Hello and Good Morning from the Freezing but not snowy or icy state of Missouri. It’s just really windy here. This week was a terrible week..... For Satan! Elder Hermann like to quote movies. We like to quote Hot Rod and other various movies throughout the day. While we were planning on Friday Elder Hermann was sitting down and he farted then looked at me and was red and shocked. Needless to say, we had to go back to the apartment and change clothes. Ha, ha, ha, ha We had a good week.
We started off the Week on the right foot. We had the opportunity to go see Teresa, we brought sister Adkinson with us. Teresa is battling a lot of addictions so Elder Hermann and I decided to give up some of our addictions. We have decided to give up biting our nails. It’s working. I am so proud. When we told Teresa we were going to be giving up things we love to do as well she beamed. We no longer were asking her to change without us changing as well.
Tuesday of Last week we emailed. We had a lesson with our investigator named Joel. Joel is really nice and a great guy. He has some conditions with his health. He has a hard time with smoking. So in the lesson, I grabbed a cigarette out of the box. It was the first time I had ever grabbed a cigarette out of a box. I felt weird. This whole time Joel is laughing his head off. I got my pen out and wrote down scriptural references that Joel had to read every time he wanted to smoke a cigarette. It was funny then I grabbed his box of cigarettes and threw it on the floor and said: "well we took care of that problem!". He was laughing so hard. We taught him and set a date with him. We got a call on Friday night saying he didn't want to meet, which was tough. He got Antied pretty bad. We are planning to call him to make sure he was serious because it didn't really seem like it. It seemed like he was being egged on to do it. We also prepared the church building for President Bateman who was coming the next morning for interviews with our Zone.
Wednesday we had everyone in the Zone come down and have District Meetings during the day. We had our interviews first with President Bateman. We had a lot of preparing to do for a meeting with President Bateman and our Stake President. It was good to see President. He has started doing interviews every month with the Missionaries. I think it’s a great idea, a lot of missionaries struggle and can’t hold it in for more than a month or two. Now that he can talk to everyone face to face once a month he can help more missionaries. He is awesome. He is always thinking of something. In our meeting with the Stake President and President Bateman, we discussed a program to turn low retention rates into nearly 90% Retention. Which is a big increase! It was really cool to be in that meeting. We got a wonderful treat on Wednesday night from my momma and dad. Pizza! It was awesome we threw on a church movie and ate pizza. It was awesome! We loved it!
Thursday morning we had to take inventory of all the supplies in the Zone. We have been spending a lot of money on supplies in the mission. President Bateman was in finance before he came out so he used his skills and found a way for missionaries to get supplies but spend little to no money. We collected surpluses and broke down numbers it was a lot of fun..... Well, Elder Hermann is a numbers guy so he was able to break it down easily. Then we went to a member’s home and had lunch and discussed missionary work, especially member missionary work. We then we had to report all the supplies the Zone had and how to shift everything around. That night we had two lessons with Alecia and Ben. Alecia’s lesson was good but her son is really loud and all over the place. It is interesting to have the lesson when you have stuffed animals and a screaming kid running around. Ben was good, both these lessons are recent converts. Ben is a great guy but has had a great past. He has jail numbers all tatted on him with other things. He is way cool.
We started off the Week on the right foot. We had the opportunity to go see Teresa, we brought sister Adkinson with us. Teresa is battling a lot of addictions so Elder Hermann and I decided to give up some of our addictions. We have decided to give up biting our nails. It’s working. I am so proud. When we told Teresa we were going to be giving up things we love to do as well she beamed. We no longer were asking her to change without us changing as well.
Tuesday of Last week we emailed. We had a lesson with our investigator named Joel. Joel is really nice and a great guy. He has some conditions with his health. He has a hard time with smoking. So in the lesson, I grabbed a cigarette out of the box. It was the first time I had ever grabbed a cigarette out of a box. I felt weird. This whole time Joel is laughing his head off. I got my pen out and wrote down scriptural references that Joel had to read every time he wanted to smoke a cigarette. It was funny then I grabbed his box of cigarettes and threw it on the floor and said: "well we took care of that problem!". He was laughing so hard. We taught him and set a date with him. We got a call on Friday night saying he didn't want to meet, which was tough. He got Antied pretty bad. We are planning to call him to make sure he was serious because it didn't really seem like it. It seemed like he was being egged on to do it. We also prepared the church building for President Bateman who was coming the next morning for interviews with our Zone.
