Canceled Appointments, Excommunication and Stake Conference

Dear family,

I am so glad Ryan's home again and I'm relieved that you all got my last e-mail. Yeah myldsmail.net is a bit unreliable and it stinks that Garit isn't getting any of my e-mails, although Dad does so hopefully we won't encounter any more problems. It sounds like everyone got my last e-mail which is a huge relief for me! If we encounter more problems in the future let me know and then I'll send the unreceived week's e-mail too.

         There wasn't a whole lot that happened this week. We had stake conference this week which threw our Sunday schedule for a loop since we didn't have to go to six hours of church. It really freed up our schedule, which was nice except for the fact that ALL of our appointments and back-up plans dropped on us. I was really discouraged and to make matters worse our investigator pool continues to shrink and nobody seems to be interested whenever we go out tracting.

               The adult session of Stake Conference was really boring and I fought to stay awake the whole time. To make things even worse we were sitting up on the stand because we were part of the choir! I had to write a list of my favorite foods on the back of a mormon.org card to keep myself awake.  Stake conference on Sunday was pretty good. The theme seemed to be on being an example of the believers. There were two primary kids who spoke, a recent convert, a laurel and someone from one of our wards plus the Stake presidency and some other lady from one of the wards I'm not serving in. The two primary kids who spoke were pretty good speakers considering how they looked up a lot, spoke calmly and one of the kids even cried as he spoke of his grandfather.

         Another interesting thing was that the spouse of one of our investigators (who's an excommunicated member) showed up to Stake conference a little on the drunk side. Elder Bell and I jumped up and down for joy when we heard he was coming. Hopefully this will be the start of a new pattern that will eventually lead to his wife and kids getting baptized. That same guy is taking me, Elder Bell and the other two missionaries that live with us shopping and he's paying for our food too.

 

     As I mentioned earlier things aren't going too well for me and Elder Bell in terms of people we're teaching. We have a pretty small investigator pool which continues to shrink all the time. I keep trying to analyze what we're doing wrong but it all comes back to agency. People just don't seem all that interested. To make matters worse they're dropping their appointments left and right and then when we try to set up another one people reply with "Let me call you back". I personally don't trust anyone to call me back so I take it as a way to try and avoid us. Our one progressing investigator's life just got busier so it's harder for us to make an appointment with him. Plus our tracting's going back to the way it used to be before President Beck gave his pogo analogy.

  

    So in light of all of this we have a new golden investigator. Her name is Raven Stern. If you remember I told you that her husband, Adam, claims to be a descendant of Joseph Smith. The ironic thing is that he isn't very interested in what we have to say. Anyway Raven's been a blessing in our lives and I think of her as our "diamond in the rough".

 

         She has two dogs and five ferrets. Yep, that's right she's got ferrets. I learned a lot about ferrets last night when we visited her. It turns out that there are panda ferrets, albino ferrets, sabertooth ferrets and bandit ferrets. I'm just waiting for her to say that she has a pirate ferret and a Jedi ferret. Okay that last part was a joke.

 

          Anyway we taught her about the Book of Mormon and she's been on mormon.org and she had questions for us about the Word of Wisdom, which we resolved. We've committed her and her children to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know if it's true and they've been doing that and Raven says that there's been a dramatic change in their lives in the two days that they've started reading. So I'd really appreciate it if everyone could pray for us that we'll be able to find some people that will be interested and will take the lessons.

 

         One more thing. Apparently there some missionaries that know how to instant message on myldsmail.net which is a big no-no. If these idiots continue we might all get our e-mail privileges taken away. If that happens I'll be writing a lot of letters! I hope it doesn't happen yet. I love you all very much and I hope this e-mail gets to you alright. Oh and could someone please tell Garit to either e-mail me or write to me because he hasn't?

