Everyone else is getting transferred....

The last 4 days were crazy, so Elder Hopkins is getting transferred and I am staying, also the two sisters in the area are getting transferred as well so as of this upcoming Tuesday I will be the only one who knows the area. 

Remembering names is hard but I found i have received a lot of help. I also love listening to talks that we download from LDS.Org, 

One of the members of the ward had a baptism and we were able to invite Jainlys and she came!!!! She witnessed Brody 's baptism and she was really impressed with the entire thing. We have seen her grow a ton with the things she is learning about the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ and are grateful for the growth she has seen also in herself.  She fed us an authentic Italian meal and we were able to revel in its glorious deliciousness, however the next day I had a slight headache and took my temp and it was 99.6 so we just kinda were studying a lot that day and I took a long nap and was all right afterwards.

We are honored and blessed to again go tracting and met a lady from Bosnia who when we first answered the door she was like "I don't speak good English" then we mentioned Mormon and her face lit up and she talked with us for 25 minutes about how much she liked Mitt Romney and the Book of Mormon and God, she had some questions about why there were many bad people in the world and why God let them do these things, and we told her that we don't know all the answers but one thing we do know is that God gives all men a fundamental right to choose between right and wrong and whichever we choose, there will be an effect upon us no matter what. 

We also talked with a lot of people who were not coming to church that often, they noticed the difference of going to church and keeping at least one day of the week to be with the family and remembering God in our upmost of mind and how the effect would have on the rest of the week. 

We have seen miracles and blessings of many things that are going on here.


PS  Hey mom (and all others), don't worry (about my weightlifting at the Gym), I'll stop at 100lbs  and its not crazy weights, just lifting, no actual benching. 

Love ya,

Elder Day

Mario Moustaches for Valentines, Power outages and snow

February 18, 2015

Life has been good here and I just wanted to tell about some few fun things that have been happening.  You might notice that I am emailing on a Wednesday, that is because Monday was a holiday and Monday night it snowed so hard (3 inches of snow) that the entire city shut down. 80% of the restaurants were closed and we were unable to use our car for that morning of Tuesday (our preparation day) because... snow.

A few days before it was really windy and it knocked down a power line so we didn't have power for 2 days (that was crazy because it was the two coldest days of the entire time I have been in Virginia, it got a high of like 26 degrees? and I think the low was -3) so we saw our breath inside our apartment when we woke up at 6:30am and since it was Sunday we quickly got ready for the day and then booked it over to the church building for our personal and companion study because it was warm there. 

A family in the ward gave us moustaches for valentines day so we took some cool photos with them on and there was nothing really done all that huge for pday.

We taught Jainlys last Thursday she had bought us 5 big brown bags of groceries and just gave them to us so we were cooking after the power came back on.  We are tracting a lot more again and meeting more and more people ready to hear the message we share.

Its awesome being a missionary, that's for sure, we go to the gym almost every morning and I can now bench almost 100 pounds again on the weights they got there!

I made a duplo bridge during p-day and am learning more about the bible and its teachings on the concepts of important gospel doctrine, such as the nature of God, and what the prophets teach about stuff like that, also the book of Enoch and what happened with it.

Elder Day

Up!, Journals and Jams

Yo! Yo! Yo!

Hey mom and dad!

This week has been interesting, last Monday we (at like 8:30pm) Elder Hopkins had pop into his mind "hey we should stop by Dion's place" this was a guy who always was never home but really wanted to talk with us and we stopped by and guess what... he was home!! We were able to talk with him about the importance of prayer and the power it has. We then had (i think) 4 days of sunshine!!! it hit 4 in a row! What the heck! Apparently that doesn't happen in February!!

 We went with a member to visit people and were able to stop by a few people who let us in and talked with us about their life and we shared a spiritual thought with them. We also had a spiritual message we were thinking about and thought that I might want to put it in this email as well. And whether someone is religious or not it is still an important one and that is the importance of journals.

I think about history and everything that we have was written down and kept for another generation so that we can read about it, even if we think that there is nothing of importance or good that is happening in our lives, so did those in the past when they wrote about all their trials. I don't think the people in world war 1 wrote every day exciting and happy things, sometimes it was mundane or not fun, but we kept it and learned from it and it helps us learn about how to improve and what it was like. It’s the same with diaries, like the Diary of Anne Frank. What would a happened if she never kept a journal? We might have not as an in depth understanding of things that went on during World War 2.

 Even with people living in the 1800's talking about an idea to improve the effectiveness of some sort of farming idea, same with newspapers and the writers that talked (wrote short journals) on what happened in that era or time. I have been trying a ton to work on writing in my journal because i can't remember some things in life and it frustrates me a ton and I can't go back to refresh my memory.

The second is being able to write down in a notebook 1 new thing positive every day. Just like with the movie “Up” and Carl where he remembered the past and dwelled upon remembering the things he wanted to do but was never able to and when he looked at "my adventure book" he saw, much later on, the photos that his wife had put in the book as her great adventures. how much more positive could life have, or will be, when we are focusing on positive things, yes acknowledging the negative as well but not dwelling, but improving upon them to make a positive come of it by learning and improving.

 

 We had 2 people come to church that we are teaching!!! Jainlys and Leon! Jainlys is an older Italian woman that lived in Brazil as well and received a book of Mormon from Brazilian elders and Italian elders and Spanish elders and now English elders (us). Both are super excited to come to church and Jainlys is going with a few of the members to a single adult dance (she even signed up to bring snacks for it! and its her first week at church! crazybuisness!!). We have seen a ton of blessings and fasted yesterday (Sunday) and saw The Lord's hand work (or maybe as looking for it recognized it more, because He always is helping wherever we look.

yo and guess what, wearing' my grandpa jams- warm pajamas! 

Elder Jeremy Day

Superslow first snowman in VA

February 3, 2015  after the Superbowl

Aye Mom, surprisingly a lot of people here didn't want the Patriots to win from whom we talked to. Weird right?  New England is super close for them, ... 

What happened was basically super slow  instead of Superbowl.  The Superbowl was Sunday, we tried (and mostly succeed) in planning the entire day with lessons. It was an awesome day for visiting people. People always ask us what food we like to eat and my companion immediately says "this guy really loves pasta" which is true, but yes even I can get tired of pasta now and again if I have it 3 meals a day.

 Pday was on Tuesday instead of Monday due to some meetings, so we had a ton of stuff going on and it threw off our schedule. Threw off the rhythm of the beat! I know tons of stuff goes on during a mission and too many things happen but when pday switches... it just made the week super slow. Something super important I think I have learned for myself out here is the experiences of different people and to know that life just keeps on going, it just doesn't stop.  We just got to keep going through any trial we have.

 Richmond is COLD and I was not prepared for the weather. I made my first snowman last week with the 8th inch of snow on the ground! his name is Jim, he is a good snowman...

 There wasn't much snow and the weather always happens at night. 

Jim is a good snowman

You asked about our teaching pool- we have 13 investigators and 5 on a date for baptism, 8 of them we found tracting and the rest were from the last elders tracting so it is crazy... We prepare by knowing the lessons and focusing on how the questions the people have we teach are relating to any lessons in particular.

One of the investigators we have works at a nightclub as a security guard. We’ve talked with him about the feelings he gets when he is in the club and the feelings he gets when he is in church or reads the Book of Mormon and he has said he notices a big difference. He is looking for a new job so he can reach His goal of being baptized Feb 28th. He is awesome and we found him tracting on a rainy day, the first lesson we taught with him (the Restoration) we discussed the inner peace he felt when talking about God caring for him. He also asked when he could be baptized the first lesson when we asked him the question of Will you follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized by someone holding the proper Priesthood Authority from God? It was a miracle.