Wednesday we had everyone in the Zone come down and have District Meetings during the day. We had our interviews first with President Bateman. We had a lot of preparing to do for a meeting with President Bateman and our Stake President. It was good to see President. He has started doing interviews every month with the Missionaries. I think it’s a great idea, a lot of missionaries struggle and can’t hold it in for more than a month or two. Now that he can talk to everyone face to face once a month he can help more missionaries. He is awesome. He is always thinking of something. In our meeting with the Stake President and President Bateman, we discussed a program to turn low retention rates into nearly 90% Retention. Which is a big increase! It was really cool to be in that meeting. We got a wonderful treat on Wednesday night from my momma and dad. Pizza! It was awesome we threw on a church movie and ate pizza. It was awesome! We loved it!
Thursday morning we had to take inventory of all the supplies in the Zone. We have been spending a lot of money on supplies in the mission. President Bateman was in finance before he came out so he used his skills and found a way for missionaries to get supplies but spend little to no money. We collected surpluses and broke down numbers it was a lot of fun..... Well, Elder Hermann is a numbers guy so he was able to break it down easily. Then we went to a member’s home and had lunch and discussed missionary work, especially member missionary work. We then we had to report all the supplies the Zone had and how to shift everything around. That night we had two lessons with Alecia and Ben. Alecia’s lesson was good but her son is really loud and all over the place. It is interesting to have the lesson when you have stuffed animals and a screaming kid running around. Ben was good, both these lessons are recent converts. Ben is a great guy but has had a great past. He has jail numbers all tatted on him with other things. He is way cool.
Friday we woke up, got ready and drove to St. Louis. We had MLC it was a good MLC. We discussed changes in the mission and what needs to happen and set goals for the year of 2017. We didn’t set a big baptismal goal. We set a monthly mission standard of excellence of 25 and that number can go up depending on what happens. After MLC we went and got me a new bed because my bed is as hard as a rock. So that was fun driving in the car and there is a giant mattress cramming everything up. We got back into town and went and saw Libin with Bro Gentry. We are trying to help Libin develop a belief and faith in Jesus Christ but sometimes he is stubborn. He is sometimes tough to talk to and other times he is open.
Saturday we met with Lindell H. He is a less active member we are working with, he is really cool. Former Army and EMT. He has some crazy stories about people dying and stuff. But we have good lessons with him. We taught about the Sacrament and the Atonement in the chapel with him. The lesson went really well. We weekly planned a little bit. Then we had to go grab a member and some pizza because Teresa was supposed to feed us but her water pipes were frozen. So we brought dinner. Little Ceaser’s, coming in clutch. So Mounds ( the town where Teresa lives) is about a 45-minute drive from Cape Girardeau. We had an awesome lesson with Teresa. Super good, taught about the Atonement. We started our trek home and saw we had 29 miles until we were empty and we had 31 to drive...... oh no. So I drove super passive and easy on the gas. We got back into Cape and we had 8 Miles left! So we took our member home. We squeezed 40 miles of gas out of the original 29 we started with. Blessing! It was fun.
Sunday we had church. I bore my testimony. I told the congregation that I have been a ghost the past few weeks. I have been in the area for a month and very few people know me and I have had only two Sundays to meet people it’s been weird. We finished our weekly plan on Sunday and Elder Hermann and I had a nice talk about what we want to see in the area.
I love you all, have a great week. Miracles happen! Oh, by the way, Teresa came to church.!!!!!!!!!!
Love,
Elder Washburn
I love you all, have a great week. Miracles happen! Oh, by the way, Teresa came to church.!!!!!!!!!!
Love,
Elder Washburn
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