October 17, 2016 Birfdays and Blessings

First off, I wanted to clarify a little about my email last week.  In no way did I mean to say that my ward here in Rapid stinks.  This ward is awesome!  I love serving here, and I love the people in this ward.  But the issue is universal.  Most of the people that I mentioned that we tracted into that had friends that were LDS were out of town.  I just wanted to make that clear!

This week has just been amazing and full of blessings and miracles!  First off, right when we finished emailing last week we went shopping, and while we were in line, a man came up to us and told us he was going to buy our groceries.  He was a member of the church visiting Rapid from Mesa, Arizona I believe.  That was a great blessing!  I hope he and his family had fun here and were able to travel home safely.  Second was how we found the C family.  E. Bone and I prayed about where we should tract and we felt like we should go to 2 specific streets right next to each other. When we knocked these streets we found 1 potential on each streets. One was this family that was very nice to us and said to try back another day cause they were just sitting down for dinner.  The other was a guy who we set up a return appointment with us for about a week later.  We tried them a few times, but had no luck. Then, when we went for the follow up visit with that guy, he told us he just didn't really care to hear our message. We felt like we should go try the family now, since we were in the neighborhood, so we walked over, knocked, they opened and seemed very excited and let us right in. It went awesome!  It's a mom, dad, and a 15 year old daughter.  They drilled us with questions.  What is a missionary, what do we do, why are we doing it, how long do we do it, where are we from, etc. etc. etc.  We were there for about 45 minutes just answering question after question, then when we felt we should let them get back to their night, we invited them to take the missionary lessons.  They seemed pretty interested in it, so we set up a return appointment, and they offered to feed us dinner. 

When we came back, we were able to teach them the Restoration.  We would teach part of it, ask a question to gauge their understanding, they understood it perfectly and would always finish it with "That actually makes a lot of sense."  As we continued teaching the Spirit filled the room.  It was so exciting, cause they were just soaking it up!  When we invited them to read and pray about the Book of Mormon, they were all for it, especially the mom.  She loves to read, so she was all for reading a new book.  We're going back tomorrow, and I can't wait to teach them the Plan of Salvation.  They are just so ready and prepared!  They are probably some of the most Christlike people I've met in a long time.

My birthday was great!  Thanks you all for your loving Birthday wishes!  They made my day!  We had dinner at the Wilbur's home and the Worsley's came and they through me a little party.  They smoked some brisket and ribs, and man, was it good.  Couldn't have asked for more.  And, go figure, they didn't make a cake!  They made brownies!  I don't think they knew I don't like cake, but it worked out perfectly.  I had a blast! 

That's about all the time I've got for this week, but It was an awesome week!  I'm loving it in Rapid!  Love you all and miss you tons.  Hope all is well back home!

Elder Carter V

Ah!  How did I forget this!  I got to go to Nebraska on exchanges, and we got to go visit the Blassingills in Hay Springs!  That was such a blast from the past!  I taught them when I was serving in Gordon.  They're the ones that would not only feed us when we came over, but would stock us up with food to last us a good couple days.  I love them so much!  Pretty much all of them asked me "When did you get back?!" and sadly, I had to say "I'm not back, just here for the day."  But, the other Elders are gonna start teaching them again.

October 10, 2016 The Essential Role of Member Missionary Work

Here's the updates.  No word from J, and almost nothing from C this week, but we did get to see H for a few minutes.  I can't remember if I talked about L yet, but she is this cute little old Native lady that missionaries had taught in the past, so we decided to contact her.  Two weeks ago, we taught her the Plan of Salvation, and she just loved it.  When we came back yesterday, she had a bunch of questions for us, and we were able to answer them as we taught the Restoration, and once again, she just loved it.  The Spirit was so strong in that lesson!  Elder Bone and I taught totally unified for the first time since we've been together!  She just grasped on to what we taught, and it all made sense to her.  She asked all the right questions, and seemed to truly find peace in the things we taught her.  It was an absolutely grand experience.

As for the rest of the week, lets just say my legs were soar some nights.  We did a lot of walking and knocking doors, and found almost no success doing so.  Having said this, I want to impress on your minds the essential role that member missionary work plays in the Church, but also that this should apply to all people, whether they be a member of this church or a member of any other Christian denomination or faith.  The Lord called His Apostles to spread the Gospel to all the world.  That commandment (for so it is) is a commandment for us today.  If anything, we should feel a greater need to keep this commandment now by sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ because we know that His Second Coming is just around the corner!  The time is almost upon us, and we have no time to waste!  We should desire to bless the lives of all we see right now, not postpone it till a stranger has to knock on their door and try to help them understand the importance of their message in a few brief seconds before the door is closed in their face.

