Halloween

November 2, 2015

Dear Family,

My Halloween was a little boring. Holidays in general are hard to work as a missionary. Everyone's gone, with family, having parties, etc. etc. We can't really go knocking on doors because we'd be mistaken for trick or treaters. The Rodenbergs invited us over at night though and we played some board games. 

On most holidays we get 6 to 9 off. That means we stop doing missionary work when the trick or treating starts. The only two holidays that are different are Thanksgiving and Christmas. We get the whole day off for those two.

Why is work an important gospel principle? Well, one of our purposes here on earth is to learn to be happy. Learning requires acting/working. It's best to learn something by doing it. When you work with the gospel i.e. keep the commandments, you learn of its blessings and grow as a person. I've seen so many blessings from my service here. It would take too long to list them all.

The many pictures I sent basically depicted all the major stuff that happened this week. One thing I didn't get a picture of was we had a first lesson with this woman named Ms C. She's met with missionaries before but she never seriously investigated. We took one of our members over, had a great first lesson, and committed her to baptism. It was great to have a member there because it's harder to get members out here in Campbellsville.

Instead of recapping my week to you I want to talk a little bit about what I've learned on my mission so far.

One of the first things I learned on my mission, and I still continue to see day to day, is how All-Powerful God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are. Back in the MTC and the early days of my mission I prayed that God would turn me into the missionary He needs me to be. I realized every trial I went through was necessary to turn me into the person I needed to be. I guess it's more like God's been turning me into the person I needed to be my whole life. I just didn't realize how involved He was until my mission. When I realized that, that's when I changed. That's when I progressed. I've been able to see that same change in a few people's lives out here. There's nothing like the mission to help you realize how real God is. How real His Son Jesus Christ and His Atonement is. And how real the power of the Holy Ghost is.

Something I've been hearing a lot lately is "There's nothing like the mission to help you appreciate your parents". That is very true.

Well, that was basically this week. It was a good one. Love you :)

-Ben

This is the best store bought chocolate milk I've ever had!

Yay! Look what I found at the local Kroger.

We had District Meeting in a suspended cabin in Sulpher Well this week.

More cabin

"Ski" soda

The area surrounding the cabin.

This is the outside.

These are the cars.

The Cruze

Elder Bennet on the Cruze.

The deck

More deck

Cool chair

This is what driving in Sulpher Well is like - dirt roads and brand new cars. 

Elder Jensen on the lawn mower.

These are some of J & L's 42 chickens fighting over an apple.

We had to build our own wood ramp to unload the thing.

We had to use a train jack to get it completely down.

This is a storm shelter J & L have in their back yard. We have the joy of cleaning out on Tuesday morning. :)

Our service project of the week was helping load, transport, and
unload an $8000 hot tub for J & L.  All the rednecks
on the street were double-taking the truck.

Elder Cox

 J & L driving the hot tub away.

Deep South District Elders

Deep South District

These are my shoes after 7 months of use. This was taken right after I shined them this morning :)

Stake Conference

Oct 26, 2015

Dear Family,

I'm doing great this week! I loved my box! There were so many cool things in it. The Tiwi is evil. Just imagine having Hal 3000 in your car all the time.

This week was eventful. Monday was a normal P-Day. We got our heater fixed because it had been out for the past few days.

On Tuesday we had to get an oil change and tire rotation. It took the car place 2 hours to do that. After that we stopped by a less active named Bro P. He had like 6 dogs and they were crawling all over me and Elder Jensen. (DON'T GET A DOG!). After that we stopped by J & L where they showed us their Passion fruit trees.

On Wednesday we helped the youth with a fund raiser of theirs. One of our members we talked with as we were working, "T" is the only active member in his family. For some reason his parents hate the church. Specifically Elders. Neither Elder Jensen or I have been able to get the full story out of him. Anyway, "T" is preparing to go on his mission. His papers are submitted and he talked about how much he hates the waiting game. He brought his sister, Miss E to the youth activity. It was her first youth activity. She's about 12 and apparently has wanted to be baptized since she was 8. "T" introduced us to her and said he wanted us to teach her. We just need to get permission from the parents which according to "T", won't be that hard.

Thursday was District Meeting in Sulpher Well. Later in the day we stopped by another less active named Sis B. We happened to stop by when she was helping one of her neighbors through a hard time. When the neighbor left, Sis B talked to us about sharing the gospel with her. She asked for a Book of Mormon she could give to her neighbor. She even said she wanted to take her neighbor to church. We stopped by Miss R and taught Mr R lesson 3. Let me explain Miss R, Mr R, and Ms K. Ms K is a less active, Miss R is her daughter, and Mr R is Ms K's boyfriend who's taking the lessons. After the lesson Mr R talked about an LDS church he helped build in California back in the 90's. He looked up a picture to show us and found the building burned down 3 months ago. It's not often an LDS church burns down. It's less often you have an investigator who built it only to find it burned down 3 months ago.

Friday was another sick day for us. Elder Jensen occasionally gets serious migraines occasionally. He said it was one of the worst ones he's had. It apparently hurt to move his head. I gave him some Excedrine but that didn't help. It was only a one day thing though. He was perfectly fine the next morning.

Saturday was fun. We had a member Sis X who's a really nice lady. She's fun to visit and she's a strong member. Elder Jensen got a call from Pres. Brough who told him that his grandfather passed. He gave Elder Jensen permission to call home like he did for me. His family has taken it surprisingly well. Apparently his grandfather wasn't in the best health. Later we got word that our branch mission leader, Bro Absher was in the hospital. We went and gave him a blessing. I've been to the hospital many times on my mission.

Sunday was fun too. It was Stake Conference. President and Sis Brough both gave talks on missionary work. They threw down because apparently the members in our stake have strong fears about doing missionary work. One of Sis Brough's opening remarks was "As members, it's our duty to share the gospel. Why is this so hard?" Pres Brough threw down even more by teaching everyone how to get rid of their fear. He said there are 3 things that members can do to get rid of their fear of missionary work. 1: Study the doctrine. 2: Fast and pray for missionary opportunities. 3: Trust the Spirit enough to tell you what to say. Campbellsville is kinda interesting for member missionary work. The Campbellsville branch itself is split up into two missionary areas. There's the Campbellsville area and the Columbia area. Most of the active members live in the Columbia area. The Campbellsville area has a lot of less actives. It's hard to get the members involved because we simply don't have that many. Fear is a big issue too. That's one of the first things that Bro Woodrum, the member who picked me up at transfer meeting, said. The Rodenburgs invited us for dinner. We taught them a quick L1 and they said they needed to be more involved with missionary work. They have friends they can work with and we helped them decide what the best thing to do with them would be.

Well that was this week. It was fun. Now that I look back a lot of stuff happened. Time in general is weird here. It feels like an eternity but at the same time, no time at all. 

As far as I know southern Indiana has part of 2 stakes in it. The New Albany stake, which is where Corydon is, and the Evansville stake.

Thanks for being an awesome family! Take care. Don't get a dog. :)

-Elder Ben

Our branch president, President Rodenburg invited us over for dinner last night.
His son was making these ghost cake things for his teachers and his home teaching families and us. :)

,

My ever growing tie collection.

Here's me and the new blue tie.

I love "studying" the gospel :)

See those round things in the trees?

The candy you sent me and the goldfish I bought.

I've written on the sides :)

Thanks for the box! Here are the two journals side by side.

A couple of our investigators, J & L are growing these in their back yard. They said normally these
grow in places like Hawaii but they think some birds must have dropped the seeds off in their yard.
Now they grow Passionfruit in their back yard. They're actually really good.
But they have the consistency of snot.

They're Passion Fruit :)

Thanks for the shirt! It looks cool. Perfect for Halloween this week.

Me and the shirt!

Tiwi

Oct 19, 2015

Dear Family,

This week was long. It was probably the longest week of my mission, so here we go. 

Monday was P-Day. Nothing special happened.

Tuesday was a normal day.

Wednesday... Wednesday is where things get interesting. That's when we drove up to Louisville to get the Tiwi's installed. The meeting was long. We had to be there at 9:30am and we didn't leave until about 5pm. The Tiwi representative from Salt Lake was probably the most serious guy I've ever met. He said everything with a straight face. Some of the missionaries were asking really stupid questions about speeding and he just kept rolling his eyes. Pres. Brough and Elders Money & Bennett gave good trainings on member-missionary work. After the meeting we went to Mellow Mushroom. After hearing about that place for the last 6 months I finally got to eat there. Boy was it over-hyped! I have no idea what the other missionaries see in that place. It was okay. It did not agree with my stomach at all. After Mellow I went on exchange to Glasgow with Elder Gough. We rode with the Sulphur Well Elders.

Thursday was the exchange day with Elder Gough in Glasgow. We biked all over the place. This was actually a positive bike experience because Glasgow is much flatter than Corydon. I also found Peach Nehi's there.

Friday was a normal day

Saturday Elder Jensen went up to New Albany for a baptism. Elder Larson from Columbia, KY came up and we were on exchange for most of Saturday. It was a fun day. One of the Campbellsville branch presidency's daughters got baptized. That was fun to watch.

Sunday we ate at the Jensons. They have a really, really nice house. Bro Jenson talked a lot about his mission and how much it meant to him. He said he wouldn't be where he is now without his mission.

Well, that was basically this week. It was long. Wednesday didn't help. Miss R's baptism is going to have to be pushed back. Her mom is still apprehensive about it. We're not sure why.

I'll often call upon my JCW's skills and cook myself a delicious deli sammich. Breakfast is soda. Yesterday was my first meal appointment with the Jenson family. Their "weekend home" is down here. They live up in Lexington KY during the week. 

It's getting pretty cold down here. Remember the humid winters? Well I'm about to experience my first one. I'm going to need a lot of thermals. Service varies. There are some weeks where there's none, weeks where there's a little, and weeks where there's a lot. I've done everything from mowing lawns to shoveling donkey crap out of a barn.

Have a nice week!

-Elder Ben

Treasure from Glasgow

*yay* I'm so happy

This card allows us to log into our new friend, Tiwi.

Here's the close up of the Tiwi.

See that little black and white box? That's the Tiwi.
A lot of missionaries suck at driving. They view the mission cars as toys.
The church buys brand new cars for us. I'm driving around in a 2015 Chevy Cruse right now.
They did this to 25 test missions over a period of two months. In those two months
they had over 375,000 violations and about 370 of them were approaching 100mph.

Crestwood and Louisville Zones

Let me tell you what this is. The church installed these at a conference in Louisville on Wednesday.

They monitor our seat belts though the car's computer. They monitor the car's speed through the GPS.

And they monitor any "aggressive" driving (turning fast, RPM violations, breaking too hard, etc.)

through the accelerometer. It talks to you. It sounds exactly like Hal 3000.

If you speed, it'll tell you to slow down. If you don't slow down, it'll tell Pres Brough.

If you don't have your seat belt on, it'll tell you to put it on. If you don't comply, it'll tell Pres Brough.

If you're aggressive with the car, it'll automatically email Pres Brough.

The card I showed you has an RFID chip in it. We have to log into these things in order to drive the cars now.
So when you violate anything, there's a name, time, location, and description of the violation
that Pres Brough will get to see.

Photos

October 12, 2015

Dear Family,

Campbellsville is more urban than Corydon which is more rural. The people here are nicer than Corydon. Campbellsville is better at saying no. I haven't gotten to know the members all to well yet. The Campbellsville branch is split up into two missionary areas. There's the Campbellsville part and the Columbia part. Most of the active members live in Columbia's area. We have all the older less actives in our area. 

Elder Jensen is a great guy! We have very similar personalities. That makes everything easier. Elder Jensen has been out for 18 months. I came out when he hit his year mark. He's from Morgan, Utah. He's a huge gamer. He was in the Sulpher Well video. He's the taller one with glasses. I spit like half of the stuff out. I drank the other half. It tasted exactly like rotten eggs. Sister Webb looked like she was about to lose it. 

Chapter 6 in PMG is probably my favorite chapter in the whole book. Something Elder Zwick said when he was here, which is repeated in Chapter 6, was "Who you become is more important that anything you do."

Sorry about your friend. We really do need to stop with all the funerals. 2015 has been hard. 2016 should be a little better though. As I've said before when things get hard, blessings are on the way. I expect 2017 to be amazing though. I come home that year.

This week was better than last week as far a productivity goes. We only have 1 person who's agreed to baptism here and that's Little Miss R. She's a 9 year old little girl who's the daughter of a less active. She's pretty hyper but her retention is excellent. She's got the 5 steps of the gospel down and the 5 things we're not suppose to partake of from the Word of Wisdom. It's cool to see someone that young just suck up the gospel the way she does. We gave her a children's Book of Mormon and she's had her mom read it to her every night.

We had a cool experience on Saturday. We went through half of our "formers" list and got several names that seemed promising. We went to the house of one of the names, Mr J, and when we knocked, he opened and told us he was just praying about what church he should go to the next day. He told us our presence answered his question. Neither Elder Jensen or I know why the former missionaries dropped him. He asked us to start lessons up again. We had a good discussion about the Sacrament. He's unhappy with his current churches. They apparently don't do the sacrament very often. Sadly he didn't make it to church on Sunday. But we're hopeful that we'll be able to teach him.

Elder Jensen and I had to give the training in District Meeting on Thursday. We trained on chapter 2 of PMG. It went really well. We were trying to teach the district the importance of preparing for lessons. We opened up with a demonstration of what a lesson is like when the missionaries aren't prepared. I was trying to teach the Restoration to an investigator but Elder Jensen was trying to teach the Law of Chastity at the same time. Law of Chastity role-plays always get missionaries busting up laughing because of how awkward they are. Apparently Sister Webb recorded it. I could not keep a straight face. I would say my part like a normal missionary would but I would start laughing as soon as Elder Jensen would talk about the Law of Chastity. The actual training part was well received. The district liked it.

The longer I serve the more and more I'm convinced this is Christ's church. It's too perfect. It all works too well for it to be false. I've known the church was true my whole life but the mission has significantly built upon that early testimony. I'm so happy for this time I've had to serve. I'm also happy that I have a lot longer to go.

I forgot to mention that we did a lot of service for a couple of our investigators who've been investigating for a long time. We had to split and move logs around. They had a log splitter but there were some pieces I had to take a maul to. I felt right at home hacking away at logs again.

Take care. Thanks for being an example and for all that you do :) Have a nice day.

-Elder (You Better Not Get a Dog) Cox 

This is the inside of Emery's. The guy behind the bar is Jason. He's the Emery's guy.
He served all of the ice cream to me during my time in Corydon.

That's Elder Shelley on the other side of Emery's. It has a lot of candy.

Jason gave me a free Peach Nehi. I bought 2 and he threw the third one in.

This is a drawing of Emery's. It looks exactly like that in person.

Corydon blues... Me and a Nehi on the last day in Corydon.

Look at this lovely purple hoodie I got at Butt Drugs. :)

 I forgot to mention this: I was rear ended last week on my last day in Corydon.
I'm fine. No one's hurt. Everyone was a bit shaken but nothing bad happened.

Our back bumper.

This is how we fixed the bumper.
Elder Shelley and the new guy will have to deal with the body shop again.
I think it's funny that happened on my last day.

The Buttiglieri's had us over that night and the Coke's were perfectly themed for what happened earlier that day.

