1/16/11

Hey hey hey! Ugh what a week! So my first fast sunday at church was pretty interesting. We challenged a few investigators to come to church and were worried none were coming and right as the service starts...Chester walks in with Brother Ranck! It was pretty awesome. He came and sat with Mouritsen, Jim and I. Roberta came too but i am not sure we are going to be able to baptize her. I guess she has been getting taught forever! So testimony meeting started out strong with some great heartfelt testimonies! I was so glad there were no wierd or stupid stories...but oh no... up walks this lady and gets up to talk and starts going off on how people keep judging her for not coming to church and with tears in her eyes tells us that she reads her scriptures and prays every night and said other stupid things. After that the meeting spiraled out of control with wierd testimonies. Mouritsen and I were trying not to laugh so badly! Ugh it was terrible. Towards the end i made a deal with Jim that we would go up together to bear our testimonies and he did it! He did great.! Chester loved church though! He gave comments in the classes and even got emotional hearing the testimonies of others. So Pday was super lame and boring like always but the worst part is that i found out i was going on EXCHANGES!!!!:P I had to go all the way out to Waynesboro which is a tiny little drug town abour 30 miles from Chambersburg. I had to go with Elder Curl for Monday night all the way to wednesday when we have district meeting. We got to go teach his and Harrison's investigators all of tuesday. They are pretty cool people but i really missed our investigators! I ate at this place called Waynesburger though and it is so good!!! So wednesday came around and it was definately good to be back with Elder Mouritsen. Elder Curl every chance he got would let EVERYONE know i am new and it drove me nuts! Plus he would never stop talking about himself! Ugh anyways wednesday night we went and met this family from an OYM we got and we didn't know what to expect. Long story short, their last name is Rivera and they are from Puerto Rico and are freaking awesome!!! The two sisters, Sonia and Dely moved over to the U.S. when they were like fourteen and they now have 3 kids(sonia) and 6 kids(Dely). We have only met Sonia's kids who are all boys, Richard, Edwin and Vincent. They are really cool though! They might come play basketball with us some nights. We want to go to some of their games though. They are really good! Our first time meeting with them we just focused on gaining their trust by just being friends and just sharing a short message with them. We have met with them twice now and so far they are all really interested! We meet with them tomorrow and are going to teach them how families can be together forever! So Chester had a big week! We started the Stop smoking program with him on saturday and so far it is going great! However, one of the parts of the program is drinking 100% grapefruit juice after every meal and we didn't know it was a natural laxative and he didn't either...He didn't come to church the next day... Hey at least he is pooping out all the nicotine!!:D So one of the days we were just walking downtown and saw a man staring at us like we were demons sent straight from Hell and we started going towards him and immediately just started screaming his head off yelling at us to GO AWAY!! It was so dang wierd! I love it though, every time we experience people like that, the next fifteen minutes is us imitating their voice or things they said to us:) We met a few Hatian guys and girls this week! They speak like seven languages! I honestly think that people that live in those places have the natural ability to learn languages. They are really cool though and somewhat interested in hearing our lessons. We actually almost got them to church this last sunday but no luck. We did get Philip though! He is one of our other investigators. Oh yeah we have nine progressing investigators right now! No big deal:) Well i have to keep this short because Mouritsen and I only have one computer:/ One thing that sucks though about our ward is that nobody signs up to feed us!! First of all we can't afford to feed ourselves and second of all how can we get refferalls if no one feeds us!! Yes i am accepting money donations for Elder Mouritsen and I:) Haha anyways have a great week everyone! The church is true! I love you:)

Oh ps for all who are wondering. No it isn't that cold. All my clothes are warm enough. Mom send me more t shirts cause i only have two. Um.. yeah no snow :(

1/9/12

Ok ok ok well hello everyone. It has been a very good week! Emphasis on the Very! First off i have been able to workout every morning with our limited weights we have but i have been able to get A LOT bigger! One of the investigators we are teaching is Tom and he is like 320lbs and like 6'6! I don't have any idea how Mouritsen or I will be able to baptize him! Anyone know if two people can baptize one?? But anyways he owns a nutrition shop so we buy all our protein powder stuff there. He gives us pretty good deals! I will start off with him though. Mouritsen and his former companion, Elder Stewart, had been teaching him for about two months and we were finally able to teach him again after the holidays. Brother Piercey came with us to teach him. He is a really fun guy to be around! For those of you who were wondering about the members, THEY ARE GRRRRREAT!!! They love to help us for the most part. We taught Tom about temples and why they are so important. We started by just briefly running over the plan of salvation and focused on where we are going after this life(the spirit world). He thought it was so awesome how we do temple work for those who didn't have the chance to be baptized and things like that. He is really close to his dad so the fact that he can be with him forever and the rest of his family. In the past Tom just liked learning about the Lds religion but didn't gain much from it. In this lesson that we taught him, he really came to an understanding of what was so special about our religion. We invited him to be baptized and he wants to!! Haha we still have so much to do so that doesn't mean to much but we will see what happens:)

Ok on to the next great investigator. Chester Fant is such a beast! He is a black guy, probably in his sixties, heavy smoker, really good guy though. We have been teaching him since i got here and he is probably my favorite investigator. He has really liked and accepted what we have taught him and it made sense to him that Christ would show himself to other nations, not just one. Everytime we invite him to read a chapter or two he always fulfills the commitments. We asked him to be baptized on January 28 and he said yes! Last week we invited him to church and he said yes! So yeah we are really excited:) We had Brother Rank go and pick him up...but no one was coming to the door and he wouldn't answer his phone... Yeah we were pretty bummed out but it happens.. We tried the next few days to get ahold of him but it was a no answer every time:/ We thought he might be avoiding us or that he was scared of these recent comitments but we really needed to talk to him. Thursday we decided we should just go to the house and here is what happened... We walked up to the door and knocked and there was no answer. We knocked again... no answer. We waited there for about five minutes but for some reason we just didn't move. We started to smell smoke and turned around to see his neighbor outside smoking. We were pretty discouraged and a little worried as to what might have happened to Chester. We started to leave but for some reason i felt like i should ask his neighbor if he knows Chester and he said no he has never met him.. At this point i am way confused!! So we start to walk back up the alley away from Chester's appartment and one more impression came to me.. Turn around.. Soo i did. And it was just at the point if i would have taken another step, Chester's area would have been out of sight. Because i stopped and turned around, i saw Chester walk around the corner going to his front door. We went to talk to him and he gladly let us in! We were able to find out he drank a little to much on New years eve and had a pretty bad hangover on sunday. He felt really guilty though and didn't feel right going but we quickly helped him realize that church is not a synagauge for saints but a hospital for sinners. This meeting was very important because we were able to teach Chester the Word of Wisdom which we hadn't done yet. Before we even talked about it, Chester talked about how he wished he could walk or ride his bike longer without getting short winded. He expressed how he wanted to quit smoking before we even taught the lesson!!!! Crazy right?!?! He said he would follow the word of wisdom though. Tomorrow we are going over again to start the stop smoking program with him:) God really does prepare the people we teach. So this is pretty long so i will wrap it up. We got a referral for these people that were a little different. This guy had been married once before and told us ALL about his first wife and about how happy he was with his second wife but how much he hates his family(how the gospel blesses family lesson was out of the picture). They started asking us about the trinity and we started to tell them it is God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost who are all seperate beings with bodies like us except the Holy Ghost but they are all one in purpose and he cut us off and started ranting about how they are just one person all in one. Let me tell you friends... I had to shut my mouth so hard and Mouritsen did too. We could have used so many scriptures but we just decided to move on. And then the wife cut in, thinking she is a genius said and i quote, " It just makes sense to me in the prayer of baptism, i baptize you in the name of the father AND the son AND the Holy ghost, that they are one person. That makes sense right??" Once again I had to keep my mouth shut. But of course i still love them:) Ugh we didn't get past the first part of the lesson which is God is our loving Heavenly Father. I asked if he had ever heard about Joseph Smith and he was like "boy i know more about the mormon church than you could ever imagine yourself to know". My response: Oh cool have you ever read the book of mormon and prayed about it? Of course he said no and i bore my testimony to him that trusting in the word of man will get him no where but trusting in the word of God...well then anything is possible. We just hurried and got out of there. Seed planted. Ugh great week though. There were more roses than thorns but still had to endure a lot! Yesterday came around and waiting at church we see Bert come in(a member's mom who has not been baptized but is one of our investigators). And right after Chester comes in! And then Jim, who is our recent convert! He is such a great guy! I will get a picture of him so you all can see:) I made a deal with Jim though that if i got up to bare my testimony he would have to go up with me and he did awesome! Geez this gospel is so awesome:) Everyone read your scriptures because "they will teach us all things what we should do." The church is true! I love you all:) Love Elder Rudd

Happy new year! So saturday we had to be in by six since its a holiday and they want to protect us from crazy drivers. At noon we went and taught Jacob who is an investigator we tracted into on friday. It really is amazing to see how willing some people are to learn more about the gospel. We taught him about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how important it is to know that we have a prophet here today that receives revelation for all of us. He took the lesson very well and is very excited to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. We even challenged him to baptism and he said yeah! Problem is though is that he just got put on probation for possesion of Marijuana but i know that with our faith things will work out for the good. Oh someone can't be baptized if they are on probation...Bummer right?! So anyways we had a dinner appointment with Ika and Leavitt at the Ohara's. We threw the football around for a little and went inside and watched the kids play video games. They live on a farm out a ways from the town so there is literally nothing to do out there. We finally ate and got home about seven and just hung out at our apartment. Ika and Leavitt stayed with us and we played chess, monopoly and talked about life. So Sunday I gave my first talk about the importance of studying the scriptures and i thought i did really good! I didn't even look at my paper during the talk! Yeah i was proud of myself:) The ward is awesome though. That night i ate at the Stake President's house and he had his huge family over for the New Year's dinnner. His name is President Hurley, he is a great guy. He does a lot of marathons and these fifty mile races. He is pretty hardcore, mom! So at dinner i experienced my first bad food experience.....Sourkraut.......It is the nastiest thing i have ever tasted! It literally tasted like throw up going back into my body! Mouritsen hated it too. We had mashed potatoes and roast beef though so that was very good:) It reminded me of sunday dinners at home so much! So that's about it! I hope everyone has enjoyed their holiday break! I love you guys! The Church is true! -Elder Rudd