WEEK 18 MENA (WEEK 57 OF MISSION)

These pictures came through last week after i had already sent out the group email so i will start with them this week ;)

Mikey called this,
"When you're having a rough day!"

Saying goodbye to Brandon before he heads to Utah to enter the MTC

So many tries but they never got a pic of all three of them looking at the camera haha!!!

When Brandon got to Utah he stopped by our house for a visit!  It was so much fun to talk to him and hear more about the town of Mena.  He is headed to Australia and will hopefully attend UVU when he returns from his mission.

Brandon with cute Aubrey.  I'm not sure Mikey would like his arm around her haha!

Not a lot of time today ladies and gents but we got the big news on transfers!!!!

I am going tomorrow to Springfield, Missouri and I will be in downtown Springfield in a two ward area Hickory Hills and Hillcrest.  It will be a bit of a change of pace from the town of Mena!

This past week was one of the hardest of my whole life and I am so grateful I made it through!  I can’t go into details really but I am so grateful for the prayers of you all and the love I feel for my Savior and Heavenly Father! 

We left Mena in pretty good shape though and really had a good week.  We had 4 investigators come to church and those awesome girls Haley and Avery are looking to be baptized on October 8^th and also there is an 11-year-old who we found last week who will also be baptized in October.  Also Donny Carroll, who was baptized a few weeks back will be going to the SLC temple soon with his brother to do his first baptisms.  I love you all thank you for all the support!!! 

This is at the baptism of the Pattersons.  A couple Mikey helped teach and got to go back and speak at their baptism.  No pic with the couple but always gets one with Elder Hess haha!

Happy Birthday to my beautiful mom this Saturday!!!!  She is my best friend in the whole world and I love her and don’t know what I would do without her. (But literally I still have no clue what I am doing out here, who knew you couldn’t put dawn in the dishwasher?)  I Love you Mama!!!  Have a great birthday Mama! 

Elder Green 

WEEK 17 MENA (WEEK 56 OF MISSION)

Hello there family and friends!

This week was a little bit of a crazy week! Our district is doing so awesome! Man I am so proud. However, because of the awesomeness of them that requires a lot of driving for us hahaha A LOT.  This week I did 3 baptismal interviews and it required easily over 10 hours of driving.  Since I can’t drive it really is a lot on Elder Doman's shoulders.  I feel terrible every time we have to make another long drive and Elder Doman is so awesome about driving so much.  He is a trooper for sure.  This upcoming week looks to be no different either.  With many more baptisms coming up I know I will at least make another 4 hour round trip.  On the way back from one of these adventures to a city called Gore, Oklahoma we stopped by in Greenwood.  They were having a barbeque and games etc. for all the investigators and recent converts and members of our stake. Unfortunately, nobody from Mena could make it because of the distance.  But because of our travels I know all the investigators from the other areas and it was awesome getting to see them :)  Also there was a zipline there and my best friend Elder Hess so that was a great day haha.

Greenwood Barbecue with Hess Daddy.

 While driving home Sunday morning we ran into what might have been a tornado to be honest. I could see the signs with the sky looking a little purple and some funnel clouds forming.  It was a wild drive but we made it home safely!  Once again Doman is the best for driving through all that haha.

This week as far as the work goes in Mena things were tough.  I feel bad for Elder Doman starting his mission off in the hardest area.  However, we are not letting the difficulty of the area get in the way of the things we can control.  We knock a lot of doors and teach a ton of people.  I need to work on getting people to accept commitments because it seems as though we try so hard and teach a lot but there’s that darn agency that people have haha.  This Sunday was killer.  We went to wake up all of our investigators that we had just barely seen the night before and had awesome tear jerking lessons with... Only to get ignored, slept in on, and screamed at to go away haha. I’ll tell ya what, we are resilient though. 

I hate to seem dreary in this letter because I really am not!  I am in a very good mood and my spirits are high!  They used to say that the Fort Smith zone and especially our district is "dead" and now we are some of the best areas in the mission and I could not be more excited about that.  There is no such thing as a dead area and I know Mena has people out there too and we will find them when the Lord see's fit.

Also let’s not forget we have Avery and Haley that are such awesome and prepared girls to hear and accept the gospel.  I hope they get baptized before I get transferred! 

Also due to the storm the lights and PA system were out at church on Sunday haha it was funny to only have emergency lights and no microphone.  I guess that’s the blessing of the smallest branch in the mission is you don’t have to speak very loudly for all to hear :) 

Love you all.  I was going to include a spiritual thought but this is already long so I will just leave one of my new favorite quotes from Elder Kapishke of the Quorum of the 70 when he was asked, “How do we balance our busy lives?”  He answered, it is simple when you run, you run; when you walk, you walk; when you lie, you lie; and when you sit, you sit. 

Live in the moment!  Remember the most common phrase in the Book of Mormon, "and it came to pass" all things in life will come to pass so cherish the moment!

Love Elder Green 

WEEK 16 MENA (WEEK 55 OF MISSION)

Well it was another eventful week out here in Arkansas!

lemme think and remember what we even did haha!!!

The biggest miracle this week is easy.  We have been working so hard to find investigators and just anybody that will listen and heed our message.  Well we were working so hard and knocking doors and really on the search.  Well still nothing.  I mean we were praying and riding our bikes and just nothing would come.  Well there are these 2 girls, Avery and Haley, and they are the best friends of a girl in the ward, Milia (Brandon's sister) and these two girls are completely ready to be taught and baptized and everything.  But because they are minors we needed a permission slip and both of their families would not let them.  Well on Thursday night of this past week both of their parents signed the papers and they can now be taught and baptized!!!!  I know that if we hadn’t shown the faith to go knock doors and show Heavenly Father how much we care about the work, that softening those parents’ hearts would have been much harder.  Faith is an enabling power!

