Transfer 3 Week 3

This week was pretty crazy!

Elder Rupnick and I set a goal to teach 50 other lessons this week, and we were able to get 45! We spent most of the week knocking on doors and street contacting people. We would have reached our goal of 50 others if it wouldn't have rained on Sunday! We went out, tracting in the rain, but had no success.. Oh well, we tried! This area doesn't have a lot of promising investigators, so it was really nice to go out and find a lot more people we could potentially teach! Hopefully some of the people we found this week are actually interested and we'll be able to start teaching them the normal lessons! 

Some pretty interested things happened this week..

While we were out tracting, some high school kids were playing basketball on a court across the street, they yelled over to us, asking if we wanted to shoot some hoops. I thought, why not? So we ran over there and started playing basketball with these 3 high school kids. They were reallyy surprised we actually came over and played with them. We were really chill with them and just started shooting hoops and talking. They ended up asking about us, who we were, what we do, why we do it, and all that stuff. So we started talking to them. (I think I'm a lot better when talking to kids that age) We gave 2 of them Book of Mormons and gave them our number and told them to call us. They said if we were in the area on Fridays, to come shoot more hoops with them. So it was pretty sweet!

We also got a referral from Church Headquarters this week. So if someone online, on mormon.org wants missionaries to come talk to them, or they want a free BoM, they can put in their information on the website, and we will get a text, telling us that information and saying what they wanted. Were supposed to contact them within 24 hours. This week we got a text, telling us the name and number of someone who wanted a BoM. I ended up calling the number to see when we could stop by. So I called the number and a lady picked up the phone and said "Dodge County Correctional Jail, how may I help you" I kinda froze.. I was like.. uhhh what? So I eventually told her who I was and that someone probably just gave us a prank number or something, apologized then hung up.. My heart kinda dropped when I heard her say that! I wasn't expecting that at all! So someone either pranked us, or someone in the jail wanted a BoM.... Were not allowed to teach people in jail, however sooo yea. That was pretty funny. 

We live next to Beaver Dam Lake, and one of the nights this week, there was the most amazing looking sunset I've ever seen... Elder Rupnick and I ran back to our apartment and grabbed our cameras. We then went to a public park and took some pictures.. I'll attach one of the pics.. It was crazy good looking. One of the best sunsets I've ever seen!

Anyways, it was a really fun and busy week! 

Love you all!

Elder Stevens

Transfer 3 Week 2

This past week was a little slow but wasn't the worst.

First off, next week we will have our P Day on Tuesday, due to Memorial day, which will be a normal proselyting day.

My Birthday was on Thursday and nothing out of the ordinary happened. We had our weekly planning that day, which happens every week. And then after, we visited a couple less actives and some potentials. I did receive a call from the Mission President, President Cutler and his wife telling me happy birthday which was really nice! No cake, or presents but it was totally fine! That's what i was expecting! haha.

We had a dinner appointment last night, and it was the dad's birthday earlier that week, so we had some cake and ice cream for him, (but in my mind it was just a late party for me..)

This week we ran out of Book of Mormons to hand out.. That's pretty awkward.. Its actually really hard to teach new people about a book, if you don't even have any on hand.. So that was pretty weird.. We should be getting a box of BoMs tomorrow.. Hopefully!

We had a lady come up to us while we were walking around town. She told us how her sister joined the church a couple years ago and she has a nephew on a mission. She said her sister has been trying to convert her over the past few years and she's actually might be changing her mind about the church. So we got her address and were going to go visit her this week. Hopefully something good comes out of that!

This week I was able to go on exchanges with the DeForest Elders. I was able to go back to Sun Prairie, and do the normal service we did with Peter at the Sun Prairie museum. He was really excited to see me and he thought I was back for good! but nope! Just for the day.. haha

We also helped the sisters move into our old apartment. Man, I thought I cleaned up that apartment. They cleaned it up real nice in the past week! It was pretty crazy, it barely looked like the same place!

This next week, were going to be doing a lottt of finding. We have a goal of getting 100 lessons taught this week in the district. Its gonna be hard but I'm sure we can do it. Were planning on getting 50 other lessons as a companionship. So we'll see how it goes! Were gonna be superrr busy.. Hope it goes well.

Anyways, i think that's about it!

Love you all!

Elder Stevens

Transfer 3, Week 1

This week was pretty good.

I arrived in Beaver Dam on Wednesday, it was a very fast exchange because Beaver Dam is just 15 miles north of Sun Prairie. Beaver Dam has about a 3rd of the people than Sun Prairie, and the area covers a much larger distance. We are very restricted on miles, so its very hard to get to some of the towns that we cover.

Yesterday I was able to Skype with my parents and brother which was really great! It was great being able to see them. It feels like I just left, so talking to them was pretty weird because I feel like I haven't been gone for very long! These last 3 months have flown by!

In this new companionship, I have to do most of the talking, teaching and finding. This is new to me, because Elder Santos would do most everything in the last companionship. I would talk and teach of course, but I was always in my comfort zone. Now I'm having to stretch outside my comfort zone and do most everything. This is good though, because I know that I'm learning and growing soo much quicker now. It stinks, but its good.. I find, that I'm having more fun doing it this way however. You feel better when you're the one handing out the BoMs and getting new investigators, instead of just listening to your companion do it.

Beaver Dam has a small branch, there's about 30 members who attend regularly. This is veryy weird to me, because I'm used to a good solid 150-200 people attending at wards.. They had me get up in the middle of sacrament meeting and introduce myself and bear my testimony. Even though there was only 30 people there I was still nervous because of the short notice.. I got through it though.. haha

Welp, that's about everything I think. Everything's going pretty good! No worries!

Thanks and Love you all!

Elder Stevens

Transfer 2 Week 6

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Well this week was my last week in Sun Prairie. We just found out this morning where everyone is getting transferred. I'm being transferred to Beaver Dam. Its a small town just north of Sun Prairie. It consists of a lot of smaller towns, spread out everywhere so we will be doing a lot of driving! My new Comps name is Elder Rupnick, he has one more transfer till he goes home.

Serving with him will be interesting because he has Asbergers. I'm sure ill be doing most of the teaching and interacting but that'll be good for me as it will make me grow and learn much faster! I've been to the Beaver Dam apartment before and I'm excited because I'll have a dish washer and I nicer apartment than the last three months!

I'm not sure what my new address is yet so ill make sure to have that to you all next week.

This last week we were mostly just preparing our area for the sisters to take it over. We did a lot of organizing and prioritizing a lot of investigators and cleaning and scrubbing the apartment for them, to make the transition as smooth as possible. We weren't allowed to tell any of our investigators that we wouldn't be coming back next week, and that the sisters would be coming back. So that was pretty weird.

I am super excited for this new area though, I'm going to try to make it the best area in our district and get the work moving there a lot more.

Welp that's about it! I'm excited for the new area and new comp and just getting a fresh start I guess!

This was an interesting week, just getting everything ready for the sisters.  I'm excited to call home for mothers day on Saturday! So that'll be exciting!

Hope everything is going well for all of you guys!
Love you all!

Elder Stevens.

Transfer 2 Week 5

Soo this week was a little slower but very interesting!

First off, the baptism was able to go through on Saturday! The service was pretty short but we had a decent amount of members come to support Erik. He was confirmed yesterday and is very excited about receiving the priesthood in due time! So that's pretty awesome!

On Tuesday, we had our Mission President, President Cutler, come to our weekly district meeting for interviews. Every other transfer you get interviewed by the mission president. The interview went really well and he told Elder Santos and I some upcoming news for Transfers coming up next week. Due to upcoming transfers, the mission will be loosing a lot of missionaries going home. (About 70 Missionaries are going home in the next 3 months) So they are combining 2 areas. So there were 6 missionaries in Sun Prairie. But as of next week, there will only be 4. The Sun Prairie Sisters are going to be taking over our area. They will be taking all of our investigators and everything. They are even moving into the apartment we are staying in currently. President Cutler said, However one of the Sun Prairie A Elders (Elder Santos and I) will be transferred to DeForest (The other set of missionaries in the ward), so that we could still help the sisters in the huge transition. So Sun Prairie A is closing, due to not enough missionaries in the mission. Pretty Crazy News. However, President Cutler told me personally that due to all these missionaries going home, I will be able to serve in a leadership position a Lot sooner than most other missionaries. So that's pretty exciting!