This is how it was the first 3 days in Campbellsville. Rain.
It never stopped. It rained for 3 days straight. No breaks at all.

These are our desks in the apartment.

It's a little cold here.

This is Elder Jensen.

"Ski" is a local soda.

There's a store called Mitchell's here. It's basically a mini Men's Wearhouse.
The lady who runs it loves missionaries. She sells really nice ties. I love that shade of purple.
I was surprised I was drawn to that pink one as well. That's my first pink tie.

This is what our fridge looks like:
We've got a few Cokes, a couple cans of Ski, and 4 packs of Mtn. Dew Game Fuel.
Game Fuel comes out at this time of year in time for the major gaming releases.
They don't call it "Game Fuel" for nothing. Elder Jensen LOVES Game Fuel.

Sulpher Well, KY

This stuff was nasty.

Campbellsville, KY

Oct 5, 2015

Dear Family,

Yup, transferred to Campbellsville. There are a lot of Elder Jensens in the mission. I actually met my companion for the first time in Corydon a few months ago. He and his companion came up for a P-Day in Corydon because they both served in Corydon last year. It's cool to have a companion who previously served in Corydon. 

Well, my first week here it rained for 4 days straight without any sort of break. We had General Conference, and we had to take a sick day because I got a cold and Elder Jensen got some stomach thing. With all those combined, we didn't get a whole lot done this week.

The transfer meeting was interesting. Elder Jensen said its most likely the stress of moving to a new area that cause me to get sick. Campbellsville itself is a nice area. It's more urbanized than Corydon. There is unfortunately, only 1 Emery's in existence and that's in Corydon. :(((((((((

I watched General Conference at the church. I stayed there all day for both days. Food was provided by a couple members between sessions. Conference was completely awesome! I took 25.5 pages of notes in my little study journal. I'm summarizing the notes and am going to send them to you to have. I'm hand-writing them. I've been working on improving my hand-writing for the last 6 months. I've come a long way. It's still not at the level I want it at, but it's a lot better than when I left. I wanted to improve my hand writing after I saw Elder Lynch's. He has nice hand-writing. My new companion, Elder Jensen, has even nicer hand-writing. I was a little sad to see President Monson struggling like that during his talk. But I was happy to see he pushed through. I don't think he's going to live a whole lot longer. There have been a lot of deaths this year. Deaths in the family, deaths on the mission (a recent convert in Corydon, Ms G's daughter, died about a month in my time there), and deaths in church leadership. But we can all take comfort from the fact that death is only a step in God's plan.

I've learned a lot about the love of God for others in my time here. As was said in conference, God looks at who we can become. When you realize that everyone has the potential to become like Heavenly Father or Jesus Christ, you start to treat everyone like royalty almost. Think of it. Think of who Heavenly Father is and all the love He has for us. Everyone has potential to become just that. A perfect being with infinite love. Isn't that cool?

Want some more good videos? I don't know if you know about this, but the church recently made 12 videos for the 12 Step addiction recovery program the church has. Each video is about 5 or so minutes long and each one is someone's personal story with an individual step. You can get them on addictionrecovery.lds.org. Watch all 12 of them in one sitting. That should only take an hour. I would also suggest you read through the addiction recovery program itself. That can be found in the Gospel Library app under the Family section.

It's hard to think I've been doing missionary work for 6 months now. This last conference was my 2nd conference on the mission. I'm half way done with conferences. I've learned so much. I celebrated the 6 month mark on Thursday by burning a tie. I recorded it! 

I got a lot of great pictures from my last days in Corydon and my first days in Campbellsville. I thank God for my family. You've all been so good to me. You've taught me a lot. Keep being awesome!

-Elder Ben

Look at this awesome picture of Mt. Timp I found. It's now my iPad background.

For District Meetings we meet in Sulphur Well KY, or "Sulphur Heck" as

Elder Jensen puts it. It's missionary tradition for new members of the

district to be "baptized" into the district by drinking out of the

well. It was nasty. I'm never doing it again.