Something super fun we got to do this week was on Wednesday night we went to youth activity and taught a lesson to all the youth (which is very small haha) but after that we played in those bubble ball things haha.  The balls you get in the middle of and then smack each other with? haha  It was the most fun thing ever and if you can imagine me and Elder Doman in our shirts and ties sweaty in these bubble balls wrecking 15 year olds!  That was our Wednesday night.  It was really good to be with the ward though!  That night we also lost the car keys and it was very crazy.  We finally found them at one of the youth’s house haha he had taken them by accident.

This week my main man Brandon Sibbett left for Utah and enters the MTC next Wednesday!  I love that guy.  He was such a help and example to everybody out here and he is going to kill his mission out in Australia with Walbeck!

This week we also ran into a guy named Tyler.  We were talking with him and he said he was visiting a lot of churches right now and that he would visit ours but he wanted us to come with him to his church tonight, which we agreed to because our plans were open.  In our conversation with this man he said that we were just lying about not having multiple wives anymore and that "yall just greedy tryna keep all them wives for yourselves" hahahahhahaa but anyways we went to his church and it was different but okay.  After the sermon their pastor trapped us and wouldn’t let us leave until he convinced us of our being brainwashed and deceived... Classic, we had to call the Zone Leaders because the guy kept us until around midnight!  Insane huh? haha 

This past week has been a rough one as far as my fight against the bugs out here.  I cursed myself a couple weeks ago when I claimed, "I have never had a tick or a flea!" This past week every morning I pulled at least 2 or 3 from the crevices of my body! Disgusting huh?  I hope I don’t have lime disease because that’s what everybody says to be careful of haha.

This weekend was Stake Conference and so we stayed up in Fort Smith the entire weekend for all the sessions and Elder Kapishka of the Quorum of the 70 was here and it was so awesome!!!!  He talked a lot about honoring our wives etc.  Which was not easy for me to relate to haha but I picked up a lot of awesome things from it still. One of my favorite being that the Book of Mormon is not just a history of the ancient Americas as we so often describe it to people.  The Book of Mormon is soo much more than that.  It is a record of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and it proves his divinity and his existence in the Bible!!!!

I love my mission.  Thank you for all the love and support!!!  I hate the Utes and I can not wait to see the Utes next year in LES hahahaha love you all have a great week.

Sincerely, yours truly, Elder GR33N

WEEK 15 MENA (WEEK 54 0F MISSION)

RUNNING AROUND!

Hello everybody!!! Since it was Labor Day yesterday we couldn’t email so today I will have to be quick but I can email home real quick!

Here is the week in review:

Monday: P-Day classic! Not much to do in Mena so we just hung around.  Ended up making a rope swing with a youth out here, Brandon Sibbett.

Tuesday: We went and did a huge service project for our investigator Sherry! It was a lot of work loading all of her stuff from a barn into a storage unit and took several trips it was really hard work. But rewarding. After that we had to rush to the Sibbett house because they had a big Family Home Evening thing where all the branch came to their house and some of our investigators, and we taught the Plan of Salvation and cut out a bunch of pictures and it was a big production haha I forgot to take a picture though, dang.

Wednesday: Drove 2 hours to Gore, Oklahoma to help out those missionaries with the work!  I got to interview two kids for baptism which was such a good experience and the spirit was extremely strong in the interview.

Thursday: Made the two hour drive back home to work in Mena.  We went back to Sherry's and finished up the service project, finally.  It was rainy and stinky and not a whole bunch of fun hahaha but then we had to go clean out our car completely because we were getting a new Jeep at zone conference!  We had to leave this night to drive an hour and a half to the Greenwood elders’ apartment to stay the night their before zone conference.

Friday at 4:45 in the morning:  Wake up and shower and make the two hour drive to Bentonville for zone conference from 8am to 5pm.  Ate dinner with President and Sister Loveland.  Made the 3-hour drive home...

This darling lady is the Mission Home Secretary, Sister Dora Weiner.  She is from Riverton and has looked out for Mikey so much.  She sent me this picture yesterday of Mikey and his friend from football, Elder DeGooyer, at their Zone Conference.

Saturday:  Back in Mena for a whole day.  Work hard to get everybody to church the next day, taught an awesome lesson with the Dominguez family and committed all 6 of them to church!

Sunday:  Nobody made it to church... 

I took you through the week we had to show you how crazy life can be on the mission running around especially when you are the farthest away from any other missionaries you can be in Mena.  It can be a little tough and a little discouraging. However, I never want to be the miner that stops digging just inches before he hits paydirt!  I know there is somebody out here who will accept our message! And if nobody does that is okay too, success isn’t measured in a number to the Lord but rather in your commitment to do what He wants!  I know we are doing what He wants! 

I read one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Mormon today 2 Nephi 33, I know that Nephi was commanded to write on gold plates in 600 B.C. and what a blessing these scriptures are to us today! 

A miracle I didn’t include earlier is that we have found Webb! He has gone through so much recently and after many prayers and random acts we ran into Webb outside of a gas station, and he ran over and gave us big hugs and told us everything that has been going on.  We went to see him in his house later that day and it turns out he is just staying in an old shack that is abandoned.  He is working hard to make enough money to get an apartment here soon! We are going to see him tonight and their will be further updates coming soon!

I love you all.  I hope you had a great week!

Elder Green