Rain, Rain, Go Away

Live the gospel faithfully and with compassion

 Hello everyone! So this week was good, not a whole lot to report though.

So, as you may or may not have already been aware, it's been raining a lot here. Fortunately we weren't hit with Hurricane Harvey, but as it passed by it sent a lot of storms our way. We've been doing our best to avoid being out in the heavy rain, so it hasn't been too bad. Apparently there are some streets and areas that are flooded. We have a little weather radio in our apartment, and at 2:00 this morning it woke all of us up to tell us there was a flood warning. I haven't seen much flooding myself, just some really deep puddles haha. Weirdly there hasn't been much lightning with all the storms, which is kinda a bummer.

Speaking of rain, Saturday morning we helped a family move out of their house in the driving rain. It was a ward service project so the bishop, high priest group leader, young men's leader, and one of the young men were there to help too. It was pretty fun, I was pretty much the designated umbrella holder as we moved stuff in and out of the truck haha.

Yesterday I gave a talk in sacrament meeting, my first one on my mission! I went pretty much a whole year without being asked, that's gotta be a record. It was just a 7 minute talk about the Holy Ghost. I based most of the talk around an analogy with bees (thanks mom). Much like how bees are able to see UV light, and thus distinguish many different pigments in flowers, when we receive the gift of the Holy Ghost it allows us to see in another "spiritual" light. 

Moving service

Taking the analogy further, UV light can reveal hidden messages (think secret ink), cleanse and purify (think camping water bottle filters), and strengthen and solidify (think cementing on braces). In the same way the Holy Ghost is a Revealer, and Purifier, and a Strengthener. And just like any form of light, even though you cannot see it directly you know it is there by observing the things it touches. I could take the analogy further, but I'll let you think about it for yourselves haha.

We've found a lot of success this week working with Jamesly's nonmember family. He's a Haitian young man that has his papers in to serve a mission and he's the only member in his family. Right now we're working to have his little brother Darwins baptized this Saturday. There's a couple more logistics we need to work out, but if we can swing it for this week that'd be awesome. Our next step is to work on the mom, Lucy. She seems pretty open to the message, it's just hard to meet with her or get her to come to church because she works all the time. One thing our mission president encouraged us to do with her is set up a fast with her so that she can get work off to come to church. We're going to meet with them all tonight, so hopefully we can get this worked out.

That's pretty much all I've got to talk about for this week. It'll be a bit longer until my next email, next Friday is when I get to go to the temple! I'm going to print off some family names that I found to take with me. That should be super cool! It'll be interesting to see how it works out, since I'm a 2 hour drive from the temple. We need to have a member take us, and we also have to do all our other p-day things like shop and email still, but we'll see I guess haha. 

Hope all is going well with you! Keep up the good work!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

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A poorly taken photo of the eclipse

The District

​Elder Rock resting peacefully

LEMONADE!

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Group picture with our friend working the counter​

Hello everyone! So this week definitely went by much quicker than last week, and a couple cool things happened that I can talk about.

First off, TRANSFERS are TOMORROW! I will be STAYING in Naples. Elder Steed is going home, but both Elder Dick and Elder Spotts are TRANSFERRING! Meaning I'm the only one staying in the house... Elder Dick is going to the Creole ward in Boynton Beach and Elder Spotts is going DL in Alapatta. Taking their places will be my new companion ELDER BLOOD, as well as Elder Anderson and a new missionary in Naples English. Lots of changes, looks like I'll have to make sure I know everything about everything. I guess I just need to figure out how to mount a gps to a bike haha... 

This week we also had Zone Conference, which was pretty fun. It went pretty long, but we got some good training about following the Spirit in all aspects of the work. I also got to see some of my friends from past areas again which was fun. The biggest news of the conference is that we will now be able to go to the temple 2 TIMES A YEAR! That's in addition to any time we go with our recent converts for baptisms or endowments. Pretty exciting!

I also went on exchanges with the ZLs this week, I went with Elder Webster in their area. It's a Spanish area, so I didn't really talk much the whole day haha. It was fun though and I got a good comp study from Elder Webster about staying positive and keeping the Spirit. A good thought that I liked from that is that we need to be transparent so that the Spirit can shine through us, and I took that to mean being yourself and not trying to make yourself into just a "missionary" if that makes sense.

