Creepy People - Mission Week 57

Well this week was definitely one for the books haha where do I start.....well I guess I'll start with the less funny stuff.

Yesterday E. Jones got super sick again. He still has a massive headache 24hrs later. We stayed in and I studied a lot and watched every video I have downloaded haha. It's looking like today might be similar so Pray that I can keep away cabin fever. 

Earlier in the week we had a few audits and stuff to do so we drove to Connell (again) and they were actually there this time. We stopped at the burger place there and they had this burger where it was 1/2 a burger & 1/2 a ham sandwich. Honestly not too bad! 

On Wednesday we helped a family in our branch move and it was pretty sad to see them go. They got baptized & married in this branch and the reason they are going back to Mexico is cuz the husband has a terminal illness and so he wants to die in his home country :( Sad stuff but they were pretty excited to see family and things like that. 

Thursday was a craaazy day! Now we're getting into the interesting stuff. We had MLC which was really good and we talked about a lot of issues in the mission that I have noticed for a while. We ended on a pretty good note that we need to step it up. Our mission has been promised by multiple apostles that we can double our baptisms and I know it's totally possible! 

After MLC a sister named Sister Wills came up to us and told us about some weird stuff that had been happening with a person they were teaching. She was chatting with another companionship about her area and about some guy named "Robert" that was super golden. The other sisters were like "Wow that's crazy the sisters we live with are also teaching a super golden guy named Robert". So, after MLC we called them with Sister Wills to see what was going on since she thought he might be a troller or something. (Sidenote: that's kinda our job is dealing with people that try to mess with missionaries online. For example one time someone made a fake account of Sister Rasmussen and started to add all the missionaries) 

Anyways, we call them up and they compared Robert and it was totally the same dude! Same phone number, looked the same, had the same "story". Then, while we were doing that E. Perry our mission Recorder overheard the convo and was like, "wait I just forwarded a referral to Pasco of someone named Robert." Soooo long story short this guy was being taught by 3 different Companionships of Sister Missionaries and had told them all different stories. He told one companionship he didn't know what the BoM was and then another he said he had a testimony of the Church. 2 of the areas he had previously had a baptismal date. Super crazy stuff. We later found out that some Elders had contact with him for like a day then he stopped talking to them once he found out they were Elders. President Rasmussen had us text him and tell him to knock it off. Anyways, all that surprise stuff made our afternoon super busy and I totally forgot I had planned to call my Mom for her birthday!! Happy late Birthday Mom! Love you! 

On Saturday we had an exchange so I was with E. Carr for the day. It was a rough day of knocking doors and no one answering haha. Seriously it was a Saturday too and normally people are a little more lively but it was like a ghost town. We did talk to this crazy lady though which was... Fun...? I don't even know. She definitely had some mental stuff going on cuz she told us all this weird stuff about how God was supposed to come in the flesh but instead he put 1000 Jesus Christ's on the earth to trick us. She said that she was one of them and her mom was the virgin Mary. And she said she found all of that out when she was in the Mental institution. Honestly, she was super nice though. Cada loco con su tema I guess Anyways, sorry this email is kinda all over the place. 

I don't think I have any pictures sorry, I hope ya'll are doing well and that you have a solid Thanksgiving. I was just texting the member that is feeding us and she is super excited to cook us a real American spread of food :) 

Los quiero, que les vayan bien 

- Elder Thompson 

Mission Week 56

Buenos Días familia y amigos, me alegro de que pueda escribir este correo hoy y decirles un poco de mi semana.

This week was kinda slow, there were some frustrating things that happened but it wasn't a terrible week. Earlier in the week we had some plans to travel around the mission to look at some missionary phones but after driving an hour we found out that they canceled the meeting and didn't tell us... Pretty much wasted our entire afternoon. 

On Tuesday we had a cool training from the mission president about Light the World!! It's gonna be super awesome, the Church has made a lot of amazing plans to get people excited about Christ this December. I can't remember if I mentioned "The Christ Child" earlier but it is a 18 minute long video that comes out on the 24th. It is definitely the best video I have ever seen!! Super good stuff. Right now you can go to lighttheworld.org and sign up for the texts! It will send you a text every day in December of things you can do to light the world. 

We also had a super awesome lesson with Alfonso, we found him last week and we visited him one more time this last Tuesday. He opened up to us and told us about his family and how much he loves them. He said he had a special connection with his Dad and how he misses him a lot so we asked him "How would you feel if you could see your Dad again?" He said that would be amazing and so we invited him to read the BoM to find out some answers. We haven't been able to catch him since then but we have high hopes. 

Friday we got invited to a members house and also a recently returned Elder was there too! We ate a ton of good stuff and it ended up being really good. The member told us later that it really helped this RM because he had come home early for health reasons and was having a really rough time about it but she said it cheered him up a bit. 

Saturday morning was really good we actually were able to contact a lot of people. We met like 3 new people that hopefully we can start teaching soon. We have recently been dropped by nearly everyone in our teaching pool... Tom and Grace kinda "soft dropped" us for a few weeks too. They said their schedule is just getting crazy so we aren't going to have lessons for like 2 weeks or something...Super sad, but we are trying to keep going with high faith. 

That was pretty much it for this week, nothing too exciting but overall not too bad. I'm still loving being a missionary and I'm glad I can have this time to serve the Lord. I hope ya'll are well! 

Los quiero! 