 

I love you all,

Elder Boothe

Pogoing Missionaries and Communication Problems

Dear family and friends,
Have my last posts been successfully delivered? I sent two e-mails to both Dad and Garit and I've received no word from either of them that they received them so I'm a little confused. I'm assuming that they did since the "e-mail subdelivery system" didn't say that any of your e-mails had "permanent fatal errors", whatever that means. Apparently myldsmail.net has a bad history of not sending e-mails out. The system is improving though so hopefully this won't happen again. At least that is what Elder Bell and Elder Beard say.

So from now on I'll be sending this same e-mail to different people in the hopes that one of them will receive it and then that person can send it to Ryan (or Becca if something happens to Ryan) so that Ryan will put it up on my mission blog.

Speaking of Ryan is he still in Chile? I'm a little disconcerted from not hearing from him. What is he up to? Does anybody have a hold of him? In fact I haven't heard from Dad either since he didn't e-mail me. What's going on Dad? Will someone please tell me what's going on?

The reason why I didn't e-mail any of you yesterday is because yesterday is President's Day so the library was closed. I hope you didn't think that I don't love you because that is absolutely not true! Now that we got that out of the way I will proceed to tell you all how this past week went:

The highlight of this week for me was a big meeting of missionaries called specialized training. It's basically a zone conference, except longer since each of the zones that meet together have a special zone meeting that lasts for an hour. In that meeting Sister Beck gave a talk on "Finding the Lord's Elect". Basically we went over:
The possible reasons why we get discouraged when we go tracting.
How we should prepare ourselves before going tracting.
All the different ways we can go finding people.
I particularly enjoyed it because earlier in that week I was super discouraged about tracting. I really didn't like it and I wasn't enthusiastic about it since I felt like it didn't yield  good results. The highlight of Sister Beck's talk was when President Beck interrupted her and gave an analogy that I hope I don't butcher in the re-telling.

President Beck held up a pencil in his hand with the sharp end pointing down. He then begin to push down on the pencil. As he was pushing down he was saying some of the things that you'd normally hear people say when they reject you and slam the door in your face. As he pushed down on the pencil the pencil went further and further down his fist until you couldn't see much of the pencil left.

As he did this he explained that when we're down and so discouraged that we don't want to go tracting anymore we're in Satan's grasp. Then he related the experience of Thomas Edison (the guy who made the light bulb) and then President Beck turned the pencil upside down on it's eraser. Then he pushed down on the eraser and it "pogo ed" up. He said that we too should "pogo" whenever someone slams the door in our face and never get discouraged.

I hope I didn't butcher the analogy for you. If you're confused just know that it worked really well for me and since then my tracting experience has gone so much better than before. We taught 26 other lessons this week. 26! That's more than twice the amount of other lessons we normally teach. TWICE! Plus we're getting more new investigators and more contacts in general.

The weather here in Suprise is being fickle right now. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's 50 degrees. Most of the time this week it's been pretty cold.

Here's an interesting story that happened last night: Elder Bell and I returned the bishop's volleyball to him (since we borrowed it for the zone activity yesterday. By the way my team got all the way to the finals) and after he took the ball we asked him if there was anything else we could do. He asked us to give him a blessing and he asked ME to give it. I would've thought he would ask Elder Bell to give it. I was surprised yet honored to give a blessing for Bishop Taylor.

Well that's all for now. If you receive this message successfully TELL ME! I need to know. Otherwise I get left in the dark and a little flustered. If you get this message please e-mail either Ryan or Becca and have them e-mail me.

I love you all,
Elder Boothe

Staying in.....Surprise ..... License issues

Dear family and friends,
  Last week we celebrated Elder Bell and Elder Beard's birthdays. They are both 21. We went to a member's house and jumped on the trampoline, played Pit and Catch Phrase and ate snack food the entire time. Almost all of our entire district was there. It was a very fun experience and I learned a new game: "Butt tag". As it's name suggests butt tag is tag on a trampoline except you have to tag everybody else with your butt. It's pretty fun actually and I never got it.

