September 23, 2019

I went swimming ?!?!

Well not a whole lot happened this week so this definitely may be a shorter email. 

I had my first zone conference in the mish which was pretty fun. We drove up to Salina Tuesday night and spent the night with the ZL's there. There were about 8 other missionaries spending the night there as well so we had lots of fun that night. Zone conference on Wednesday was amazing. It was nice to have a break from normal missionary work and to have a bunch of trainings and receive lots of revelation. Whenever missionaries get together for trainings or anything really we never call it a meeting. I think it was Elder Bednar who said we should call them revelatory experiences so that's what we do here! It really changes my perspective on the purpose we're meeting. We had interviews with our mission president right after zone conference so that made for a long day. It was all super fun tho. Elder Grassi and I just jam out on the drives there. If anyone needs a banger church approved playlist, we've got ya covered. Also we stopped by this really big egg in Wilson on our drive back from zone conference so there's that

Nothing else too exciting happened except for yesterday. Ya boi got a baptism. We've been working with Joe for a little bit and it was awesome to see him enter the waters of baptism. Joe is a pretty big dude so when I baptized him he made a pretty big splash and I'm pretty sure I was completely covered in just as much water as he was... Which was unfortunate because the water was literally about 113 degrees... The bishop told us to just use hot water the whole time and not switch to cold so we did, and when I got in I just looked up at Elder Grassi told him how hot it was and he thought that was pretty funny. He wouldn't've been laughing if he had to get in it. This water was literally hotter than any hot tub I'd ever been. It made for a pretty funny baptism. 

I was feeling nice last night so I made dinner for my comp and the sisters who live down the street from us and we all sat on our porch and ate Sunday dinner together which was nice. 

Well I think that's all I've got for this week... My emails are starting to look like my brothers... Hopefully some crazy stuff happens this week. Apparently, September is tornado season so we'll see about that... I hope everyone has a fantastic week. Remember to always rely on our Savior Jesus Christ!

Elder Nixon

September 16, 2019

I stole $300?!?!

Well sorry to those of you who just look at missionary emails for the pictures because this week I have very few pictures :/ Oh well, everyone knows my emails have the best content.

Tuesday we went up to Barton Community College for a bible study, which I thought would be fun, but boy it was not. They started reading from the bible, and I looked at what it said in my bible and they were completely different so that was awkward. I looked at my companion and just whispered "that ain't the bible we used in the MTC..." We got a good laugh out of that. Come to find out that it was a Baptist bible study so that was a good time. 

We were driving down to Wichita for some meetings, and I saw a super weird road sign so I asked my comp about it, and apparently there's a town here called Yoder I think, and it's an Amish community which explained the sign. I wanted to pop in and see what was up, but we didn't :( 

Now to address the title of my email. On Friday we were visiting one of our investigators, Joe, who was supposed to get baptized yesterday (more details to come later), and he asked us if we could go to Walmart for him and pick up some money from his roommate Chris for rent. We agreed and went to Walmart. It took us a while to find Chris, and I noticed that it was a little after four when we found him. I knew Joe would probably be at work by the time we got back to his house, so I messaged him on facebook and asked if we should leave the money with their other roommate. He didn't respond, and then Elder Rowley (we were on exchanges at the time) needed to grab a few things from Walmart, so we did that. We got back in the car and drove to a members house to visit them. About thirty minutes later, I felt my phone buzz, and looked at it. It was a message from Joe that just said "yes" answering the question of if I should give the money to their other roommate. I had completely forgot I had the money in my pocket! We quickly left and drove right over to Joe's house to drop off the money. Come to find out, Joe had the day off of work, so that was fun to explain how I went to Walmart, picked up 300 dollars for him, and then five minutes later, completely forgot I had it. It was pretty embarrassing. 

Like I mentioned earlier we were on exchanges Friday to Saturday. Well somehow Elder Grassi and Elder Winkel switched up their MSF cards (our mission debit cards) while in Hays. So Saturday night we had to drive back up to Russell so they could get their debit cards back. On the way up we were going about 70 and a deer jumped out in the road. Elder Grassi slammed his breaks and all but threw me out of my seat. We missed the deer by probably no more than about two inches. While a brand new car would have been nice, we were definitely grateful we didn't hit the deer. 

So now onto yesterday. The whole week we kept making sure Joe was good for his baptism, he kept saying he was, but we kept putting off making the programs, and figuring all the details out. Once we knew he was solid we printed off all the programs, asked people to talk, pray, sing, etc, and we were good to go. Sunday morning we were literally on our way out of the house, with baptismal clothes packed, and we get a message from Joe that said "Hey can we reschedule my baptism to next week?" We both just looked at the message, and I gave quite possible the biggest REEEEEEE of my life. If you don't know what a REEEEE is then that is unfortunate. So we called him and he told us he was in the hospital because he had some awful chest pain. He had to get x rays, and some other scans so that was a big bummer for us not gonna lie. We were able to go and see him later, and he was doing better which was good. He told us this morning he had all his clothes set out and ready to go when he got the pain and had to go to the hospital. We're planning on doing it next week now instead. 