Transfers are coming up next week and they are going to be very very interesting. So my address is going to change this upcoming week. I'll give out my new address as soon as I find out!

Other than that crazy news, and the baptism, this week was pretty slow. We've been deep cleaning our apartment (again) for the sisters to move in and organizing our area so that they wont have as hard of a time taking over our area.

Something cool that happened this week, was that we decided to stop by this guy named Holman. Elder Santos didn't really want to stop by this guy because he's really sketchy but i decided we should knock anyways. He opened the door and we had to introduce ourselves again to him because he had forgotten who we were. Then he asked if we could get rid of evil spirits. And we said yea? all hesitantly. Long story short, We ended up going into this guys home and Blessing his home. He felt a lot better after we did that. He proceeded to give us a 30 minute pep talk on faith and staying strong which was pretty cool! He told us that we were amazing and that we were doing the right things and that we should never allow anyone to get us down. This guy started talking about things that are talked about in the D&C and we had no idea how he knew that information. But all in all it was pretty cool and he made us late to our dinner appointment but oh well.. hah

I think that's about it! Love you all!

Elder Stevens

Transfer 2, Week 4

This week was pretty interesting.. :)

We've been going to Wednesday night activities for the past couple of weeks because the ward would like us to for some reason. This week we were with the Teachers. The teachers in this ward are sooo smart.. its kinda scary how smart they all are..

Anyways, this week they had a "Missionary Ramen Noodle Cook Off" So we all got one packet of ramen and we had to use anything we could find in the kitchen to make it. They had judges, and there were 3 categories that were being judged. Taste, Presentation, and Creativity. Welp, long story short, Elder Santos and I ended up winning the Taste category. (the only category that really matters..) Which was pretty crazy. We were so surprised.. it was pretty funny. I guess were good missionaries after all..

This week we ran into some reallyy nice people. We ran out of paper plates in our apartment so we ran over to the gas station to grab some real quick. And the plates were really expensive so we ended up deciding not to get them. As we were leaving this random lady came up to us and offered to buy us what we needed. We thanked her for the offer but declined. She insisted.. She wouldn't take no for an answer.. so we ended up getting 2 large bags of chips, the paper plates and some fruit from this random lady.. We felt bad because we had no idea who this lady was and she spent $16 dollars on us.. oh well. Thank you who ever you are!

The next day we were out tracting.. The very first door we knocked on, a lady opened the door really quick and said to hold on, she had brownies in the oven, so she shut the door before we could say anything and she came back out with some brownies. She gave us a brownie each and then said that we would need some liquid to help wash the brownies down. Before we could say anything again, she was back inside. She came out juggling some cups, water, and milk. She poured us a glass of water then headed back inside. This next time she came out with a ball of cash and stuffed it into Elder Santos pocket. She asked us if we had been to a Salvators Pizza that was in town. We said no and she said, "welp! You're going there tonight! Do you need a ride?! My daughter works there! She looks like Emma Stone and you need to tell her I sent you.." and all this stuff. Then she started talking about how she loves Mormons and she used to have LDS friends in Kentucky when she lived there and how they were the nicest people she's ever met and all this stuff. We hadn't even said anything yet and we already knew this ladies life story!

Long story short, were going to go back this week and help her with some yard work. And we ended up going to the Pizza place because she wouldn't take the cash back.. As soon as we got there, her daughter ran up to us and told us her mom had called saying we were coming. She was super excited to seat us and have us there. It was pretty crazy! Some super nice people! We didn't know how to thank her!

I guess if you run into too many nice people in one week, you have to run into some not too nice people as well.. We ran into an Anti Mormon when we were tracting and that wasn't very fun.. He was cussing us out and trying to put us down. I personally thought it was kinda funny because everything he said didn't make any sense and he wouldn't even let us talk back.. It was a good faith builder! I tried to shake the guys hand but he refused.. lollllll

We also got to help build part of the Millers driveway on Saturday. I got to ride in Brother Millers tractor with him while he went and drove to his farm to haul some dirt to the driveway. That was pretty fun. Dont think I've ever done that before..

Welp all in all it was a great week. Erik has his baptismal interview on Wednesday and the baptism is on Saturday! Hope that is able to go through!

Love you all!

Elder Stevens

Easter Box