As to this new week, time has flown by like a hurricane! When Elder Bell turned 21 his liscense expired. He tried to renew his liscense but you have to be 24 according to Washington law. He tried getting an Arizona liscense but his parents can't find his birth certificate. Since I don't have a liscense we can't use our car right now so we either have to get rides or walk. Yes I know, everyone who reads this will be going "I told you so Elder Boothe. See this is what happens, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag". Yes I want to get a liscense when I get home. Yes I realize that it was a mistake not to get one. Anyway we'd normally ride our bikes except Elder Bell has some weird medical condition where he can't ride bikes for very long. He's not making an excuse either since I heard him explain to a member who was a doctor once and the doctor had heard about the condition before.

So what we're doing right now is waiting for Elder Bell's liscence renewal to come back. Our mission vehicle coordinator (a.k.a Elder Skonnard) sent some kind of weird application thing that will extend Elder Bell's liscense until he gets home (which is May 3rd). Once Elder Bell gets that we can use our car again.

While that happened we had to go on exchanges twice in a row this week! And I took over the area both times! It was quite a learning experience! I managed to teach some lessons and got some new investigators! We have an appointment with one of them today so we'll see how everything turns out. On Wednesday we had appointments with three new investigators and they all bombed their appointments! It was extremely disappointing for me and Elder Bell had to give me a massive pep talk, but hey you learn a lot of things while you're out on the mission. On Saturday I had to do a mini-exchange because Elder Bell's had a weird rash on his waist and he finally got an appointment with a dermatologist on Saturday. So Elder Beard had to drive him down to Phoenix (which was where this dermatologist person was) and I had a mini-exchange in my area until 12:00 when Elder Bell got back.

To make things even more interesting Elder Beard was playing with his phone  Monday, evening I think, and he accidently dropped his phone in water. So because their (Elder Beard and Elder Kelley) phone got messed up they've had to use our phone which got pretty annoying at times. Elder Ely, the housing coordinator and the mission office elder who takes care of our phones, had to drive here and fix it. So now Elder Beard and Elder Kelley have the "brick" again, which is what our old phones looked like. Even though they had a phone to use it didn't have all their contacts on it so we had to go to a Sprint store on Saturday and get that fixed. Like I said, we had a really crazy week.

Yesterday I bore my testimony in both of the wards that I serve in. One of our investigators came to church, which was very exciting for me. We've been coming over and teaching her for a few weeks now. Her name is Ashley Harris (I think I already mentioned her but if not here's some quick info) and her parents are both less active members. She stayed for two hours of church but chose to stay in primary to watch over her three year old son named DJ. DJ actually liked Primary which was really cool and I'm excited for them now that they're coming to church more often.

We did not go tracting yesterday for two reasons:
1) We had a lot of meetings and
2) It was Super Bowl Sunday.

I didn't even know when Super Bowl Sunday was until Saturday and I'm glad we didn't go tracting on Super Bowl Sunday because that would've really sucked. We got haircuts yesterday and I wanted to take a picture of myself with my new haircut but the batteries on my camera died so I'll have to get new ones today. We got our haircuts at a member's house in one of our wards and the members are a young couple with several rambunctious children. One of those children likes to draw comics for us. We've really been looking forward to them because they're pretty funny. He also drew an orange tree of life for us and a Darth Vader trading card. I wanted to take pictures of both of those and show you but my camera's out of batteries (it uses AA batteries) so I'll have to wait for next week in order to send them to you.

So today was the day of the transfers and... I'M STAYING IN SURPRISE WITH ELDER BELL! That's pretty cool. So he not only gets to step-train me he also gets to "greenie break" me. This is Elder Beard's last transfer. He goes home March 22nd, which is two days after the transfer ends.

Well that's my life for now. I'm still here in Surprise. I hope you're all doing well. I love you and pray for you.
Love,
Elder Boothe