The last cool thing from this week was that some of the Sisters in our district came up with an idea to set up a free lemonade stand in a park as a finding method. To be honest I was a little skeptical, but we all went and set up this lemonade stand. There were hardly any people at the park, and no one was coming over so we sent teams out to "recruit" people to come to the stand. 

It was nearing the end of the time that we could stay when one of the teams comes back with a Haitian young man! His name is Jovensky, and he was super open to talking with us and coming to church. We set up a time to meet with him and he said he'd come to church too. When we went to his house, his cousin came out and told us that he didn't live there anymore (we thought she was lying, but turns out he gave us the wrong apartment number) so we decided to knock around his building. This was an area that had been knocked a lot, so we never went there the whole transfer. 

As we're knocking doors, we run into the Sa[.....] family, a couple straight out of Haiti that we had met with a couple times but had dropped off the face of the earth because they didn't have a house or a car to get to church to meet. Turns out they're living with some family now in the same complex! It's still a hard situation since they still don't really have transport but at least we know where they live. And after all that, Jovensky actually came to church and loved it! Our return appointment fell through again, but he should be coming to the English class on Wednesday so that'll be good. 

Moral of the story is that I can never make fun of the lemonade stand ever again hahaha. 

That's pretty much it. Today marks 11 MONTHS as a missionary and the start of my 8TH TRANSFER in the field! Time's flying by, this is the transfer where I hit my year mark! [I think he's counting his time after the MTC, because it's already been a year since he became a missionary] I definitely don't feel like I've been out for that long. I'm going to do my best to finish off my first year strong, even if it means lots more biking haha. It's worth it. Love you all! 

Thank you so much for your support! Here's lots of pictures! 

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​Elder Spotts stole my camera at Uncle Louie G

​​​​​​​Clearly ice cream makes me happy...​

​​​​​​​​​​​My companion with his dream bike. haha

​Driving across all of Florida to zone conference​

​So I finally got around to using the live composite feature
 on my camera to capture some lightning. Here's the outcome.​

This one was taken over a period of 4 minutes​

​This one was over a period of 7 minutes.
All the light from these pictures come from the lightning, it's about 9:30 at night

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

Happy Birthday To Me!

​When the bowling alley ACTUALLY works
(feat. Elder Foster)​

Hello everyone! Another early email! The work continues pretty much the same as always, here's a couple of the highlights from the week.

Around the middle of the week we got a call from the mission office. A member in some other state had referred her dad that is not a member and had entered into one of the hospitals in our area. She asked us to give him a priesthood blessing. Apparently he was getting treated for cancer and then fell and hit his head in the hospital and suffered some brain injuries. We got there at the same time as some family members and gave him the blessing. After that we talked to the family a little bit and then left and went on with our day. The next day the mission office called us back with an update. Apparently 15 minutes after we left the doctors were asking him questions. He was able to remember questions that he hadn't been able to answer before. The family was very grateful, but still not quite open to receiving the missionaries yet. There's a few things we can learn from this story; 1) that priesthood power is real 2) seeing miracles is not enough to make someone believe.

​My "chicken pot pie" birthday dinner! ;)

So none of our people came to church, so that was a little disappointing, but there was one person that showed up! She was referred by our Bishop because she has a son or someone that's a bishop in another state. Our Bishop was out of town this week but she still came for sacrament meeting! We're going to talk to her more later today. She said she would be interested in learning more and being baptized! She accepted a date for the 17th, so hopefully all goes well with her! Other than that we weren't able to get in contact with Tanya or any of our other investigators so we'll see how that goes too.

I feel like before my mission I was WAY less interested in family history, haha, now it's like one of my favorite things. I've been using Ancestry.com almost exclusively for a bit, I like the hints on it better. You can link Ancestry and Family Search and move stuff between the two so that's pretty handy too. Really the goal should be to have everything in family search since that has the ordinance information, but ancestry is an awesome tool and since we already have so much work done on it, it makes it really easy to transfer over. Super cool stuff!

That's pretty much everything, other than the fact the my birthday is tomorrow! Probably not going to do much different, but I bought myself some "chicken pot pie" today for a birthday dinner. You'll see what I mean in the picture. It's crazy that I'm 19 now, I still feel like a little high school kid haha. It also means I'm a week away from 9 months as a missionary! It's weird to think that I've been in Florida for 7 months now too, it doesn't feel like that long. Time's going to fly by! Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers!

Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson

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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