Monday, February 23, 2015

Second Week

Sooo This week hasn't been as note worthy I guess, since I've just been getting in the swing of things. No new stuff really so I guess I'll just talk about some smaller stuff.  I need to start writing down stuff that happened because now when I'm sitting here, I can't think of hardly anything.

We had a baptism set for this past Saturday. We filled up the baptismal font and had people show up. And the investigator was a no show. He didn't show up for his own baptism. They've been teaching this dude whose about 19 for a few months now and they say he doesn't keep commitments very well. But he quit smoking and chew and all that stuff so he could be baptized. This is the 3rd time he's bailed on (us) them on his baptism day and we thought he was progressing but I guess not. It's a really hard situation with him. I didn't explain it very good but were disappointed in him because he set up the times and everything for his baptism, interview and conformation date and then he didn't even come through. So we don't know what to do with him.  

And the guy I committed to baptism, we haven't been able to get into contact with him since. So yea. We have some new people that seem interested though. We have tons of names of potentials but not many progressing investigators at the moment.

The AP's (assistants to the president) even came down from Milwaukee for this guys baptism who didn't show, because Elder Stephens taught him when he was serving in Sun Prairie. They stayed the night in our apartment. There's a new AP named Elder Eyring (so its not Elder McKay and Elder Stephens anymore) and he is a clean freak.

This whole week we've been deep cleaning our apartment. Mom, you would be so proud of me to see how I took the initiative in cleaning our apartment... I deeeply scrubbed our shower, toilet, sink, kitchen and everything. They were yellow/black and now they're squeaky clean, white. I'm proud of it hahah. I also rearranged our furniture and made us have soo much more room. Then we found out the AP's were coming to stay the night and we were super relieved because this clean freak was coming to stay and we had just cleaned our apartment. He was very pleased with how clean our apartment was he told us.

We also made a whiteboard instead of buying one. Ingenuity. We have a whole wall just for whiteboards where we write our investigators names and stuff.

We found a Waldorf Ct. That's pretty funny.

I'ts been soooo cold, its snowed 2 of the days and I had to drive in it. I took it slow, but it was fun sliding around corners and stuff.  Tracting in negative degree weather is fun. Everyone is like "Why in the world are you outside in this weather!?"  Everyone's mostly nice though.

I cant really think of anything else. Love you guys!

Elder Stevens

Pictures






Monday, February 16, 2015

First Week

Hello Everyone (whoever mom sends this to),

I arrived at Milwaukee around 1 on Wednesday. We met the AP's and the Mission President and his wife at the airport. Pretty funny, The AP's names are Elder Isaac McKay and Elder Stephens. Everyone thought that was hilarious. They were super nice and we spent the night in the mission home. By the way, it's been the same mission home for about 30 years now so I wasn't able to get pictures of it but I'm pretty sure its the same one that Norman stayed in. So that's pretty cool. They had pictures of all the Mission Presidents in it. All the way back to the 70's I think.

There's a solid 6 or 7 inches of snow here, everywhere. The roads are perfectly fine but the yards have lots of snow on them. Its been a good 10 degrees or so here constantly. As soon as we got back to the apartment, I immediately put on my thermals. Been wearing them ever since. Haven't taken them off. One of the days it was -1 degrees with a wind chill of -35 or so and we went visiting potentials. So we would drive up to their house, get out, run up their driveway, knock on their door, no answer, run back and in the space of maybe a minute and a half of being out, your hands, ears and everything was just numb. Pretty fun.

My comps name is Elder Santos, He's really cool. He's been out for about a year now. We're in this town called Sun Prairie. There's about 30,000 people in it, it looks just like Waldorf but I just found out today there were only 4 police in the whole town.. Unlike Waldorf.

All of the members here are super nice. I'll have to tell you guys about them more later on, but we've had a couple meals with them and they're really cool. Especially the Millers, they're an older couple that joined the church about a year ago, and we go over there constantly. They love the missionaries. Everyone calls her Mama Miller, we spend P-day mornings there every week supposedly and she makes us breakfast, we do our studies there and get ready for the day there. It's pretty cool. This other investigator's name is Peter, he works at a museum and he's one of the nicest guys ever. It's a museum of Sun Prairie and we do service there every Wednesday and Friday. He took us over to his warehouse and he has sooo many antiques and army uniforms and Nazi stuff. The stuff in there is worth millions and we can just go around grabbing it all and looking at it, he loves the missionaries as well. Everyone says Sun Prairie is the best place in the mission, they say I'm soo lucky to be here. The AP's told me that and tons of others.

My comp doesn't have his drivers license so I'm the driver. There's this machine in the car called TeeWee or something and it monitors everything you do. If you speed or do anything aggressive it gives you a warning and if you do it again, it reports it to the mission office... so yea, pretty annoying.

The apartment is small and dirty but I'm gonna clean it up. It's not too bad but I'm gonna still do some deep cleaning.

Kinda weird, every time I say I'm from DC, everyone asks me if I'm from the Virginia side or the Maryland side. It's like they think DC is on the border or something. Every single person has asked me that question. So I don't know if they know something I don't but I thought it only had a Maryland side..

Everything's going good though. I challenged my first person to baptism on Thursday and they accepted. My comp is the district leader, we have the highest numbers in the district. blah blah. yea.

Everything's good, having fun. Pictures in another email

Peace

Elder Stevens

Pictures at MTC