I have been learning a lot about Daniel in the Old Testament when he was following what God had asked of him and he received blessings for it. That is something to me that I have learned. Follow what God tells us and even though it'll be hard, life will turn out all right. Our Mission President came to our congregation and everyone knew except us apparently that he was coming; no one wanted to get us in the loop. But ahh well it happens. I shared what I know by the power of bearing witness and seeking for the truth we will know what to search for with help from places all around us.

I have also taken the challenge Grandpa Harlan and Grandpa LaVelle and Grandma Mary Alice and Grandma Marie have said, that short statements of what you know of truth are the most powerful. We had someone interested in the church come to church today, his name is Leon Trader and he was a gospel pianist for an Episcopal church for 20 years. He is really good at that piano.... we gave him a church songbook. He really likes it a lot.

love ya mom

Your son

Elder Day

Doing Fantastic !

Hey Momma, its super cool to hear about Ryan and his band winning in a battle of the bands competition!  (Ryan’s college band was in a Gorilla Battle of the Bands in Salt Lake City and will perform again in May.)

Also with Elder Lott leaving that is a sad time, but hey I heard John Stanley got his mission call to Hungary. Crazy business... 

How is it going? Its not really cold here ‘cuz I wear long johns all the time, it is just rainy. Really, really raining.... a lot.... like, you have no idea how long it drizzles here.... it goes for 5 hours, takes a 15 minute break then the sky seems to forget that it was supposed to be raining so it starts back up super hard for like 2 minutes then goes back to drizzling.

I'm doing fantastic here and we have discovered the miracles of obedience, more on my part mostly with meals with people lasting only an hour, that has been really hard because, heck, I love to talk and listen and am a slow eater (when its not pasta) and we have had some amazing meat and potatoes, and Chinese takeout here is cheap and heavenly its like 8 bucks for the weight of my head in food.

Yesterday (Sunday) we were pretty much perfectly obedient and we saw many great rewards from it. We met someone who wanted to be baptized during our first 6 minutes of talking with him! It will be in February, a guy who works at a restaurant and is a Bouncer/ Security guard at a club. His name is Nickolas, we joked about stopping by to say hello.

We had 4 other lessons that day with people that we knocked on their doors tracting and one lady was from Venizia Italy who came to Virginia and she wanted to learn more and had already been given Il Libro Di Mormon (Italian copy of the book of Mormon) so I gave her a promise by reading aloud both copies side by side entirely cover to cover that she will be able to know English almost fluently.

We met some other kids playing soccer who are in 9th grade who were from Sicilia and Morocco who their parents had moved here for better education and stuff. There was also a man named Dion who we couldn't get in contact with for the past month but we prayed for a miracle and we were able to see many miracles, including teaching him about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he said that he partied on the weekends a lot and found that he was not as happy as he knew he could be. We told him that there is always help from God waiting for each and every one of us to seek it. He fully knows that we came at the right time and wanted to have us know that we were there for a reason, to help him.

Here is some street art we found. Super crazy things in the downtown.

We have been going out on Mission exchanges a lot with two young men, Hidden Canite and Shown Canite where I will go with Shown and we will tract and knock doors while Elder Hopkins and Hidden will go teach someone, then we will switch off and it is really cool to see the improvement that we all get from the experiences we get from sharing the gospel. Hidden is super excited to go on his mission March 25th to Columbia. There was one person we were knocking on his door and he opened it, smiled and said Goodbye then closed it quickly. we started laughing after that happened, it was super funny.

I am learning so much about the blessings of Serving others and have the attitude of "Go and Do" instead of "sit and stay" because that is the only way I know of that things will actually get done and people will be blessed, whether it be the go and do person or for the receiving end.

 A super interesting ride we saw

We were in the downtown area of Richmond to contact a referral and I think we were there for another reason we went there, to talk with a college student at VCU named Lauren walking home. She had given Sister Missionaries her contact info and said she wanted to talk more but never got the sisters contact info so she was extremely happy to have their info when we gave the referral to the mission office.

Love

Your son

Elder Day