Yay for Carl!

Christmas in Florida!

Hey everyone! So this week was a very good week for us. I forgot to bring my planner with me so I'm going off of memory, so here we go!

This week we were pretty busy, which is great. We got lots of referrals from other missionaries and got to teach a few of them. We were able to exceed in pretty much every category compared to last week, and even exceeded a couple of the goals we had set, so that was awesome!

This week we started the #LightTheWorld campaign. It's pretty cool, similar to last year on mormon.org there's a new scripture and video every day about how to serve others in little ways. Check it out!

The highlight of this week was probably Carl. Can't remember if I mentioned him before, but he was a referral from another set of missionaries. We got to teach him once before, but after that he vanished. This week, we randomly stopped by one night and he was there! He was so happy to see us again. He said he lost contact because he left the house after some problems [...], but he decided to come back. He had even read a little bit from the Book of Mormon and wanted to know more. We read through the introduction with him and then taught him the Plan of Salvation. After that we asked if he would be baptized on the 23rd of this month and he said yes! He even came to church this Sunday and loved it! He said he's been talking to his wife and friends about everything he's learning and is excited to be baptized. He asks thoughtful questions, and takes notes on the reading assignments that we leave him. So elect, he'll be baptized, I just hope I'm here to see it. 

Honestly that's pretty much it, just lots of visiting people this week. It's been nice teaching lessons instead of knocking doors though haha.

Some last items of business though. My next pday will not be until Wednesday because of a special zone conference. And the next 3 weeks after that pday will be on Tuesday because of transfers and Christmas and new years. Oh, speaking of transfers, transfers are soon so please send mail to the mission office instead of my house in case I leave. The address is 7951 SW 6th St Ste 110, Ft Lauderdale FL 33324. Thank you!

I'll leave you with a thought that I love from this last general conference. It's [from] Stephen W. Owen and is called Repentance Is Always Positive. I've taken some editorial liberties to splice parts of it together to make my point:

"When we speak of repentance, we aren’t just talking about self-improvement efforts. True repentance is more than that. True repentance inspires us to make our obedience a commitment—a covenant, beginning with baptism and renewed each week at the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament. The joy of repentance is more than the joy of living a decent life. It’s the joy of forgiveness, of being clean again, and of drawing closer to God. Once you’ve experienced that joy, no lesser substitute will do."

Hope you all have a great week!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Zone Conference

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

"I come from Southern California. We're known for fires and surfing."

My Zone

Hello everyone! So this was an interesting week, a couple things that I can talk about.

Last pday our zone went and did a little nature hike and played some games. It was pretty fun, I'll send some of the pictures.

This week we also had our interviews with president. It went well, and president was like "apparently your mom is good friends with the Sher[......] family?" and I was like "yeah, our families are very close and I'm good friends with their son in Paris" so that was a fun connection. We also received a training this week about how to make our knocking less robotic and more effective. It's been hard trying not to fall back into the old ruts.

If you remember, back when I was in Hollywood we worked on something called the "blackbird" that has maps of all the members in the ward. We're working on redoing ours now for this ward and that's been going well, hopefully it'll be more useful.

So this week Peggy kinda gave us the run around. We had our appointment scheduled with her and our member for Thursday but she cancelled on us. She said she'd still be able to come to church though, but when our member went to pick her up she said that she hadn't slept all night and was feeling sick. So that was disappointing, we really need to get on top of this if she is going to be baptized this month like we have planned. Hopefully we can meet with her more often starting this week.

Peggy was really all we had going for us, this week we got all 0s in our key indicators. (That means for confirmations, investigators at sacrament, investigators with dates, and new investigators and service hours.) Sometimes that happens I guess, that even though your working hard and doing everything you're supposed to it doesn't always translate to numbers. Still, it shows that there's room for improvement somewhere so hopefully we can do better this week.

The highlight of the week however was the International Dinner that the ward put on Saturday. We had a good turnout and a couple recent converts and less active members even came. It was a lot of fun with lots of good international food. We have a very diverse ward so there was lots to choose from. Pupusas, tostadas, jerk chicken, complatos, empanadas, chicken pot pie, and griyo just to name a few (sorry, no spell check for the Spanish ones haha). They made everyone name tags and drew little flags representing different languages that they could speak. They even had people go up and share about their countries, and they had me and Elder Marshall give shout outs to California and Arizona. It was a fun time.

That's pretty much it for this week. Looking forward to a nice relaxing pday. I don't believe I mentioned it last week but that's when I hit 13 MONTHS as a missionary. The time's going fast, I'm getting old! I feel like I'm at the point now where I'm very comfortable and confident in my skills as a missionary, I just need to make sure that I'm still looking for ways to improve so that I don't become stagnant. Hope you all have a great week too!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

[more pictures to be added soon]

Questions From Mom 4

Back in Business Baby!

​Ray got baptized! (and I got a haircut haha)

Hey everyone! So this week was pretty normal, especially compared to the last month or so. But there were a few exciting highlights!

The first one being that Ray got baptized! Wooo! It was a bit of a scramble at the end, part of why it's been hard to baptize him is because he's so busy that it's hard to get in contact. But this being the first week where we haven't had to do service we jumped on the chance. As Sister C[......], his wife, stated: "This day has been 37 years in the making." Yeah, he's been investigating for a while haha. We're so excited for him, and the ward is already making sure that he feels welcome and won't be forgotten.

