Peggy Coming In Clutch

Hello everyone! So this week was kinda a long week again haha, but it ended on a high note.

This week we finished off our "blackbird", and have been way more effective with stopping by less actives in the areas that we want to work in. One less active member, brother Ja....., even took us out to lunch one day! He took us out to Pollo Tropical, a south-Florida exclusive (I think, haha). It's basically just Latin food, grilled chicken and rice dishes, but it's pretty good and pretty cheap too. 

So this week we also took a hit to our monthly mile limits (seems like the whole mission did), which means that I got back on my bike for the first time since Naples. It was just for one night, but let me tell you that biking on the city streets at night is a much different experience here than in quiet Naples. My biking muscles were sore, but we should have saved ourselves enough to make it through the month. We've been extra careful, planning out exactly where we will drive throughout the day, and like I mentioned earlier using our "blackbird" to get the most work done in each place. It's been pretty exhausting, for example on Saturday we were knocking for almost 4 hours, breaking it up with contacting former investigators and less actives nearby. Very efficient, just exhausting- but that's missionary life for ya.

The highlight of this week was Peggy! She came to church! After 2 weeks of not being able to meet with her, we talked to her and set her with a [baptism] date for November 4th. She still had some concerns about being "baptized again", but we whipped out some scriptures that seemed to help (2 Nephi 31:13-14, 3 Nephi 27:19-20, Acts 19:1-6). We found out the real problem was that she's staying with a friend that she cleans the house and babysits the kids for, and they didn't want us coming over to their house to meet with her (even though we met outside on the front porch, but whatever). So we are now trying to set it up so that we can meet her somewhere else. We got with one of the families in the ward, and they're letting us come tonight and do a Family Home Evening with them and her. It should be great! I'm excited for her, now that we can meet again she should progress well towards baptism! 

I just thought I'd mention something I found on lds.org today, that they now have standardized missionary interviews and are going to be replacing tablets with smartphones and making them available to more missions. These are big changes that show how the work is progressing. And who knows, maybe we'll be getting smartphones soon? (Zone Conference is tomorrow after all...) Anyways that's pretty much everything from this week. Hope everything's going well for you! And since I don't have any attention-grabbing pictures, I'll include one of Elder Perez and the fish he caught last Pday. Enjoy.

​Elder Perez with his "fat fish"

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Opposition In All Things

Hello everyone! A couple interesting things happened this week, and they involve a wallet, two bros named Rob and Rod, and the number 428. 

So here's the wallet story. Yesterday we were out and about looking for a member on our "Blackbird" when we spotted a wallet on the ground with sundry cards and identification information held within. We found that the owner lived in the complex we were in, so we tried knocking on the door but no one was home. We decided we'd come back and try later, and if he wasn't home we'd return it to the police station the next day. We went back in a couple hours, and he was home! His name is Bruce, he's a younger guy and was very thankful to have his wallet. The first thing he said after we gave it to him was "can I have one of your pamphlets?" We were like "Sure! Let us take a few minutes to explain it to you first." We taught him the Restoration, he accepted baptism, and we set him with a date for the 15th right on the spot! Pretty nifty how God directs us to find the elect!

Speaking of elect-ness, we met some very un-elect people too. They are Rob and Rod, two buddies from high school living together. We knocked into them late one night, and they let us into their home and bombarded us with questions about ourselves between expletives and alcoholic drinks. Neither of them are religious, and were amazed by all the things we had to do as Mormon missionaries. They were mostly harmless and just curious and accepted a Restoration pamphlet and Book of Mormon. We came back the next night and they had spent the whole day looking up what we "believed" online and fired more questions at us, a little more hostile this time. We would answer their questions and concerns to the best of our ability, but they would just move on to the next topic. We decided to go over one more time, and this time we were with our member brother Pablo. This time it was all a big show, Rob had a list of all the Anti he had found and paced the floor firing round after round at us, and no answer would suffice. He even went so far to say that he had prayed about the Book of Mormon and God had given him a vision of a black "X". He was trying to be so deceptive and showy. Meanwhile Rod was outside on the porch doing drugs and drinking with his friends. 

What amazed me the most was how closely this all matched to the story of Korihor in the Book of Mormon. In that story, Korihor preaches against Christ and refuses to accept an answer until he is shown a sign. After 3 attempts to get him to understand and repent, he was struck dumb. I wish this guy could've been struck dumb haha but that wasn't the plan. Needless to say we're not going back there again.

As for 428, that's the number of new investigators we got as a mission this week, surpassing our goal of 400 to send President Richardson out with a bang!

Speaking of, President Garns is now officially in charge! We haven't met him yet. We're going to this Thursday as he makes his tour. As predicted, no sweeping changes yet haha. Everything's exactly the same, we still listen to Motab only and we still don't have iPads (or even personal smartphones as some missions are testing out.) Maybe something interesting will change in a couple months, but for now it's smooth sailing.

Other than that, Happy 4th! I bet people wonder what missionaries do for the 4th so I will tell you:

-exactly the same stuff.

-EXCEPT everyone MUST be home at 7:00pm

So yeah pretty boring. Cynthia, the ZLs' recent convert will be feeding us though so that should be fun. Plus it's a rare opportunity to just chill at home for a couple hours, that's pretty exciting! It'll be fun, I'll try to take pics. I bought an apple cobbler for us to eat tomorrow too so that's good haha!

That's pretty much it! Hope all is well with you! Thank you all for your support!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Temple and Transfers

Belle Glade couple that were sealed

Hello everyone! Just a couple highlights this week. First off is the transfer news, I will be staying in Hollywood! Elder Hatch will be transferring (for his last transfer)! My new companion will be Elder Celestin! I've heard good things about him so it should be a fun transfer. I'm glad I get to stay in the Hollywood ward, it's honestly one of the best wards in the whole mission, even if I am running out of places to knock haha. This transfer will also be 7 weeks long instead of 6 as it is the transfer the President Richardson goes home! That will be an interesting transition, looking forward to any new changes coming up.

So the main thing that happened this week started Wednesday night. We got a random call from President. We actually missed it because we were on the phone with our bishop so we called him back. He told us that he had a special assignment for us, that he needed us that Saturday to go to the temple and translate a sealing ceremony for a Haitian couple getting sealed! The couple came from Belle Glade, a tiny little farming town in the north of the mission, just south of Lake Okeechobee, and where Elder Hatch was trained! It worked out well because we were planning on going to do baptisms that day with Bertina. We ended up not being able to for other reasons, so we got to go to the temple anyways! That was a really cool blessing, especially being able to go inside! The Haitian couple was very nice, and things went pretty smoothly. It was cool being able to use my language skills for something outside of missionary work, and I definitely got some pics!

The couple after the sealing

Another random miracle was that for the first time, one of the random people that we gave a card to on the street ACTUALLY called us, and we were ACTUALLY able to teach her! She was an older lady that was mostly just curious about the church and wanted to learn more about the Bible, but we were able to teach her about the Restoration and she seemed to understand, so we'll see if she's able to come to church and keep progressing.

Other than that we've been doing more stuff with our less-actives, and were able to get some to church on Sunday! We were able to find a ride for Erika and some of her kids, as well as one of the random people we met while going through the Blackbird came to sacrament! He's an older guy that feels like the church has abandoned him a little bit. He hasn't had a visit from anyone in a while and was happy when we came by. He also says that the 9:00 church is a little too early. We're working with the High Priest's group leader to get him some good home teachers and fellowship so that he can be active again.

Also on Sunday one of the young Haitian members brought her friend! Her name is Laila, and we're going to try to visit her on Wednesday and start teaching her! Member referrals are always the best, so hopefully this will go somewhere too!

That's pretty much it from this week. It's weird that I've been out for over 8 months now, this is my 6th transfer in the field! It's also weird that my birthday is around the corner, I'll be 19 in 2 weeks! (Finally, maybe now everyone will stop being surprised when I tell them I'm 18.) Anyways, thank you all for your support!

​Driving to the temple​

​You can see the temple from the freeway

​Elder Hatch loves having his picture taken...​

​Artsy pic​

Fort Lauderdale Temple

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Day By Day

​Here's a picture of the invitation to today's zone activity.
Picture credits to yours truly.*

Hello everyone! Surprise, I'm emailing early this week! This week was a fun week, I'll try to go day by day.

Monday was Pday, and we pretty much just did the stuff we had to like clean, shop, and email and then napped. It was pretty great actually. We also had our ward's first FHE, which is geared towards getting recent converts, less-actives, and investigators into the church for a little activity and gospel lesson. It was pretty successful, we got all our recent converts from the other week there. We played 2 truths and a lie and then our ward mission leader gave the lesson. Pretty fun, it's only going to be once a month though to start.

Tuesday we didn't do much other than knocking and visiting people in the blackbird. We also had correlation meeting, and a little Book of Mormon class afterwards with some of the ward missionaries and recent converts. That was good, we started reading through the book of Enos and talked about prayer.

Wednesday was pretty much the same thing, but we got to do a little family history! So far I've just been scanning through everything I already have and looking for people ready to do ordinances before I do too much tweaking, but pretty soon I'll start trying to find new people and get rid of duplicates and resolve errors and whatnot. It's hard to do much with only 1 hour a day twice a week, but it's still fun to look at stuff and find work to do.

Thursday we had interviews with President, that was pretty fun. I didn't have any questions for him though so it was super short. He just asked me if I was having fun a bunch of times haha. He also gave some cryptic hints about transfers to the other elders, so I have no idea what to expect. We also went to the Netane's house, one of the counselors in the Bishopric, with Bertina and her family for a pizza night! It was super fun but really hard to get the spiritual thought in haha.

Friday was pretty much the same as Wednesday. We did get in contact with an "eternigator" that we met at the beginning of last transfer and haven't seen since. She's super Mormon, but can't be baptized because she's not married to her boyfriend she's living with. Super lame, but she made us good food so that's good.

Saturday we got to take Bertina out teaching with us! It was super awesome, she's like a naturally good teacher and awesome fellowshipper. She was using like all the missionary teaching skills, it's almost like we didn't have to be there!The investigator kind of dropped off though, which is lame, but it was cool to have Bertina with us!

Sunday was Mother's Day! Yay! I got to facetime my family, which was super fun. It's weird that people still have lives while I'm a missionary haha. Our member also had Star Wars Episode 7 playing in the background, which was pretty distracting even though I've already seen it haha. Elder Hatch hasn't seen it, so it was really distracting for him haha. Other than that refer to the above knocking/blackbird.

That's pretty much it for this week, thank you all for your support!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

*Editor's Notes:

1-The Elders don't know what it is going on with politics. They just hear snippets here and there. We think this is funny even though it could be offensive to several different groups.  ;)

2-Transfers are coming up, so please wait to send any mail until we get his address confirmed next week.

Family History and The Blackbird

Here's a picture of my district for #MuchoMay:
Elder Hansen, Me, Sister Osborne, Sister Sweetnam,
Sister Wertz, Sister Dees, Elder Hatch, Elder Foster​

Hello friends and family! This week was pretty good, seemed to go by pretty fast. Here's a couple things that happened.

First off I was able to do a little family history for like an hour, it was actually pretty fun. I was able to find 3 people on my tree that haven't had any ordinances done for them, and hopefully we can get Bertina to the temple so I can do baptisms for them. Hopefully I'll be able to do more family history work, it's really fun to be able to look at your tree and trim it up a bit. To any reader that has tips and tricks for that it would be appreciated.

​Crazy looking rain clouds part 1​

Another thing we've been working on this week is something we call the 'Blackbird." Basically it's just a map of all the members on record that live in your area. The only thing is that since we don't have iPads, we have to make it by hand. Fortunately the church has a map on lds.org, but it just shows a dot for each household so we had to go through and label them all. We were able to get it all finished and nice, we have 213 households in our half of the ward and about 10% of those are active. So we've been going around to all the less-active names whenever we have time, and we're finding that most of the people don't even live there. One of them had been moved for at least 13 years, and no one knew. That's pretty sad, it seems like a couple years ago missionaries would just baptize a ton of people that almost immediately went less-active and now are missing. Our ward is now working on cleaning up the ward list and really emphasizing Home/Visiting teaching to keep it from getting worse. Hopefully that helps, it's so sad when a recent convert gets no support and goes less active.

​Crazy looking rain clouds part 2

This week we were able to find a pretty good Haitian knocking spot! We have not been able to find Haitians in this area, they're so spread out and even though we cover creole for the whole stake we don't go out that far because of time and miles. But we found a little complex with Haitians in it and have found a couple investigators! They haven't progressed very far yet, but could be promising. It's nice just to be able to teach in creole again, even if it is still a little stressful. I almost had to translate for Sacrament meeting yesterday, which would have been my first time, but the people that usually need translation weren't there. I'm sure I'll have to later on in some other ward, I've just been blessed that both my wards so far have had equipment and members to do the translation.

That reminds me that transfers are coming up on May 24th! There's a good chance that I'll be moving but you never know. Also Mother's Day is this Sunday, I'll be able to Skype my family!

This week we also got a little taste of the "Florida Summer" aka Rain. There was one day where is was pretty clear, and then out of nowhere some crazy looking clouds come and DUMP rain on us. We ran from the house we were at to our car for like 2 seconds and got SOAKED. Then after like 5 minutes the dumping stopped and in 15 minutes it was gone and sunny again. I got some pictures of it though so that's good.

Florida Summer

One last thing that happened this week is that we got a Bible referral for someone named Erika, but it turns out she was already a member. She's less active and just moved down here from Boca Raton, but contacted us so that we could help her get active in the church again! She has older kids that are already baptized and one 8 year old that wants to be baptized too. It's hard for her to get to church since her husband is not a member, but she's super solid and really committed to coming back. One of our members offered to give her a ride and she came to church yesterday! That was a pretty cool miracle.

Other than that everything with Bertina is still going well except that she couldn't come to church because of a family emergency. We're still working on getting the boys the Priesthood so that we can all go to the temple for baptisms, hopefully we can do that before transfers. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers! Keep up the good work!

​Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson