Week 82

Hey guys!

Well, it's been a pretty good week. Transfer weeks are always crazy and there's lots of changes to get used to, but things are going okay. My companion is Elder Hansen. Not gonna lie, he's pretty weird. If I had to choose a Christlike attribute to work on this week it'd definitely be patience. But hopefully things are able to get better this week.

So Jeremy's doing super well! We had a lesson with him on Wednesday about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he pretty much committed himself to get baptized. He also came to church again on Sunday. His life is changing a lot in a really short amount of time, but he seems totally on board with it!

Everything else is going pretty well. We've had to drop a couple people for different reasons, but that just means we have room to find some more people who will progress better.

But I guess other than transfers, it's just been a pretty standard work. We did service out in Medora and at the food pantry, did some finding and had some lessons with members... nothing eventful enough to really talk about. So I guess that's about it, I hope you guys have a great week!

Elder Hart

1. These are the Dunbar kids, and this was probably the cutest thing I've seen on my mission so I had to get a picture with them!

2. They made me become a superhero and battle them after that, so that was a good time ;)

3. Here's me, Elder Richins, and Brother Biasco from last Monday! He's a fairly recent convert and he's just an awesome dude

Week 81

Hey guys!

I guess I'll just go ahead and start out by giving the transfer update: Elder Richins is heading to Bismarck to be AP and I'm staying here in Dickinson and getting Elder Hansen. I don't know Elder Hansen super well, but I've talked to him once or twice. He came out one transfer before me, so neither of us have too long left. I was sooo relieved when we got transfer calls! President said he was considering both of us to become the new assistant and I was praying super hard that it wasn't gonna be me :'D I'm sure it would have been fine either way, but I'm super excited to stay here in Dickinson for at least another transfer, and from what President said, possibly until the end of my mission! Elder Richins is pretty nervous, he's only been out for about 10 months and he feels super inadequate, but he's gonna do an awesome job. I'm really excited for him.

We've been able to do a lot of really good work this week. Three people we're teaching came to church yesterday, and there were probably six or seven nonmembers total there. We had Charles, Sam, and Jeremy there. You all know who Sam is pretty well by now, but I don't remember if I've said too much about Charles before, and you definitely don't know Jeremy cause I didn't even know him until last Friday.

Quick update on Sam first though: the man literally has no idea about anything we teach. We taught the Word of Wisdom last time but he smelled like alcohol pretty bad at church yesterday and I doubt he has any idea who Joseph Smith is, or really even Jesus Christ. So he's a big work in progress.

Charles has been investigating the Church for a while now, at least since a month or two before I got here. I'm not really super sure how the missionaries met him, but he's actually really interested in the Church and is pretty committed to getting baptized here pretty soon. He does have some Word of Wisdom issues holding him back, but we're starting the Stop Smoking Program with him next time and he's already doing a lot better at limiting himself. Yesterday was the first time he's been to church since I've been here, which is just another step in the right direction. Hopefully he's able to get baptized sometime in September.

The way we met Jeremy is a really cool story. We saw a less active lady pull some weeds on Thursday as we drove by her house, so we jumped out to help her for a few minutes. While we were over there, we got a text from Brother Rogers in the bishopric that the bishop from the other ward had just called him. He said that a guy named Jeremy had just randomly called him and told him about some pretty significant experiences he'd had during the past couple weeks and that he had a lot of questions and wanted some missionaries to come by his house to talk to him! Well that's definitely never happened to me before, so we really weren't sure how solid he'd be. We went by on Friday to meet with him and he turned out to be one of the most genuine people I've ever taught! He grew up attending church off and on, but he's been an atheist for most of his life and had never really planned on changing. But during this last month or two, he said that God has finally been able to 'awaken him', and he's felt really strongly like he needs to have a better relationship with the Lord. So we taught him the Restoration, which helped to answer a lot of his questions about religion in general, and gave him a Book of Mormon at the end. He told us yesterday that he's been reading it and he thinks it's really interesting. He also enjoyed church a lot yesterday, so I'm really hoping that he keeps progressing down the path he's on.

That's pretty much the teaching update for the week! We've had some pretty weird stuff going on these last few days with transfers, which has taken up a lot of our time. President decided to do a little pre-transfer type thing on Saturday, so there were four or five missionaries coming through Dickinson on the way to new areas, which we had to deal with all day. Elder Cliften and Elder Bowden (the missionaries in second ward) got pulled out since Elder Bowden went home on Thursday. They sent Elder Cliften off to Fargo early so that he can start getting used to his new area, so we're the only elders in Dickinson now. And they're replacing them with sisters at the transfer, so me and Elder Hansen are pretty much gonna be alone next transfer :/ I guess we'll see what we end up doing all day on P-days :'D

I'll let you guy know how transfers went next week!

Elder Hart

1. Me and Roger! He's the guy we used to help out doing landscaping and fencing out in Medora, but his last day was on Wednesday.

2. This is inside the little chateau in Medora; it's some old mansion type thing that an aristocratic family used to live in back in the 1800's. It's actually not that cool but I took a picture of it anyway 😂

3. The district!

4. Outside the chateau. That's supposed to be my rich face but it turned out terrible so you can just ignore it ;)

Week 80

Hey guys!

