Trio Train Confirmed

Well hey everyone! Things are still out and going strong here in Minnesota! 

So we found out on Tuesday that we would officially be training together in a trio.  

So we now have Elder Pugh from Washington.  

So this week we had a lot of prep work to get both our apartment ready, but also the Alexandria 

apartment we had been using as our "vacation" home.  

So we had to work on getting more dressers and cleaning, and the Alexandria apartment was quite the 

project.  Missionaries in the past have just not been the nicest to that apartment, so we had to fix

handles on doors, the shower,  and clean up a ton. We were basically the house turn around shows on 

that apartment, then the new elders there proceeded to complain about the apartment to us. So you 

gotta love other missionaries sometime.  Its like they just figured we could move locations of the

apartment, or like completely redo everything,but whatever, we are down in Morris and happy.  

So we had to go down early to the mission home to be there on time for transfers.  We ended up 

staying with the APs here and that is also where all the new missionaries stay, so man was that crazy.  

Lets just say they were all quite excited and just crazy.  

It made me really glad that my entrance to the mission was made into the mission home and the 

hospital, although it came with its down sides of like almost dying at all. But at least I didn't have to 

deal with the crazy. 

So we picked up our new guy and then the rest of the day was pretty much spent driving. 

Once we got back to Morris we had to do another final drive back up to Alex to go grab him a mattress.  

And we had to fit him and the mattress in the back of the car, lets just say if we got into a crash, 

he would have been the safest person ever.

So since he has been here, and we have had time to work we have been having a good time.  

We have had had a few lessons with some people that we are working with, nothing super huge in 

progression wise here, but also good lessons. We are being patient, and the miracles will come in the 

Lord's time.  

In church we had 14 total of us this week, and once again we didn't have to give a talk or a lesson! 

So its crazy just being there and being able to enjoy it and just listen and take it all in.  

So like I already mentioned, patience is super important.  That is something lately I have been studying

and working on myself, and we sure do receive blessings from it.  We are promised in Alma that if we 

continue in patience through our trials, we will will have success, and as is mentioned many times as 

well, God knows what we need better than what we do.  So as we focus on having patience, on all 

the little things, when things don't go according to plan, when someone cuts you off on the road or 

whatever it may be, have patience! And then God will give unto you the success and a better outcome 

then you could have thought before! 

So continue on in patience this next week! Love you all and hope you have a great week!

Elder Pickering

Estoy Hecha Una Sopa

Hey everyone! 

Back again with the same beginning to my group email as it has been always haha, but its been a good week.  Transfers are coming up this next week, and we are still pretty sure that we will be training here in Morris in a trio. But we will see for sure on Tuesday, we are all excited.  

So starting off the week with all the fun stuff. On Tuesday we got to go up to have a dinner with one of our members in the English ward that we try to watch out for here and there, and this family technically lives like half a mile outside of mission boundaries, so pretty much we were #Rebels this week.  But that dinner was so much fun.  The family has 11 kids, with 9 of them still at the house and they were celebrating their twins birthday that day.  So we got some delicious food and then the kids wanted to have a nerf war, so the whole house got involved and they have a ton of nerf guns and hundreds of bullets. Man we got to be kids again and just a good time, the simple adventures like that are always a blast.

Also I got to work on my barber skills again this week and I cut Elder Johnson's hair, so when I'm back, if any of you are looking for an amateurishly professional haircut, I am your man.

This week we got pretty dumped on by the rain a few times.  The first we were ending our night with a dinner, and as a missionary you get an hour of time for dinner, and we ate quick and had about an half hour of time left over at the end. So lately we have been trying to be healthier and doing runs here and there and all that good stuff.  So we decided to make the most of the rain and go do a quick mile run to just get some fresh water. We got super soaked, got to run and splash the rivers that the roads became, and just have a good time, but lets just say we were completely soaked.  And then later in the week when our weekly soccer we are trying to start up came around, the clouds looked a bit menacing.  And there were only 3 of us at the time, and it just started to pour, so people decided not to come. But we passed the ball around a little bit in this monsoon type storm and once again soaked ourselves. It was practically swimming in the air with how much rain was coming down, but it was some good times. One of these weeks, the weather won't rain out our soccer and scare people away. 

