pics from River Falls week 22

dressed as each other for the ward Halloween party

SLENDER MAN costume

River Falls week 22

Hello!

So last P-Day we had our district P-Day, where all the missionaries get together within the district and do some activities. We were going to go to a corn maize, but that fell through. So we carved pumpkins and played some games. When I first arrived some missionaries were playing the organ. So I went in and we sat down. One of the Elders who I was in the MTC with started playing Canon in D. I started playing the pedals with my feet and some Canon variations up high while he did it down low. So the church rang with some beautiful classical music. IT WAS SO LEGIT <3 <3

Anyway, then I ran off to Woodbury on exchanges. Woodbury is a super rich area filled with countless town homes. The place is so prim and proper. Literally nothing is out of place. All the lawns are perfectly trimmed and the houses are all similar in style and color. It is kinda erie, honestly. When some plans fell through Elder Kelsch, the missionary I was on exchanges with, and I had the opportunity to go visit a family that a woman in Montana really wanted me to visit. I told the family I knew someone in Montana that knew them. We talked for awhile but they were ultimately not interested. I honestly did not believe I would ever have the opportunity to do that. The mission is so big! But I am grateful the Lord put me in the place to have that opportunity. 

While in Woodbury we taught a man who flipped out about the Word of Wisdom concerning hot drinks. He said that we are hypocrites for not drinking antioxidant caffeine free green tea yet drinking HOT chocolate, especially since one was healthy and the other was not. I asked him if he ate normal chocolate but then decided that the conversation I was about to start would  was not worth it so I changed the subject to talking about the Holy Ghost. 

While I was on exchanges Elder Cole and Elder Sharp when and talked to a less active I have been visiting for the 5 months I have been here. She told them she was leaving the church. Things went crazy. This woman can talk for about 2 hours straight. Literally. The member we brought can do the same. And that is what happened. The less active and the member went at it for about 2 hours and Elder Cole and Elder Sharp managed to say 6 sentences in 2 hours. Oh man. ha ha. 

For lunch one day Elder Cole fried up some chicken. Some oil spilled and burned onto the stove (a white ceramic sort of stove top) and a plate sized mess of black char stuck to the stove. I went and made some calls while he began to clean. I heard Sister Taylor come in and just gasp and say, "oh my..." I got a good chuckle out of that. It took 40 minutes of hard scrubbing to fix that one. 

So our investigator Sister J. is a young exchange student who is getting baptized on November 9th! But a lot of drama has come up because of it. She attends the singles ward in Minneapolis, 45 minutes away. So we cannot attend the baptism there. She found out and wants to switch it to here. Well now the Elders in Dinkytown (University of Minnesota ward) are not happy that a baptism is being moved from their area. Neither are their zone leaders. So there is some really dumb quarreling going on and I thought I left the drama behind in high school... lulz. This is our investigator's decision so we will just iron out the wrinkles. 

A member this week asked us about our investigators. We told him we are teaching in a lot of trailer parks. He laughed and said, "of course you are. In my mission we called trailer parks Narnia. They are hard to find, but once you get there it is magical." 

So friday night was our ward Chili Cookoff slash Halloween party. Elder Cole and I got pretty creative for our costumes! We dressed up as... each other! We switched name tags, wore each other's ties, I put contacts in and gave Elder Cole my spare pair of glasses to wear for the night (he kept them low on his nose), and then I did my hair like Elder Cole. It was mildly amusing. The members got a chuckle out of that one. Elder Farnes almost died laughing on the ground. It wasnt THAT funny... There is also this member who is a Grand Master in martial arts and self defense. Elder Mattison once taught me how to protect myself from a knife attack using a move he learned from this member. Elder Farnes was trying to use some move to rip out my intestine or something and so I told him to attack me with the knife. I couldnt remember too well how to do it so it didnt work to well. Then the member was like no this is how you do it. In a blink of an eye I was staring at the ceiling with a massive arm around my neck and the other arm pushing my spine upward. Yeah. it hurt. I got destroyed. The member who won the costume contest came as Slender Man! Now a lot of you probably dont know what that is, but it is a creepy character from this little computer game. Basically you are in a dark forrest trying to find some notes and Slender Man comes and consumes your soul. Mildly terrifying to play in the middle of the night. He stood about 8 feet tall in the costume. So bueno. look for the pictures I will send out. 

Last night we went over to a referral's house. The scene we stepped into was.... bizarre. I have never seen so much tobacco in my life. There was mounds upon mounds of tobacco piles and literally hundreds of cigarettes waiting to be filled. He smoked 4 cigarettes and drank 3 bottles of beer while we were there. He has this parrot who lives in the corner that was staring at us the whole time. The man is brilliant. He basically knew my thoughts from my body language. It was insane. When we left I saw that his gas stove burner was on high. It was just on. It wasnt being used. The flames were just billowing up. 

Spiritual Thought: 2 Nephi 2:24

 24 But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who ^aknoweth all things.

This scripture really stuck out to me this week while I was thinking about why bad things happen to good people, which I have been asked a LOT recently. It hit me that one reason God allows this to happen is because He knows that through the Atonement all will be made right. His Son came to earth and covered for all these pains. Yes bad things happen, but through the atonement of Jesus Christ those pains can be taken and the joy that comes from following the savior can fill our lives. Just Alma and his followers in Alma 24 (i think, somewhere around there) who had their burdens made so light they barely even remembered them through their faith and trust in the Lord. 

I love you all! Have a wonderful week!

Elder Damron 

River Falls week 21

So it is currently snowing outside. I really do love this time of year. Except I have never had to proselyte in it, so we shall see how this goes.. ha ha. 

So last Monday Elder Cole called the Lumberjack challenge (when I ate that 5-6 pounds of ice cream a few months ago) "easy" and decided he wanted to take it on. Our new zone leaders decided the same thing. I shook my head and agreed to go with them to do the challenge. They were talking so much smack and I just kept shaking my head and saying, "just you wait." Well, they got their bowls of ice cream, realized just how much ice cream it really was, still tried to talk the challenge down, and then got utterly destroyed by that ice cream. I just sat there laughing as they dropped out one by one. Oh man was it hilarious. I took some pictures to mark their humiliation and reminded them how "easy" the challenge was. So I am the only champ in these parts of 'Wiscansin. I still remind Elder Cole how "easy" it was. He still says it will be easy the second time and wants to go back. lulz

So last week I mentioned our little debate over whether it was raining or sprinkling one day. We decided this would be a great way to contact and then we went to campus and started asking people (it was raining/sprinkling/drizzling and at one point misting at the time) to clarify what the precipitation was. Most people agreed with Elder Cole... all I am saying is look up the definition of rain in the dictionary. Not that I did that or anything.... 

We also finally got back into contact with Sister S. We had not talked to her in about a month and she had quite a few commitment issues. But we finally found her at home one night and we went in to talk. She broke down and told us she had made quite a few mistakes recently and she didn't know what to do. We immediately taught a message on the atonement and told her the only way she can be happy is if she gives up breaking the commandments. She immediately went to her fridge and pulled out six large bottles of alcohol and told us to get rid of them for her, which we did. But there is such a change in her countenance. Truly, just as spoken in Alma 32, the  Lord will compel us to be humble. We then committed her to come to church. There were two issues with this. 1. she had bailed quite often on church. 2. it was stake conference in a town 35 minutes away. But by a literal miracle of God we found someone to take her and us and we brought her there on Sunday. A young couple of our ward immediately came over and said she could come sit with them and that truly made all the difference. Member missionary work truly changes the whole dynamics of missionary work. The stake conference was on missionary work as well and a few recent converts spoke and they all mentioned how great the members were. Sarah said afterwards that she had never felt such a family feeling in a church in her whole life. After she even met President Clements, who spoke at the conference. She stood there wide eyed and without us even telling her I am positive she could see that a true man of God was standing before her. 

So Elder Cole and I like to pretend we are funny. There is this bike on this bike rack we go to frequently where the person puts their bike lock on, but never mixes up the combo. Anyone could take the bike at any time. Makes sense, right? So we finally decided to help this person out. We moved the bike to the other side of the rack, mixed the combo up, and left a note telling the person someone could easily steal their bike, but mixing up the combination would really solve all their problems. A similar thing happened to Elder Cole a few weeks ago, so we figured we would pay it forward. 

One of our investigators who has refused to pray for quite some time prayed this week! He prayed for his sister! Without any encouragement from us! Few times on my mission have I been so filled with joy. He later told us he thinks God selectively answers prayers so he doesn't want to pray too often, but baby steps. We will work that out later. ha ha. 

We have met a college student Brother JB a few times. He often belief bashes and so this time we called in the big guns and brought a man in our ward who is pretty legit. So we go in, the investigator starts trying to pick us apart, and at one point the topic of persecution came up. We talked about John 15:20 on how the true church will be heavily persecuted. Then I asked him, "for example, you left the catholic church. Do you heavily persecute them?" He said," YES. I DO. I go to all the pastors in town, make appointments with them, and slam them on why they are wrong." JB:1 Elder Damron:0 Then the conversation went on and I refused to keep answering his many, many questions and told him to go to the Book of Mormon as a source of truth. He has literally gone everywhere but there. I told him to pray about it and he said ok. Then we talked about the bible. Now up to this point he came off as someone who believed the bible to be true or he was searching for that truth. I told him that just as he finds the bible to be true through prayer, he must do the same with the BoM. He told me that would not work then because he has prayed and the answer he got was the bible wasnt true. JB:2 Elder Damron:0 Basically that lesson did not go well. I walked out fuming. Blah. But he committed to reading and praying about the Book of Mormon! That is cool.

So Elder Cole almost died this week. It was pretty terrifying. We were helping this man move some stuff out of his storage unit. The guy had put part of a computer desk at the very top of this unit on top of some boxes. He could barely reach it. So he told us he was going to slide the desk down and we were going to grab it and help it slide to where we could firmly hold it. So he tipped it and started sliding it down, Elder Cole was at the bottom holding the end of the desk and slowly letting it down. All of a sudden the desk lurched forward and we heard the sound of something quite heavy sliding down the desk (it was too far up to even see what it was). All of a sudden some very large boards all wrapped together hit the one peg at the end of the desk and stopped 2 inches from Elder Cole's face. We literally would have had to call the ambulance. Holy cow. The Lord watches over his missionaries... 

So this week I was reading in Mosiah 10. I noticed that multiple times in the chapter it says "they (the lamanites) were wroth." At one point it said they had an "eternal hatred." Then they were wiped out in war. The start of our downfall is anger. Anger cannot coexist with the Spirit, which will show us all things that we should do to be safe. Peace be unto thy souls! And follow the Lord's counsel to be of good cheer. 

I love you all! Have a good week! Thank you for the mail too, I will write you all back. 

Love, Elder Damron 

pics from River Falls week 20

RIver Falls week 20

It is starting to get chilly... and dark... But that is alright. We still only bike and so after dinner we put coats on and thermals under our slacks. The one store in the area that we can buy winter stuff at won't have winter clothing for another month, so hopefully we can stay warm till then.. ha ha.
Anyway, we had another slowish week, but that is alright. Our teaching pool is still not where we want it to be but we met some awesome people this week that we are really hoping will progress. One of those people was Sister S. So after all of our plans fell through for the day and the time was around 8 pm (most awful time of day to try and do anything because people freak out that it is "late." IT just gets dark early...) we decided to pray. After the prayer we felt we should visit Sister S. We had performed some service for her 2 weeks ago and stopped by to say hello and so this time we decided we were going to go teach her. She gladly let us in and told us how she is a recovering addict and the guilt of her addictions are weighing heavily upon her. WE shared a message on the atonement and gave her Alma 36 to read. We shared the message of the restoration too and then she hardcore rejected baptism.... but we will take care of that. 

We dropped by a member of the ward who actually attend a different ward in the area to do what we call a teaching evaluation, which is where we teach a lesson and they tell us how we can improve. It got awkward quick when one member said, "we know you are just here because the bishop thinks we are inactive." That is not actually true, but it was awkward nonetheless... 

So this week was filled with raking. We met this woman with some health issues tracting and asked her if there was anything we could do to help her. She was like, are you serious? We told her yes and she said she was physically unable to do her raking because of the health issues. We told her we would return the next day to help. And we did. We also returned the next day. And the next day. After about 8 hours of raking, 34 bags, and what we calculated to be 1352 gallons of leaves, we completed the task of raking that yard. Holy cow. But it was all worth it in the end when she almost started crying because of her appreciation. We also organized her shed and put some boxes in and she was speechless when she looked inside to see what we had done. I love to help people... she then asked us if we believed in Jesus, ha ha. She said she wanted to pray but she ended prayers in Jesus' name and didnt want to offend us. We told her we would love to pray in Jesus' name. Side note: another cool experience occurred on the first day we raked when the mother of the woman whose house we raked came outside and glared at us. We asked her how her day was going and she just said, skeptically, "why are you doing this?" We told her we just really love to help. She was shocked that there are still people in the world who offer help so freely. What is our world coming too, anyway. 

While tracting this 6'5" bald, mammoth of a man opened the door in an orange tank top. He folded his arms and just glared at us. His arms were probably as big as my thighs. This man probably could have eaten my soul. Needless to say, the conversation didnt go anywhere and Elder Cole and I scampered off quickly. 

Being in a college town weekends can get kinda crazy. On fridaynight we foolishly went into an apartment building looking for a potential. This man named David came running up to us totally high as a kite (we have talked to him  before) and was like you need to come and have some drinks with us! He knew already we dont drink. We reminded him and he said we could just sit and watch the movie instead. We talked our way out of that one and then we finally agreed to merely say hello to his roommates to get him to leave us alone. We waived from the doorstep, said a word or two, and quickly left. The door shut and then the hilarity ensued. The walls are quite thin and we heard David go on about how the other day he apparently confounded us with his opinion of Jesus being a legend, not a myth or fact or anything. In actuality all he did was invite us to join his booster club and mention Jesus was a legend. We hear the most interesting things through walls after we leave a door, ha ha.  Some people's kids... 

So on Friday Elder Cole said he would bet two ties that it would not rain that day. Around 3:30 it started to rain a little bit. He refused to acknowledge that it was actually raining and said it was sprinkling. I told him that no one said, "hey sprinkle drops are falling!" No, everyone and their dog says, "rain drops are falling." So we took this tactic into our finding and began asking people if they thought it was raining or not. All I am saying right now is Elder Cole needs to pony up two ties. 

So Elder Cole REALLY hates bugs. He flips out if one comes near him. After church Elder Walker (our new zone leader) picked up a box elder bug (those things are like flies here, sooo many of them) and threw it at Elder Cole who was sitting in the car with his window down. Elder Cole flipped out in his seat. Oh man, so funny. I got the bug out of the car for him, dont worry.

Spiritual thought: I was reading in Jonah recently. The Lord called Jonah to do a great work, but Jonah rebelled and resisted. But the Lord is very merciful and allowed him to repent and then complete that same work. This is very comforting to me to know that as imperfect as I am, if I will repent and follow Christ that no matter how many times I mess up, the Lord will still allow me to complete the tasks he wishes me to complete.

I love all of you! Have a wonderful week! 

-Elder Damron

River Falls week 19

So this last P-Day was fantastic. Elder Cole and I stopped at a thrift shop and bought 6 classical Cds, including some celtic music we are stoked about, a CD player thing, and some super nice ties (which I got for 50 cents!). Then we went home and gave each other haircuts using some clippers a missionary who recently went home gave me. That was an interesting experience... Elder Cole has a bald patch behind one ear and I have this giant clump of hair on the crown of my head that Elder Cole totally missed. Ha ha. At Coordination Meeting our ward mission leader asked us where we got our haircuts. We told them we did it and he said oh ok. I was asking so I could stay clear of the place. ouch. The cuts aren't THAT bad...

I also  named my bike Shadowfax. Every time we are in a hurry I yell," With haste, Shadowfax!" Got to love Lord of the Rings. :)

ELder Cole and I were pretty sick this last week. He got sick last weekend and, being the kind companion he is, gave it to me. I almost had to stay in the apartment on 2 occasions but we had appointments so we went out. The appointments canceled and I put my head on a picnic table while Elder Cole made some calls. Every single lesson we had except 2 canceled this week. So that always makes for a really fun time. We tracted college areas and found some people we are looking forward to going back to see, but none of those meetings turned into a lesson. It also rained almost the entire week and all we do is bike, so that was pretty fun too. We tried to stick to some apartment buildings. THis week is supposed to be in the 70s, but then the snow is coming. The nights are getting quite cold and it gets dark around 7:15. People answer there door around 7:30 and complain that we are out so late. I look at my watch every time and say something along the lines of "it isnt late, it just seems like it because it gets dark so early..." 

I think Elder Cole and I will open up a maid service and start running it on P-Days. We got a referral from this nonmember to go talk to this lady with a lot of health issues. Well it turned into us cleaning her apartment, the apartment of someone she is a caretaker for, and now we get calls from random people saying they were referred from this woman for free labor. We love to help of course, but we also need to add to our teaching pool some how. We always help then return later to share a message. 

We were tracting a trailer park the other night and we met this man who had a few too many drinks. He proclaimed he was the mayor of the trailer park! Then he rambled something unintelligible about mormon temples and SLC. We meet some of the most interesting people tracting. 

Another time I was riding my bike and this man in a truck pulled up next to me and yelled at me," God doesn't love you!" I responded with,"but He loves you!" That wasnt the response he was expecting. 

Both Elder Cole and I both had some bike troubles this week. On the way to teach an investigator at the college campus I hit the brakes but then I hit a patch of mud and just kept going. I hit the curb of the sidewalk and flipped off my bike. It hurt a lot. My hip has a wonderful bruise. And of course everyone was staring at the strange boy in dress clothes who just hit the curb and flipped off his bike... Later that day Elder Cole had a bit of an accident. Elder Cole tends to get bored when he rides his bike. On this occasion he was trying to speed up, and hold himself up on his handle bars while dangling his feet below off of the pedals. Well you can imagine how that turned out. I looked forward to see him fall over and eat cement. His pants got ripped pretty bad and his leg started bleeding pretty bad. We went to a woman's house nearby whom we teach off and on and we patched him up. He cant bend his leg too well at the moment. 

While riding in the car Elder Cole told a delightful story: "My neighbors bought a cow and named it Steve. Then they butchered it and ate it." (Elder Cole's first name is Steven, just FYI) I died laughing. It reminded me of Anna Griffin's stories. So for those of you who havent had the opportunity to behold her marvelous story telling, I would suggest seeking her out.

One bright spot this week was teaching Brother D. We haven't been able to teach him much because he works inspecting water towers and travels all over the midwest. But he is so incredibly awesome. He practically taught us the message of the restoration through the questions he asked. He thinks that our message makes so much sense and he brings the BoM on his long trips to read in the hotels. Hopefully we can meet him more often than once every 3 weeks...

Well conference was pretty legit! 

I cannot say I had a favorite talk, because I have like 7 favorite talks, but two I really enjoyed were Elder Ulisses Soares on meekness. I have really been trying to seek this attribute out the last few weeks so I loved the talk. But man can he talk quick... I will need to re read that one. ha ha. I also LOVED Elder Quentin L. Cook's talk on bondage. I feel like I have been in "bondage" a lot in life with worldly things. Whether that was being glued to my iPhone at all times of the day or worshipping LeBron James and Peyton Manning every sundaynight. But the single greatest source of bondage in my life I think would have to be negativity. I need to follow the Lord's counsel, and commandment for that matter, Be of Good Cheer. Why should I always look at the negative when the Lord has given me so much? 

I also was delighted to hear Elder Holland talk on depression. I don't think people take it as seriously as it should be taken. 

A couple of themes I picked up on: missionary work tied with member work, role of women in society, cleansing power of the atonement, faith unto conversion, and chastity. 

I hope you all have a wonderful week! 

Love, Elder Damron