During Sacrament meeting I had to give a talk on the Come Follow Me for the week which was on 2 Corinthians 1-7. While preparing for the lesson I came across a video called The Will of God. I ain't tryna give any spoilers away, so just go watch it for yourself. You won't regret it. 

Sunday night we watched the face to face event, which was super cool and then visited with the senior mission couple for a little. We still needed to find some new people to teach, so we just went knocking. It honestly sucked pretty bad. We just kept getting yelled at for coming by so late, even though it was like 8:30... I wish I could say this had a happy ending to it, but it doesn't. We just spent all night getting yelled at lol.

Well, all is well out here in Great Bend. I love it here. The church is true everyone. I can promise you that. 

Elder Nixon

September 9, 2019

I got attacked?!?!

Well folks it's been another fine and dandy week here in Great Bend. Honestly not a whole lot has happened this week. 

Umm the first thing is that during my study time I was reading in Mosiah 18, and if you've ever really studied that you would know that Alma baptized himself and boy did I get a laugh out of that when I read it. It literally says that when he baptized the first guy he also buried himself in the water and then clarifies that for the next baptism he doesn't bury himself. I would highly suggest reading it. 

Next thing I wanna write about is a few of the miracles we've seen while finding. There have been two days this week where we were trying so hard to find people and both days we just couldn't. We were gonna call it quits around 8:50, but I remembered reading in one of my friends emails how important it is to work to 9, so I said let's just knock one more street. We did and at the eleventh hour we found someone! This dude literally told us he was in the middle of a faith crisis and was seeking answers. Boy were we able to help. We taught him so much, but unfortunately he's going out of town for like two weeks so that kinda sucks. 

The second guy we found was actually almost the exact situation. We were knocking in this creepy part of town and the same thing happened. This dude is like 25 and just ready to learn so we're definitely seeing miracles out here. 

This week I had the opportunity to help not one, but two crazy cat/hoarders. The first one we helped was moving so we took that opportunity to throw away a bunch of her stuff. She didn't even notice. The second one we helped was just trying to get back inside her house. Apparently it's so full in there she can't get in anymore so she lives in a tent on her property. We had to use a bunch of bug bombs, which are exactly what they sound like, in order to not get eaten alive. 

I don't remember if I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but we found that guys wallet and returned it to him. He dropped off the face of the planet and then when were helping the second lady move, we saw him so we went and said hi. The dude was clearly high which made for an interesting conversation. After he left the lady we were helping told us to stay away from him because he's one of the drug mules for the biggest drug dealer in Kansas. And that's how I learned Great Bend is the meth capital of Kansas! 

There's this member here who I think I've talked about before but honestly I don't know. Anyway this dude is hard core. But he asked if he could show me some of his moves. I said yes and then realized he meant he was gonna do his moves on me. He told me to fight back but it was just really weird. You'll see what I mean in one of the pictures. 

Last thing I've got for this week is Sacrament meeting. We were able to get an investigator to come to church which was AWESOME, BUT apparently the Bishop here forgot to assign speakers so after the sacrament he got up and spoke for about 15 minutes and then ended sacrament meeting, which I didn't think he could do, but they do it different out here in Kansas. Well instead of us all going home he wanted to do a 30 minute singing time with the whole congregation, half of which were never in primary, so they knew none of the songs. Anyway so that's what we did. We sang primary songs for a half hour and then had to explain all that to our investigator. Thankfully he's cool and didn't mind it, but it was just so weird. I was laughing the whole time. 

Well I'm loving it out here in Kansas. This truly is the best mission in the world so for all you hoping to serve, pray you get called to the best mission in the world. The Kansas Wichita mission

Elder Nixon

September 2, 2019

I got a KNIFE pulled on me?!?!

Well honestly, I don't feel like a whole lot happened this week, but my email will probably still be long... oh well. 

Tuesday morning Elder Grassi was eating a bag of cheetos and it asked how tall you were in cheetos and then told us that 21 cheetos is 3.5 feet so from there we figured 42 cheetos was 7 feet and we concluded the ratio was that 1 cheeto was 2 inches. From there it was pretty easy. I'm 5'10" so I knew i was 70 inches tall which made me 35 cheetos tall. We did it for all the missionaries the great bend area and just laughed for like 10 minutes once we were done. 