Also as I have expressed in past emails, we do service at a salvation army thrift store here in Morris. This week we were supposed to take down this hoist they had in the back room and so we got to be batman and try to hoist our way up into the sky with our "grappling hook". Although it looked probably a lot more lame than it may sound, we made the best of it.  That has something I have always been an advocate of on my mission, is having fun.  Taking small moments to laugh or do something funny or make you or your companions day. Way too often people think that they have to be lifeless robots, but this 2 years of your mission is still your life, so make it so you wont regret it, in all ways. Work hard, laugh hard, pray hard.

Now to more of the work that we did here.  This week we had a lot of contact with our people and have been able to set up lessons with a bunch of them! So we have been very blessed in that aspect this last week and we are super excited to see what we can do with all those lessons this week. It should be fun for our new kid.  We had a bit of time to do finding and met this kid going to college here in Morris and he was super open to have us come over this next week and let us start working with him. It is a nice relief for us when people are open from the get go to hearing our message and nice about it too, so we are excited.  

We also have this new Hispanic couple that we got a lesson with and now are going to start meeting weekly with them, like everyone they have their hardships and trials, but the gospel is always the best place to find relief from those things.  There are so many blessing that we get in the gospel, we just need to have the eyes open to see them and take them in. So we are optimistic with them too.  The hard thing like always is work, everyone here in Minnesota here wants to work on Sundays, and if they aren't working, they are out playing hard.  And that is hard because we have the knowledge of how much you can get when you give your will to God. The only thing that we can offer to God in this life that he can't get for himself is our will.  We can come before him with a contrite heart and open spirit, willing to sacrifice what is necessary to align our will to His.  And then we need patience.  Because God's timing is key, and when we are patient in whatever it may be, we are promised in Alma 26:27 that we will have success.  So stay patient, give your all to God, and watch for his blessings.

Hope you are all doing great and have a good week!

Elder Pickering

PS. Saved another turtle this week from the road, so I'm out here just saving lives.

P.P.S. Also all 3 caterpillars are in their cocoons  I know you were all wondering.

You better find a pretty "Darn" big tub

Hey everyone! Back again after another week in Morris.

We had a pretty good week here with some fun experiences, nothing that are life shattering, but some good times.

So to start of this week we had our last exchanges with our district leader. So they came down to us on Sunday night and then were with us until Wednesday afternoon.  So Monday we actually got to have a p-day with other elders which doesn't happen too much here in this area, so we did lots of basketball and just good times at the church.  We ended up playing a game of 21 and it ended up being like a 2 and a half hour game, so good times.  

Then Tuesday we had like a zone council type thing.  Like a district council, but with our whole zone. So we had to drive all the way out to St. Cloud again for that. So that was good, its just hard when like every single week they have something that makes us leave our area because it is usually like a 2 day commitment which takes away time and work from our area which is just hard, but we made due.  

So on Wednesday we finished up our  exchanges and then after that we had the chance to go visit our man Leigh! He had just gotten home a little while before from surgery. He had some parts of skin taken out that might have been cancerous, so he was all stitched up, but doing super super well! We decided to just go through the baptismal interview questions with him, because he already knows so much about the gospel and we wanted to gauge where he is at.Turns out he pretty much knew everything and knew them well. We will have to go over prophets and how to pray with him and that's about it, and he has been going to church and reading from the book of Mormon as well as taking notes, so its going super well with him! He told us that he is still all for being baptized and willing to make that commitment, so we told him to pray for a day he would like to do it, and he told us to find a "dang" big tub haha. So he is in good spirits and ready to go.  We wont be able to meet with him this week because he has to drive his wife to Fargo every single day this week for radiation treatment, but after that we will get to meet up and see what date he has decided and make those next steps! 

Another pretty cool thing that happened is we were walking out of this apartment building and this guy just kind of looks at us and asks what we are and why we looked all fancy, so we ended up talking with him a bit and he said we wants to learn more, so hopefully we can meet up with him here soon and help him progress as well.  It is super awesome when as a missionary you get to experience little miracles like that.

This week we also put some work into getting a game of soccer going down here in Morris on Saturday evenings, so we have been hyping that up on Facebook like crazy and posting fliers and inviting people. This first week we only had 2 other guys from our branch come, and 3 kids came and didn't see a big group and left, but granted it was also raining all day so conditions weren't the best. But it has been a lot of fun being able to be a part of getting an area really going with service and activities and be in the first group of that here in Morris.

Also fun little thing, this week while we were walking around town we found a bunch of Monarch Caterpillars and so now we have a little project of saving these caterpillars so the killer wasps here don't eat them, which is a fun fact I learned here.  So you can look forward to a weekly progression picture of how well these little guys are growing as we attempt to save these creatures and help them grow up! We have one big chunky one that is an escape artist and we woke up this morning and it was just not in its little bottle anymore, and then we look around a bit and there it was just climbing up the wall, so fun adventures here in Morris.

