Serving in Kentucky: Emergency Emery's... :)

Aug 17, 2015

Dear Family,

Transfers are on Tuesday. A lot happened this week. It was an adventure!

You know how I said your emails seem to help out during the week? Well, the ones I just got today are going to help out with a less active we just met who is bitter towards the church due to some negative Branch President experiences he had many years ago. He's since claimed Atheist. I'm going to study what you wrote me because they would be great for that less-active to hear.

Now onto the week!

Monday... and Tuesday... were the two hardest days I've had so far! They were awful. Here's why they were so hard... We didn't have our car for those two days. We had to... well... here's the story... Some of the previous Elder's who drove the car cracked the bumper a long time ago. It wasn't a huge crack but it was still a crack. The Vehicle Coordinator of the GKLM got onto US for that about a week ago. He had us go to a body shop, get an estimate (over $628!), and set up an appointment to have it fixed next Monday. Monday rolled around and we dropped it off early in the morning. We didn't get it back until Wednesday morning. Pres. Sodders drove us from the body shop back to our apartment where we got our bikes ready for the rest of the day. We then rode all down hill to the church to lock them up for emailing. When we got there however, I found that the tube in the back tire of the bike Elder Lynch left me had a hole in it. It barely survived the ride down which only took about 5 minutes before it was completely flat. We locked the bikes up and then emailed. When we finished, we came back to the bikes to try to fix mine. We spent an hour trying to fix it. It didn't work. I was thinking I would have to walk the flat bike all the way back uphill to the apartment. The Hermana's happened to see us suffering with the bike and they offered one of theirs to help us. We accepted. They took the broken bike and allowed me to use one of theirs for Monday and Tuesday.

We rode up hill to the apartments and that about killed me. It was so hard. The hills here in Corydon are steep and many, so when I got up that first hill to the apartments, I knew what I was going to be in for, for next 2 days. By the time we got to the apartment, we only had about an hour of P-Day left before we would have to ride to Mr T's for that dinner appointment he practically begged us for. The whole thing with the car and the flat bike tire took almost our whole P-Day away! We weren't happy about that.

The time came to ride to Mr T's. We rode down the same hill to the church, that was a lot of fun, and then we had to bike up that same distance to get to Mr T's. He only lives about 4ish miles away from us but when you consider all the hills, it feels more like 20 miles! We got there alive. Mr T, himself, took us to Pizza Hut. There we got some stuffed crust pepperoni and talked about Jesus. He is, what I would call, a "sign seeker". He relies on physical proof. He's done a ton of research into our doctrine. He's working on becoming a PhD in religion. He knew everything about what we teach. He's had missionaries over countless times. The reason he doesn't believe is because he doesn't think the Apostasy happened. He also doesn't believe in the BoM due to the lack of physical proof. Mr T is the 3rd person of this type I've met and he had the same problem the other 2 had. He hadn't prayed. My favorite question to ask people like that is "How have you involved God in your studies?" Every time I've asked that they give me an answer along the lines of "I came to know God through my studies." The question isn't "How did you come to know God?" It's "How have you INVOLVED God in your studies?" What I mean by that is "Did you pray before you studied? Did you ask God to give you understanding?" etc. The answer to that is always "no" as it was in Mr T's case. I told him the last thing he needs to do to find the truth is to pray. He didn't want to. It blows my mind that people would put that much effort into knowing the things of God but fail in involving God Himself. Sign seekers or "Evidence men" (as he put himself) all have the same problem. They refuse to pray. PRAYER IS VITAL IN THE CONVERSION PROCESS. If you're not willing to talk to God through prayer about his word than you will be in big trouble. You'll be left to the interpretations of men and forget that God is a real being just as tangible as us.

We actually had a really good time with Mr T. Unlike the other 2 sign seekers I've talked to, he was extremely nice. I had fun talking with him. We won't be meeting with him anymore and he understands that. He understands that if he's not going to progress in the gospel then he'll be a waste of time for us. A lot of missionaries have made that quite clear to him.