Another thing that was exciting was being able to go to church again! This was the first time in about a month that we've had a regular church service, and it was so refreshing. I actually feel like I belong here now that I've met the ward and got things established. To make it even more exciting, Peggy came to church! She loved it, and is excited to come back next week. In her own words she put it this way: "I have been praying about if I want to be baptized, because my father was a pastor and I had a dream where he told me that I was already baptized. But now I want to be baptized so that I can have the Holy Ghost, so I will keep praying." So elect! It was awesome for her to be able to watch Ray be confirmed in sacrament meeting as well and to talk about it with her afterwards. We're going to meet with her again this Thursday with a cool member and go over Acts 19 with her and give her a baptismal date. I think it should go really well!

Not a whole lot else happened this week, we had other people that we were teaching but they all kind of fizzled out so we're kinda at square 1 again. It happens. We did get to watch most of conference this week, it was really good. I've watched all of Saturday and about half of the Sunday Morning session. I've been taking notes about what stands out to me in each of the talks, but I don't have them with me right now. oh well, I'll have to include some next week and by then I should have seen the rest anyways. Anyways that's pretty much it from me, hope that you all had a good week too!

​

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Camping in the Keys

​My new district. Starting with me, then up to Elder Shoen (something like that, he's new), Elder Perez my new DL on top, Elder Hasara under him, under him Elder Loftus, under him Elder Flake, next to him Elder Bullock (also new), behind him Elder Norman (not as new but still new haha) then Elder Marshall next to him and Elder Rire under him.​

Hello everyone! So this week has been a fun one! Lots of work but still fun haha.

Transfers were this week, so now I'm in Cypress Creek with Elder Marshall. We're very similar haha, pretty much the same person. It'll be an interesting new dynamic since most of my other companions have been very different from me in some way or another! My new home address is .....Fort Lauderdale, FL 33308. We haven't done a whole lot so far, but it's going to be a transition especially since for the large part it's "business as usual" over here on the east coast since the hurricane didn't hit as hard. Back to "real" missionary work! What I can tell though and what I've heard from other missionaries is that this is a great area to be in. Even though I don't get to teach in creole, there's still plenty to talk to and even though the ward is smaller it's strong. Should be good!

We also have some cool people that we're working with right now. One is named Ray, he's been investigating the church for a while now but is set to be baptized this week! We were going to try to have the baptism last weekend, but with service and everything it just couldn't happen. But so far everything is in order for this weekend. He's passed his interview and everything, so as long as we're in town it should happen! The other person we're working with right now is Peggy, she's a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo! She's super cool, we're still pretty early on in the teaching process with her. She's been living in America for a little while and understands English pretty well, but her native language is Lingala. So we got her a Book of Mormon in Lingala! Super cool, and she really wants to change her life and follow Christ so I think she'll be baptized.

Me and Elder Marshall
hanging out at our campsite at the museum on Marathon

So the climax of the week was the weekend when we went down to the keys to camp and do service! We drove down with our ward to Marathon Key on Saturday morning at 4:00am, then set up camp and went out to work. Most of the missionaries from the east coast were there so I got to hang out with some of my friends that I haven't talked to in a long time. It was so much fun. We did a lot of helping people tear down drywall and shoveling mud out of houses and hauling out trees and things. It's hard labor, especially with how hot and sunny it gets, but we had plenty of water and food and things so we were taken care of. We camped out Saturday night, it's been a while since I've been camping, it was fun. I got a cool self-inflating chair thing that I intended to use for an air mattress, since we were sleeping on a gravel driveway, but I guess it's not designed for that since it was deflated by the middle of the night. I ended up sleeping just fine though. Hopefully I can figure out the issue because it's a cool chair haha. Then we went and did the same thing all of Sunday until we got back home at around 9:00 pm. Lots of work but it was lots of fun and the people were so grateful for it.

Saturday evening we got to watch the Priesthood session of conference. The talks were very interesting, talking about how the priesthood is like a rocket, and about the significance of light, and of integrity and other things. I really enjoyed it, I'll have to go back and study it some more though. We'll get to watch 4 hours worth of conference during the week this week, the rest will have to be on pdays. I'm excited to watch! I did hear the news though that President Monson wasn't there, and that Elder Hales died. Very sad news, but a lot was said during the priesthood session about how the leadership of the church works and I know that there is a purpose behind these things.

That's pretty much it, but I do have lots of pictures! I'll try not to do a huge dump again haha, but they're all so good! Anyways thank you for your support!

​-With Darwins​

​​​​​​​​​​​​​-Lucy and Darwins​
-​​​​​Lingala Book of Mormon!​
-​Driving to service at 4am​
-Tearing out drywall​
​-destroyed burger king
-​This was the worst house I've seen so far. Flooded, then downed lines burned it.​
​-destroyed gas station​
-​​​National gaurd​
​-Cutting up trees​
​-This boat went over, and one of the cords on it went halfway through a tree, see next pic​
​​-​destroyed sail​
​​​​​-pirate ship​
​​​-Artsy palm tree pic​
​-The Atlantic ocean between keys​

​-A Florida rainstorm ​ 
-​random windsurfer

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson