River Falls Week 1

So I arrived in Minnesota wednesday! We met the mission president and had interviews and some orientation and then we met our trainers and headed to our areas. And my first area is River Falls... Wisconsin. Im not even in Minnesota ha ha. Oh well. So I am in quite the unique situation. For one thing, I am actually 13 days older than my trainer. He has also only been out just over 4 months. For the second thing, we are white washing this area. Meaning, they sent two missionaries with no prior experience of the area to the area to serve. WE actually opened up this area, we are the first missionaries to serve here in awhile. So this is cool, but it creates quite a difficult place for a brand new missionary because when you open up a new area you have no contacts and all you can do is that one most fun and desirable activity: tracting. yep. we tract basically all day every day. I do not have a strong like for tracting and thursday,friday, and saturday were quite miserable for me in that regard. But sunday i prayed quite fervently to have the strength and confidence to get over myself and go out there and enjoy it. and Sunday was such a marvelous day! We tracted a good 4-5 hours, met some cool people (we met this Filipino girl named Alma. She is catholic and didnt reallly care for our message but she was like, "Yes i know i share the name of one of your chapters", it was pretty funny), got some doors slammed, and the whole works. but i was surprisingly ok with it. The whole "Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith" idea is what keeps me going. Elder Seargent, one of our zone leaders, told me he whitewashed an area 3 months into his mission and he said he never worked so hard in his entire life and that that was the hardest he worked his whole mission. So it is kinda tough for me to start out being trained and whitewashing, but i realized i prayed for the Lord to help teach me how to work and how to have patience quite a few times in the MTC. So the Church is true everyone, prayers are answered. ha ha

So we also visit less active members. Elder Berg, my trainer, and I drove out (we have a car :) ) about 20 minutes to find this guy named Devrin. Well the gps told us to turn one drive way too early (this was farm country and the driveways went back quite a good distance into trees and whatnot, we couldnt see any houses) and so we drove up about 7 minutes. at one point i said "we should go back, there arent any houses up here". Elder Berg was like "lets just go a little further". well we did. and what happened? We got stuck in the mud. and of course he is the designated driver so i had to get out and push the car. i got mud all over me. blah. anyway, so the car wasnt moving so i broke some tree branches and put them under the tires to create friction so the car could move. it worked! The car moved back a couple feet... into more mud and we got stuck again. after about 20 minutes a car drove up and a man got out. he just stood there pretending not to notice us for about 5 minutes and then he walked over to us. i apologized and said our GPS was being dumb and we were looking for a boy named Devrin. he told us devrin was one house down, and he helped us get out of the mud and leave. he seemed quite irritated. i guess i would be too if i went to check on my land and two teenagers were stuck in some mud.. ha ha. but he was an answer to a prayer. no sooner did we get back on the main road when it started to pour rain. had we still been up there in the mud, we would never have gotten out. 

So now i will backtrack a little. When i boarded the plane for Minnesota, a man walked up to me and asked who we were. He then said it was nice to see such fine looking boys and girls in the world and noted how we stood out so much in the crowd, he then said it was quite sad that we stood out as much as we did. I agreed with him. I then got to talking to him a little. Turns out he lived in Montana for quite a few years so we talked about that and then before i boarded the plane, i gave him an "I'm a Mormon" card and told him if he wanted to know why we stood out so much, to go look at that website. it felt good.

Back to now. so my companion sleep talks quite crazily. like i mean full blown conversations in his sleep. i woke up the first night and thought he was on the phone it was so loud and real. i awoke last night to him laughing in conversation with someone then he said something about talking to them later. it is quite amusing.. haha

so while tracting our first day we met this boy named Cody. He recently got out of jail where he found Jesus. The instant we said we brought a message of Christ he stood straight up and just ate up everything we said. We will meet with him again tomorrow and he is a very promising investigator. the desire to learn and find truth in his eyes was remarkable. We also committed him to baptism. Another man we met is Andy. Andy is in his 60s and we walked up his driveway and talked to him in his garage. He is sort of catholic and knew most of what we taught him but he said that he was a bad bad man and there was no hope for saving him. we taught him the restoration and bore testimony that the atonement could cleanse anything he had ever done and he could be clean. We said a prayer with him and left. But i will never forget his face, i know for a fact the spirit touched that man because he was rattled to the core with the truth of the message we brought. he has a very busy work schedule but Elder Berg and I are determined to get back and teach him.

We have also been teaching a man named Jeremy, the zone leaders gave him to us because before we arrived they would travel the 20 minutes to our town and teach every once in awhile but since we are here now we can teach him. So Jeremy is late 40s, tattoos, earings, smokes, and the whole works. he has been studying religions for quite some time. He has studied basically every religion you can think of and some you would never think of. the last religion he seriously studied was Wiccan. anyway, we taught him the restoration and we brought up Christ but he does not believe Christ was perfect. He said that is impossible. We will have to work on that. So we went back saturday to teach him and his girlfriend, who lives in a half way house but visits him once a week. we taught her the restoration, and i committed her to baptism. she said if she knows it is true she will get baptized. Her and Jeremy are going to make the decision together, but i think it is all looking pretty promising. well, Wanda has a sincere desire to find out for herself. Jeremy is still a skeptic but hopefully we can get through that.

Well that has pretty much been my five days in Wisconsin. We are actually staying in a member's home, the Taylors. they gave up their master bedroom so that they could house missionaries! They are in their early 60s probably and super sweet and kind. its a pretty nice gig. but also kind of awkward. our zone leaders live with another member of our ward but he travels to Europe a lot and is rarely home. so they basically live in this mansion by themselves. its pretty legit.

Anyway, my excitement to be out here is growing. the MTC was a cakewalk compared to this and I expected the mission to be difficult but not in this way. the physical demands have not hit me, mainly because we have a car, but the mental toughness required is unlike anything i have every before run in to. My companion is a perfect match for me, he is extremely bold and loves to tract. I have always been uncomfortable talking to random people, let alone teaching religion and committing them to baptism after 5 minutes of knowing them. But through the strength of Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father all things are possible. The phrase "forget yourself and go to work" is so trite when talking about missions but so true. We are commanded to spread this wonderful gospel, it is one of the most important things we can do. So I'm happy to be our here. 

Have a good week everybody, Elder Damron :)