Things picked up for the week on Thursday when we went on exchanges with the Zone Leaders. We met them in Ellseworth and then I went with Elder Josselyn up to Salina. As we got to talking I asked where he was from and how long he'd been out. The basics ya know. I kid you not, this Elder was from American Fork and he knows my older brother. It was the craziest thing. Anyway, we spent most of the day tracting, and we both decided to go knock these town homes. We ended up meeting like three people which was incredible for their area. Later that night we had to run to target with the Spanish elders serving there so they could get some stuff. We made a stop by the electronics and they had an ipad out for display, so naturally we went on to the voice recorder app and erased all the recordings and then recorded our own which was just the restoration in two minutes. I don't know why, but I thought it was pretty funny. 

Once I got back to Great Bend, Elder Grassi and I had to drive up to Hays to give a baptismal interview. We get to this guy's house and we're like hey we're here to give the interview and he was like um okay well I only have like 5 minutes so can you do it fast. The interview isn't supposed to be a fast interview, but we were not about to wait until 7pm when he had more time. Even in the five minutes you could just tell this guy was super solid. 

Saturday was a pretty wild day. There was a wedding at the church and I won't go into too much detail, but let's just say neither of the people getting married was very active in the church and their friends definitely weren't members. The bishop had to keep asking people to stop taking pictures and hooping and hollering and all sorts of stuff. It was definitely an unorthodox wedding. Later on Saturday we were tracting and it was getting pretty late, but we were just grindin’ and I looked on my area book and saw an area that was pretty dry so I suggested we go over there. I had a distinct impression to go down a certain street so we did. Right around 9 when it was quittin time we knocked on a door and I looked at Elder Grassi and just said This is the one Elder. The guy who opened it was pretty chill. I asked him if he knew about the Book of Mormon and he said he'd seen the musical. It was a good start honestly. He let us in and he just opened up right away to us. He said that he was going through a faith crisis and he was just looking for the truth. Little does he know we have it. Unfortunately, he's going out of town for like two weeks so that kinda blows but we are definitely gonna follow up on that. 

Sunday's here are really weird because if you try to go tracting it never works because no one opens the door. And I mean no one. So normally we just visit with members. Well we went and met with this guy Jamie who is a straight baller. Well we go knock on his door and it opens very fast and Jamie is standing there with a knife in his hand ready to attack us.  He used to be a prison guard and apparently like two inmates have tried to break into his house and kill him so whenever someone knocks when he isn't expecting it, he swings it open, knife in hand. We talked with him for a while and he told us how he trains and all that. This dude is wild. He literally punches the bark off of trees. Unfortunately, he couldn't do it for me then because of his health but he said he'd do it later and that I can video it. There was one point in the conversation where this dude has a machete in both hands and he is literally fighting himself and as he does that he's explaining to us what is going through his head and it was soooo funny. I wasn't about to laugh though because this guy could probably kill me a million different ways. 

Also I was buying sticky notes at a store called Dillon's so we could leave nice notes everywhere and the lady asked me if I had a Dillon's card, which would give me a discount, and I told her no because I don't. Then Elder Grassi stopped me and did something that made me lose my mind. He took out his white handbook and on the back cover there is a bar code and he asked the lady to scan it. She did and the discount totally worked. I was mind blown. He told me the owner of Dillon's is a member and that you can use the bar code from the white handbook, a Book of Mormon, or any of the pamphlets we use to teach. It was truly life changing

Well that's all I got for ya this week. I want to leave y'all with a quote. I think it was D. Todd Christofferson who said it, but I have no idea when. He says, "God will always love you, but can He trust you?" I would encourage everyone to do all they can to always have God's trust no matter what it may take. You have never sunk lower than the light of Christ reaches. You can always repent and come unto Christ. Sometimes it may feel like we've hit rock bottom, but guess what? Jesus lets us hit rock bottom so that we can discover that He is the rock at the bottom.

  

August 10, 2019

Cool Story

I wanted to write to all of you and tell you a cool story that happened here. The other night the guys in my room and Elder Bee, who sleeps in the other room, were talking and one of the Elders asked if someone comes and gets you when you die, and I had remembered reading a story once in Grandpa Chester's journal about when Louis died and how he lost his voice, but he told Grandpa Chester that someone was there to get him. If you guys don't know that story is you should definitely read it. It's on like page 26 of his journal. Anyway, I finished reading it, and the spirit that was in our room was undeniable. We all like had chills and stuff. We all just sat there like what just happened. It was amazing. Definitely a testimony to all of us in the room that the church is true.

August 26, 2019

There were brown recluse spiders everywhere!! My comp got bit?!?!

