"Sinners go to Hell" and Alligators

Hello everybody!

     This week was really great! We had a lot of crazy things happen that just really made me love being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I'll give just one of them that happened this last Tuesday.    

 Here's a picture of Turlington Plaza on campus. Examine closely..

(The sign being held up is a bunch of flames and the caption: "Sinners go to hell")

     This week we were on campus and there were a bunch of street preachers.  They were on campus from 11AM-7PM, arguing with every single group on campus and calling them out. As soon as we stepped on campus, and they saw us missionaries, they started preaching about how bad Mormons are. It was really sad to see people watching this, getting that kind of an impression of Christianity. 

     We were able to talk to many people, who told us that we are a great example of our faith. I'm glad to be a member of a church where we teach in the same kind and peaceful way that Jesus Christ taught!

      I loved it when people would come up to us while they were preaching and ask us what we thought, and we could just share our message. It was a blessing in disguise to have people there who were open minded to hearing our message. 

    Have a great Halloween! It's 85 degrees here, which just feels wrong for Halloween, but oh well!

   Love you all!

(We also went out to Paynes Prairie earlier today to show the new Elders some alligators.)

Elder Bangeter, Elder Aiken, Elder Day, and me

 (The new companionship is great - Elder Aiken is in training, just came from the MTC, and Elder Bangerter just came from being a zone leader. He's been out for 16 months. He's really into the arts - he did lots of musicals and theater in high school. Elder Aiken is a quarterback and will be going to Weber State with a football scholarship. He's super athletic and a fast runner, fun to play frisbee with! )

hmmmm.....

Fried Alligator, and Exhaustion

Hello everybody!

       These last few weeks have been great! We have a few amazing people that we're talking to who are progressing and learning really well - I love watching people grow as they change their lives and just look happier and happier as they follow up on their commitments. It's fulfilling to see that the work that we're doing is actually helping people.

Being on a mission is really hard sometimes! As a church member, all that you see from the missionaries is them being really happy and bearing their strong testimonies of the gospel while they teach and baptize. What you don't see are the late nights worrying about investigators and the hours upon hours thinking about struggling members and how we can help them. 

As fulfilling and incredible as being a missionary is, it's exhausting! I fell asleep at a member's house for the first time yesterday afternoon... It's not as bad as it sounds. We were at his apartment, and he and Elder Day were cooking fried alligator (tastes like a really good combination of fish and chicken, 10/10 would recommend). Elder Faust, Elder Pacella and I were all sitting on this really comfortable brown couch and within one minute of us sitting down, all three of us were OUT. 

I know that the gospel that I have the opportunity to preach is true because I don't know how on earth I'd be able to keep going without God's help. We have dozens of disappointments every week, we're doing something that the world sees as really peculiar (leaving family and friends for two years to bike in 100 degree weather and tell people about Jesus), we face a lot of rejection, and we spend all of our time thinking about other people. At the end of the day, I just look back at the day and thank God for help keeping me going with how hard I'm working, because, without God's help, there's no way that I could keep going.

I love you all! Have an amazing week!

Here is a photo of me, Elder Pacella, and Elder Foust. Transfers were this week - Elder day and I are staying, Elder Pacella is going to Jacksonville, and Elder Faust is going home. Ade is front and center - he was baptized 9 months ago. 

We painted the graffiti wall again! It was really fun. This time, we painted the Book of Mormon and the Bible and where they take place (the Bible in the Middle East area and the Book of Mormon in the Americas.

For more history about the background of the Gainsville "Graffiti Wall" go to :  "Asher gets into the arts in August"

Post Hurricane Mathew

Hello everybody!

         This week was really exciting! It's been pretty slow and we didn't have that many lessons but that's alright. The hurricane didn't really help...

  For those that didn't know, there was a category 3 hurricane that came up the east coast of Florida this past weekend. Where I live, in Gainesville, just got some rain and wind. The east coast, on the other hand, had a lot of storm damage... It was crazy. The hurricane moved pretty slowly, so it stuck around in the Jacksonville area for about half a day solid. 