Elder Thompson 

Fotos

1. Comida Pic: Entomatada

2. A picture I never sent with us and Valentina (Back when it was warm haha) 

3. All the Kennewick Spanish Elders, Hna Valdivia, and Elder Eastham 

Mission Week 55 - A trainee in the house

Buenas tardes a todos! 

Esta semana fue genial!

We had transfers this week so we did the classic train the new missionaries thing. This group is a super awesome one! Definitely a good future for the mission. On Tuesday we took out elder Williams from Snowflake Arizona and sadly everything we had planned fell through. Buuut we visited our branch mission leader so he would at least be able to talk to a native speaker jaja. 

On Wednesday we were supposed to meet up with the new senior missionaries that were going to replace us but they didn't show up so we were kinda frustrated at first. We found out the next day that they aren't actually going to do be able to serve so the whole thing got called off. Soooo our transfer is normal now haha we were expecting it to be way weird but now it's not. We met E. Carr and he is being trained by E. Escandon which is super cool because I haven't been around a new missionary since I was trained. He is pretty sweet, from Provo UT and he has acted for Hale Center Theater for a few years. I'm pretty sure I saw him in newsies right before I left. 

Thursday night we contacted some people about getting some new computers for the mission office and so we went and got 5 computers. It was super funny cuz we were just tangled in cords and stuff like that and everyone in the office was commenting on how 'techy' we looked. It was good though, we spend a good amount of time wiping them and getting them set up for the office missionaries.

Friday and Saturday we got to work a lot which was cool. We met two new people to teach named Alfonso and Silvia and they asked a lot of the textbook ''questions of the soul''. We have another lesson with them tonght and we are super exited for that. 

We also had a lesson with Tom and Grace and they, as usual, fed us some super good food. During the week Tom sent us some articles that he had read and they were just straight anti (it was like super low quality anti tho it was all easy stuff) so we spent a long chunch of our lesson talking about that. Buuut it was overall pretty good and we committed them to read and pray every day since they only had been doing it occasionally. 

Today we had a cool miracle, a super awesome member, Sister Garcia from the Park Hills English ward here, paid for our groceries! I was about to drop like 60 bucks too and so it was a super bendición. 

Anyways thats pretty much it!! Los quiero, gracias por sus oraciones y  apoyo. Se que la iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos días es el reino de dios en la tierra. Mi testimonio ha sido fortalecido bastante en la misión. Yo sé que dios nos ama y nos conoce perfectamente. Agradezco la oportunidad ser Misionero y representar Jesucristo. 

- Elder Thompson

Fotos:

1. Some stickers I designed for the mission. (Mission logo & Wow missionaries is a training we have revived that president wanted turned into a little emblem)

2. Goofy Walmart picture

3. Mission T-shirts

4. "The Pattern" poster. It's another training we got on how to be a successful missionary and president wanted a poster to go in every missionary apartment.

5. Our mini computer lab at the office 

Grace is a member? - Mission Week 54

Hey so this was a craaazy week. Elder Jones got sick again last Saturday, we think it was something new though.

The rest of the week we were working on various projects and we taught a few lessons which was nice. Since it gets dark so early people aren't super into the idea of strangers knocking on the doors at 'night' especially in Finley where it is super rural. Our mission t-shirts finally came in and they looks so good! I'm happy with how they turned out. We spent some time seperating all of them into zones so people can get them and that was fun haha. I'm really good at folding shorts now. Next week I'll send a picture of the shirts and some other stuff I designed for the mission.

It was the last week of the transfer and we have 3 hermanas going home from our district and 6 missionaries total from our zone. Super sad, but exciting. We had fun at our last branch coorelation meeting with the and some members fed us as well for a 'goodbye' party. Leading up to the transfer we had heard some rumors that our assignment might be getting move to a Senior couple but we were doubtful. (considering that a lot of what we do is help the senior couples we currently have to do everything on their computers). We had a meeting with President and he told that that we actually are getting replaced at the end of this next transfer so E. Jones and I will be training them to do our job. We are going to be optimistic about this haha. We haven't met them yet so soon we will know how the next little while will be.

We had a lesson with Grace and Tom as usual and there were some interesting developments. We talked a lot about authority and how to get to the Celestial Kingdom. In that process we felt strongly that we should be very bold and straightforward with them so we were. Tom and Grace really opened up, Tom told us that if he believed strongly that this was the right path for him that he would be baptized. Grace told us that in her life she has been active and been baptized into 7 different churches! One of them is ours haha. That was 30 years ago so she doesn't really remember a ton but she says that a lot of the things we say sound familiar. Anyway, we were pretty surprised with that and we are just gonna keep working with them :)

OH Halloween happened too. Nothing crazy happened, we just had the Perry's from the office visit us with their grandkids. We made a video for the mission as well (its a tradition for the tech missionaries to do one at Halloween) it was a good day. Oh also we found out we can listen to most Christmas music even if the songs aren't in the hymn book, which is our normal mission music policy. 

I kinda mentioned it before but transfer results are:  Elder Jones and I are staying for our 3rd transfer together in Kennewick and we are Training 2 senior missionaries haha. I'm just now realizing that I will be one of few elders that gets the chance to do that. It'll be fun I'm sure. 

Anyway, one cool thing I've been thinking about is who God is and why it's so cool that we get to pray to him and talk to him directly! He has worlds without number, but he still knows us personally and listens to our prayers. 

Love you all! 

E. Thompson 

Fotos:

1. Zone picture 

2. District Pic w/ pizza

3.District Pic