First things first. My new mailing address is 2101 31st street Great Bend Kansas 67530

Man alive what a week. I gotta write about a few funny things I did before leaving the MTC just in case nothing funny happened once I got out here. I didn't want to disappoint everyone. A few days before I left, me and another Elder in my district wanted to have an ice cream sandwich eating competition so naturally we did. We both skipped dinner since it was gross and just started on ice cream sandwiches. I think I ate around 13 or 14, but honestly, I can't remember. It feels like so long ago. Needless to say, I won that and I made the other Elder throw up. The scary part is I was like not even phased by it. Like I felt a little sick later into the night, but I was feeling great right after it happened, so that concerned me a little, but I'm all good now. 

So, on Tuesday I left the MTC at like 6:45 am and made my way to the airport. I'll spare y'all the boring details. You're welcome. Anyway, I got to Wichita around 6pm I think. We were met by the AP's and President Ernst. They took us to the mission home where Sister Ernst had dinner waiting. We had some training and then we got to ask the AP's tons of questions while President held interviews. We were told stories of miracles that just made me excited to serve, and to see miracles like that happen for myself. We spent the night at the AP's apartment which was pretty wild. There was just a lot of Elders and not a whole lot of space. The next day we had to sit through more training and safety stuff. We got warned multiple times about bed bugs which I didn't actually know were a real thing... They're nasty little buggers. We were assigned our new companions and our areas, and then we were sent out with different missionaries while our trainers got some training. My new comp is named Elder Grassi and he's from Dallas Texas. Me and him get along just great which is a huge blessing. He is a super cool dude. Love him to death. We are serving in Great Bend Kansas, which is a pretty big area. 

One thing I've noticed about this area is that it is super hard to get people to come to church. The ward boundaries are 100 miles north to south, and 60 miles east to west. So, some people have to drive quite a while to get to church. We're making it work though. 

One of the first few people I met here is named Mark. He lives in a pretty run down house with his sister Chris in Larned Kansas. He was excommunicated a while back for some stuff, but is being rebaptized in October! Mark and Chris are originally from Paraguay, so they're super big into maté. So here I am in the middle of Kansas, sitting in this run down house drinking maté just like I was in Argentina! It was pretty wild. The mate he made was nothing special, but it was loaded with sugar which made it taste just a little better, but after a few sips the sugar was gone. I didn't want to be rude, so I just had to force myself to drink it. Hopefully he doesn't make it for us again...

So every Thursday we go into Larned, and it literally rained the whole day. We didn't have a car, so it only seemed fitting that it rained on my first full day in my area. My white shirt took a beating, but I'm sure it'll was out... Hopefully you can see it in the picture.

Saturday was one of the craziest days I've had here so far. We drove out to St. John to do some service for an older lady in the ward. She is your classic horder/ cat lady. I'd bet she had around 20-25 cats living in her house. We had to clean out her garage because there was cat poop everywhere and then scrape down the walls in her house. We were warned as we were cleaning the garage that there were brown recluse spiders everywhere, and boy they weren't kidding. Anything you moved had spiders in and around it. I went to move a leaf of a table and after I set it down, I realized there was a spider right next to my arm. It scared me half to death. If you don't know, I'm very allergic to cats, so I was not having a good time. We all had on like doctor’s masks and latex gloves to help. As we cleaned more, we had to start putting the cats in cages. Well these cats didn't exactly want to go into cages. Elder Grassi tried to grab one, and it started flailing and screaming for lack of a better work. I looked over and just saw latex glove pieces flying in the air from where the cat had torn them to shreds. In order to escape, the cat had to bite Elder Grassi twice before he finally let go. They were mean little cats. We finally got everything cleaner, and this lady was only allowed to keep four cats after we were all done. We got back into town and there was an absolute bonkers storm. We were on tornado watch, which means the weather is perfect for a tornado, and then around 9 we went on tornado warning which means there is a tornado and we're supposed to go directly to our safe spot. Well we figured out that we don't have a safe spot. Thankfully nothing happened. I was a little mad it came at night because I couldn't see anything. It was honestly a fitting ending for the day. 

Another guy I met is named Joe Hernandez. He was taught by the other Elders who were here, but is totally ready for baptism. We went over and visited him once, and I invited him to be baptized, and he said yes! I'm praying he follows through. 

The last person I wanna write about is Bree. The missionaries who were here before were working very hard with her. She got pregnant at 16, and has the cutest little daughter now. She's 17 now and we have her on date to be baptized sometime in September. We always have scripture study with her, and it's so cool to get insight from non members on the Book of Mormon. 

Well I guarantee I'm forgetting something, so maybe you'll get a little more from me later, but if not, the church is true. Hoorah for Israel. 

Hopefully by now everyone has figured out my comp got bit by a cat and not a spider lol.