Our branch missionaries, and some others, had the opportunity to go and clean up some mess from the storm in a city called St. Augustine. They live by the ocean and this house was just off the coast. There was a 9 foot storm surge that came up and flooded their entire yard, and the waves ended up going inside of their house and flooding everything. After the water finally left, pieces of their neighbor's dock were in this house's front yard, their dock was smashed into pieces, several trees had been knocked over, and all of their plants were flattened and scattered everywhere.

You see pictures of hurricane destruction on the news and the internet but it's just not the same as in real life... Before this weekend, I'd always thought, looking at hurricane aftermath, "That's a mess! How on earth do you clean up after that?" Well, I can tell you that it's just a lot of work. It's a muddy mess, and we were wading in water and mud up to our ankles all day (this was this past Saturday). We moved pieces of their dock, picked up branches and shrubbery, and took the boarding off of their windows that had been placed there to protect the glass. 

There are a lot more critters here than there are in Wisconsin... As I was grabbing some of the mashed up plants, I looked under what I'd just picked up and there was a snake. Not the little garden snakes that you chase after and try to catch, but a solid 4 foot long, thick as your arm snake. I don't know what kind it was because it quickly slithered off into the mess. (The only analogy I have for what it was like wading in it was the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars Episode 4... Think that, but with alligators and snakes and muddy plants.)

Despite the mess, I was really glad to be able to help. When we first talked to the owner, his eyes were completely devoid of hope. He was talking and looking like there was no way that this could ever be cleaned up - like there was no way that his life could possibly be the same. After 7 hours of solid, hard work from more than a dozen people, his attitude had changed. There was hope in his eyes and a smile on his face. 

I learned a lesson about service that day - whenever an opportunity to serve comes along, just drop everything and go do it. It doesn't matter if there are a number of legitimate reasons not so serve, just go do it. We can really bless people's lives and bring them hope as we do so.

Love y'all! Here are some pictures of the hurricane...

Part of their neighbor's dock...

Looking good!  Never mind, just muddy.

Part of their dock. There were banana spiders and cockroaches all over them so we had to be careful while we moved these. (There were six or seven pieces like this."

A branch thing. Entire trees had fallen down and the owner cut them up with a chain saw and then we moved them.

Action shot of lifting things. I'm not in pain... definitely not... yeah.

The whole group. It was such a great experience and I really hope that we can go back and help again sometime this week.

A bit of this and that..

Hello all!

            This week has been great! Let's see... So much happens every week but then I look back and can't remember anything! Elder Pacella and Elder Foust had a baptism! He's a man named Nick who's really amazing - he finished the whole Book of Mormon in about 3 weeks and has an amazing testimony of the church! It was great to be there and feel the amazing feeling there. 

Another funny thing - my companion Elder Day has a girlfriend who is serving a mission in Peru right now. Her mom apparently loves hiking and kayaking, wears Birkenstocks, tie die shirts, and bandannas, and loves granola. I was just thinking, "Yep, that's my family. And almost everybody I know back in Wisconsin..." But anyway, she sent us a five pound bag of granola, so we've been enjoying that...

We're teaching a few amazing people right now really regularly! One of them just went up and visited a friend at UW Madison and then drove back down to Florida, driving through Stoughton. That was pretty cool - he said that Stoughton is a "nice little town". That's accurate.

This weekend was General Conference for our church, and it was amazing! The Prophet and the Twelve Apostles, along with some other church leaders, spoke in several sessions of a broadcast to everybody in the church, talking about things that can really help us spiritually in these times. It was really amazing and I learned a lot about the importance of sincere prayer.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great week! Stay happy!

(Here are some pictures from this week.)

Granola! I has coconut and is really good. In case anybody was wondering, I had some for breakfast this morning, mixed with yogurt and a banana. It was good.

This is John! He's a new member and loves missionaries, which we love. Sometimes, he'll just randomly bring us gatorade while we're on campus. We appreciate it.

Here we are driving... I love these Elders so much, they're all amazing. Elder Foust is the one in sunglasses - he's going home in 2 weeks. It's pretty weird.