There's been a bunch of stuff that's happened here since last week. I guess the biggest one is that Elder Bagley is gone :( he packed up his bags on Monday night before we headed to zone conference on Tuesday (I'll talk about that in a second), and we were planning on leaving him in Bismarck when we headed back to Dickinson that night. But then we got a text from one of our investigators, Grant, who moved to Colorado saying that he was coming through town and he was really hoping to see Elder Bagley one more time before he headed home. So we talked to our mission president and he said it was alright if Elder Bagley came back to Dickinson with us on Tuesday night and then turned around and came straight back to Bismarck on Wednesday morning. That was a really good thing for Grant, and we were able to finish teaching him all of the lessons that he needs to be baptized! He wants to get baptized up here in Dickinson, so hopefully next time he's in town (which should be at like the end of this month or the beginning of September) we can get his baptism planned out. But anyway, we woke up at 5 on Wednesday morning to get Elder Bagley to Bismarck before his temple session started, and then we turned around and headed right back to Dickinson. It's been kinda weird without him, but it's been going really well!

We taught Sam the Word of Wisdom on Saturday with Sister Rogers, who speaks Spanish. We also gave him a blessing that he'd have the strength to be able to live it, and he says that he's willing to do his best. He also promised that he'd do better at reading the Book of Mormon, so we're hoping that he's able to start progressing faster. He's still on date for August 24th, but it's pretty unlikely that he'll make it because his comprehension levels are so low. We still need to figure out how to teach him more simply.

We were really close to just dropping Floyd last week, but he showed up to church yesterday and had a really spiritual experience there. He was asking all kinds of questions after church about how he can become a member, and he even called us a couple hours later during studies and asked some more questions. The sisters have a baptism tonight and he said that he'd come to that and see what it's like! He's actually changed a lot since we first met him, so I've still got some hope for him.

It's been a little tough to contact all the other people that we're teaching for different reasons, but everybody seems to be doing pretty well. I'm hoping that we're able to have a baptism pretty soon.

That's about it, have a great week guys!

Elder Hart

1/2. We did some service at the Lutheran Church for a member who was putting on a concert there. I'm not sure if the second one is disrespectful or not but I thought it was funny 😂

3. We also did some service collecting tickets at the racetrack on Saturday. That was pretty fun!

Week 79

Hey guys!

This has been a pretty eventful week. I'm not sure if we had too much success or not, but we were busy every day, which made the week go by pretty fast. The highlight was probably on Thursday and Friday when we took a big road trip across our whole area to hit all the little towns that we cover. We usually can't make it out there much, so we decided to plan a couple days where we could make it around to all of them at once.

We started out by heading down to Regent, which is a little town of like two hundred people. The only people we made contact with there were a less active family that lives a couple miles outside of town on a farm. It turns out they have a couple kids who are unbaptized, and their mom seems interested in us teaching them over technology, so hopefully we're able to do that! We only had one or two other people to stop by in Regent, and none of them were home.

We went down to Hettinger after that, which is a little bigger than Regent -- maybe like fifteen hundred people. An active family had been planning on feeding us that day, but they ended up needing to go down to a big county fair the town was having and it wasn't able to work out, but that was alright. I don't think we got in contact with anybody we were hoping to talk to in Hettinger, probably because they were all down at the county fair.

We stopped in Scranton for a minute after Hettinger -- yep, there's a Scranton, North Dakota. But it's nothing like Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I don't think they filmed any of The Office there at all so that was kinda a disappointment. But we did get some pretty dang good pizza from the little restaurant they had there, so that was good.

We went and stayed the night with the Eyrings in Bowman after that. They're an older couple in the ward, and they spoiled us like crazy the whole time we were there! It almost felt like being at my grandma's house or something like that. We had a really good time with them. In the morning we went out and did some service for Carl, one of our investigators, on his ranch. He's pretty much the main reason we went out there in the first place, because he's so close to baptism! Pretty much all he needs to do is set a date and make it up to Dickinson so that we can get it done. All we did on his ranch was move some cattle into a different pasture and finish setting up an electric fence. Then we taught Carl a quick lesson and went over with him to check out the Hiatts' bee farm. The Hiatts are some more members of the ward that own like twenty thousand beehives, and when they found out we were going to be down in Bowman they told us to come take a tour of their facility with Carl. That place was crazy! We had to walk through this huge cloud of bees to even get into the warehouse, which was kinda scary, but Elder Richins was the only one that ended up getting stung all day. There was so much honey in that warehouse, it was ridiculous. If anybody's ever seen the Bee Movie, that's pretty much what this place reminded me of. Carl had a really good time there and it helped him to get to know some of the members of the ward better, so we were really glad it was able to work out. We had lunch with the Hiatts after that and tried a few more people around Bowman before we left to head back towards Dickinson.

We stopped in a couple other little towns on the way back and talked to some people, but I've already talked enough about that trip. Today is Elder Bagley's last day with us before he gets ready to head home later this week. We have zone conference tomorrow in Bismarck, so we're just going to drop him off there. He's been pretty sad about leaving, and  he's definitely been working pretty dang hard before he heads out. That's been both a blessing and a curse in some ways. We've definitely spent lots of time looking for new people, but the thing he enjoys the most and is most used to is knocking on random doors, which is not very productive and is something the mission is trying to move away from. I didn't try to stop it since it's his last week, but we didn't end up finding any new people to teach last week, and we're kinda disappointed about that. I think if we'd been a little more creative and used our time more productively, we could have found at least a couple. But we'll do better this week and hopefully make up for our lack of success.

Anyway, that's about all I've got this week. See you guys later!

Elder Hart

1. The Hiatts' honey farm

2. A kitten I made friends with at the less active family's farm in Regent

3. If you've never seen any of The Office you won't get this at all but that's alright

4. Me, Elder Bagley, and Elder Holder doing some service on exchanges