Finally we ended the week with church yesterday, and we had 17 people total there with us, so far we have still been increasing in numbers which is awesome, and yesterday was the first time since my being here that we actually had a two hour church, which is a huge difference compared to the first week of like 55 minutes total, so we are working up and getting in the rhythm of things. Elder Johnson and I both had the chance to give talks on the atonement of our Savior and its always such a cool experience to study to give a talk. It gives you a chance to learn and grow for yourself, even if you only have a 40 minute heads up to prepare haha. 

Well everything is good here, hope you all have a great week and keep the Savior in your heart!

Love you all!

Elder Pickering

Out Here Doing Work

Hey everyone! 

Back again, and I want to apologize to start off if this email is not the most thrilling or exciting of the bunch.  Lots of work and whatnot has been going on here in Morris, but not really anything super noteworthy, I'm not sure you want to hear about the doors that we knocked or all the contact attempts made with those that we are teaching, but we will see how this goes.

So this week we had interviews with our mission president, so we got to trip on down about 2 and a half hours to meet up for that.  We stayed in the zone leaders apartments along with another set of Elders, the best part of that was for our exercise in the morning we went to a nearby basketball court and played some dunk ball, so what a better way to start a day of missionary work then just throwing down on your fellow missionaries in some basketball.  Interviews went well, they are always good to just talk with the mission president. They aren't always that crazy, but its always nice.  He updated me on my last trainee Elder Hulse and told me how he is doing,  It sounds like he is just killing it still and might be training this next transfer, so he is following in my footsteps with the 4th transfer train.  Speaking of training, as of right now the President thinks that we will probably be training a new person here in Morris as well, it can still be changed, got lots of time until transfers, but hey round 4 training, but maybe in a trio, that would be an adventure.

The rest of the week really was just a grind of work, the next few interesting things both come from Sunday yesterday.  So church we had 15 people, so an all time highest attendance for our branch so far, so that's super awesome. It is hard starting out and getting it going, but we are hoping to build the momentum and just get this little branch just to blossom.  And I bet it would surprise  you that we had to give a lesson as well at church. It has just come to the point that we both come with a lesson and a talk prepared for the branch each Sunday just in case for when we get asked every week. But it is a blast, maybe for my homecoming talk I'll just compile a bunch of my Morris talks for you all haha. 

One more cool little experience, so while we were in St Cloud for our interviews, there was a fair going on, and shout out to my aunt Missy and my Mom, for getting me in contact with a less active member from Ecuador that is here and was running a booth at the fair.  We stopped by and talked to him for a good 25 minutes and just where he is standing with God and just got to know him a bunch.  He now has the address of the church and we are working with him in letting the missionaries visit him.  The world is such a small place, the connections and miracles are amazing if we open our eyes.  

Then Sunday evening was quite the trip, so we were up in an area north of Alexandria working with some members from the ward there for the evening, and it was a pretty pressing day.  The first family, one of the daughters, shes older, not like a young daughter, just feels like she is the victim in life.  She feels like God doesn't love her, that he lies to her and shes got nothing going for her... The next member we talked with, she ended up going and telling us the kinds of addictions that really should be discussed with the bishop rather than the full time missionaries.  So it was kind of a trip of an evening but lets talk about it for a little bit.  First off, we have some powerful knowledge as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that is that we come from a divine heritage.  Not only were we blessed to have some guardians and earthly parents to love and care for us on this earth. but we have spiritual parents who love us with a love more than we can comprehend.  These heavenly parents that we have could not stop loving us, no matter what happens in our lives, no matter what we do, no matter what trials we have, Our Father and brother Jesus Christ love us so much and will never stop.  So we need to put our trials, and offences behind us and move forward with faith and the knowledge that each one of us is a child of God.  And no matter what each one of you do, don't let whatever anyone says to you, or about you, affect your relationship and your spirituality.  Way too many times have I as a missionary had to talk to people that have left the church because this or that was said to them by an imperfect human.  And this may come as a shock, but no one on earth is perfect, we are a bunch of imperfect people in a perfect church, its up to us to keep moving forward, the second we let what someone said, affect what we do or how we act, that is Satan winning in getting between us and God.  So stay strong, love God, and never forget of His PERFECT love for you!

Love you all!

Elder Pickering