Anyway, moving on with the rest of Monday and Tuesday. After Mr T, we biked back to the apartments which was VERY hard. But I knew that Tuesday was going to be a lot worse because we would be on the bikes a lot more. I was right! Tuesday was far worse! We had to bike EVERYWHERE! Like I said before, Corydon's hills are large and many and the fact that we didn't have access to the rest of our area due to a lack of car meant that we couldn't even check on half of our investigators. Elder Shelley and I cover ALL of Harrison County. Not just Corydon. We have a big area and we could only be in Corydon on the bikes because everything else was too far away for the bikes. In the middle of the day we stopped at a gas station to pick up some Powerade. I put the Powerade in my messenger bag (which was amazing while I was on the bike! It was so helpful in carrying my stuff!), locked the bike up at the church, and walked up to our next appointment. We were supposed to have a nice lesson with Ms L but her Atheistic Brony husband decided to jump in and be a distraction. We had a good talk but we weren't able to teach anything.

When we left, we walked to Ms S's house to check on her. She's the investigator who gave us the Coke's that one hot day. We had a good lesson with her. She's beginning to realize the importance of the Gospel. The only bad part of the lesson was when I found my iPad sitting in a puddle of Powerade because the messenger bag is water resistant and somehow the Powerade opened itself. It had been sitting in that puddle for about 2 hours before I realized it.... After we finished the lesson I was about done. I needed a break. We made an emergency Emery's stop. I don't know how but my iPad still works perfectly. Nothing's broken. At first, the speakers weren't working for videos but they were working for alarms. After a few hours that fixed itself though. God HAD to have protected my iPad. There's no way that thing would have survived for that long in liquid and still work perfectly otherwise.

By the end of the day I was so worn out in every aspect that I about slept on the floor the second I stepped into the apartment. I was mentally exhausted because I was annoyed that my bike took my P-Day away and stressed because the iPad was soaked. I was physically exhausted because of the hills. And I was spiritually exhausted because I tried my absolute best to keep a positive attitude and look for what God was trying to teach me with those experiences. When we got the car back Wednesday morning I was so happy! And on Thursday I realized why I had those trials.

Earlier I said when things get hard that means something good is on the way. With that one week I had all those bashes, the reward was the Stormtrooper armor. With this week, it was the Elder Zwick conference. Elder Zwick, a General Authority in the Quorum of the Seventy came and taught us how to teach better. Elder Zwick, his wife Sis Zwick, Pres. Brough and Sis. Brough all used the space of 7 hours to teach us how to be better missionaries. I took 14 pages of notes in my little study journal. During the lunch break, Elder Shelley and I were in the hall talking with some other Elders and Elder Zwick came up to us and started talking with us. I talked to him for a couple minutes about my family. It was cool to get a little one on one time with a General Authority. Over the next few days I reviewed the notes I took, compared them with PMG, and wrote down the teaching method that they taught us. It's a super simple way of teaching gospel principles but man, is it effective!

There's essentially 3 steps:

State the Principle.

Testify of it, maybe, share a personal story.

Show Scriptures to prove the Principle true and testify again.

Companions switch at every step. I was able to apply this for a lesson we had Pres. Sodders present for. We were teaching Ms M lesson 3: The Gospel of Jesus Christ. I got this routine down where I would (1) state the principle. (2) Pres Sodders would testify of it. And (3) Elder Shelley would show a scripture and testify again. It worked so well! That was by far the best lesson 3 I've given. It was simple and understandable. Elder Zwick said he wanted us to teach so simply and clearly that there would be nothing left to say about it.

I heard about this teaching method a while ago but I didn't really know much about it. Now that I've had a General Authority explain it, I understand it a lot more. Pres. Brough talked about how we can better use the "How to Begin Teaching" section in chapter 10 of PMG.

I learned so much at that conference. I'm so thankful for how much I got out of it because I saw a lot of other Elders sleeping or dozing off. I feel sorry for them. What those 4 talked about was so vital to missionary work and I feel sorry for anyone who didn't take notes about it.

I'm going to have to end the email here. It took a while to write this. Thank you for the support and the pictures. They make me feel like you're still there.

Thank you for being awesome!

-Elder Ben

This is a Strawberry Cheesecake Sunday with Italian Strawberry sauce,
whipped cream and chocolate drizzle on it.

This is what I looked like for 2 days. This was taken Monday night before the events of Tuesday :D

This is what I got during my emergency Emery's trip after my iPad was soaked.
I don't even remember exactly what it was. It had vanilla caramel ice cream
on the bottom, chocolate peanut butter ice cream in the middle,
more vanilla caramel ice cream on the top and topped with peanut butter,
chocolate drizzle, whipped cream and more caramel.

This is why I go to Emery's every week.