As members of the LDS church, we have been reminded time and time again of this commandment, and yet many of us still don't get it.  This is not a new mandate.  It is ancient, and it's importance has been revealed to us again today in such clear terms as "It becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor".  This is what the Lord has told us at the start of this dispensation, nearly 180 years ago, and every prophet since has reminded us of it.  Just last week we were once again taught the importance of it in General Conference.  Now is the time that we need to repent of this!  Seek the will of the Lord as you strive to share your testimony with your friends!  Pray for the gift of discernment that you may know what to say and when to say it, to not miss your opportunity, but also being patient and not jumping the gun.  Pray for the faith to act on the promptings the Spirit will give you. 

I'm sure you can figure out what inspired this rant.  It is because we have spent so much time knocking doors only to find no success thus far.  The saddest thing is that half of the doors answer and tell us that they have friends in the church.  Many say they know almost nothing about the church but don't care to know more.  Why?  Because they have never been told just how important our message is.  Why?  Because their friends have never had the courage to share it with them.  Being an example is important, but it is not enough.  We must do more.  And when we do, we have been promised by prophets and apostles for the last who knows how many years, that we will feel a joy that cannot be compared, and we will rejoice with hundreds of thousands more of our dearest friends and family as "we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" and we will only be able to do it by "speaking the truth in love" (ephesians 4:13, 15).  Notice the action word there.  Let us all have the courage to open our mouths and speak.

Once this happens, we will no longer need to have missionaries use their precious time knocking the doors of strangers, most of which are not home or not interrested, but they will be spending all their time and efforts teaching the Word of God to our friends.  What a blessed day this will be, when the vision of the Prophets will be fulfilled!!  If you want a list of talks from the modern prophets and apostles concerning this subject, I can give you a very large one. 

Well, I once again will step off my soap box.  Hope you enjoyed the show!

And that about concludes my adventures this week.  Sorry it was all just my thoughts and feelings and not so much about the work we did.  I love you all dearly and I hope all is well!

Elder Carter V

October 3, 2016 General Conference

General Conference was SO AMAZING!!  Loved every second!  Good to see my old buddy Dale (that's Elder Renlund, in case you are wondering.  We're on a first name basis.  That is, I'm sure we would be if he remembered me hehe... he...).  Shout out to the beautiful Peg Carter and the amazing Mr. Kenny Wiser, who did great with the music!  It was way too much fun to see familiar faces this weekend.

Here's some updates.  Sadly, we didn't get to meet with Cynthia this week, although she almost came to conference, then something came up so she couldn't.  We also had no luck contacting Joe again this week. 

We did a bunch of walking this week.  Lots of knocking on doors, lots of "nah, we're good"s, but all in all it was still a great week.  I cooked my first ever pork chops, talapia, and I'm still alive which either means my prayers were answered or I cooked it properly (please hold your applause).

Well, that's all I have to report this week.  I love you all dearly, and hope that you have a splendid week indeed.

Elder Carter V

Here's the picture of all us missionaries at GC.  Love these goofs!

September 26, 2016 Miracles on Miracles

This week we have seen many miracles! We have been finding success in our finding activities. We have an investigator named C who is 15 years old. Her family isn't interested but they said that if she wants to investigate she is more than welcome to. She has been very out front with us about being atheist and not really expecting an answer. She has told us that she genuinely wants to know mostly because she sees how much faith we have in what we do, but she hasn't kept any of our commitments. We had a "pep talk" with her about needing to do her part and we told her that for now, all we wanted her to do was have personal prayer with the intent to find out that this is true. We nagged her the first few days, then forgot to keep reminding her, then we had our meeting on Saturday where we gave her and her family a tour of the church. Right when she walks in and we're about to say a prayer, she says to her mom "well, I guess now's a good time to tell them. I want to be baptized". We were totally stunned! I asked her how her answer came and she said that she finally prayed the night before, and in the morning she just knew it was true and that she needed to search harder and deeper. We were so stoked! That night the bishops family (they are her fellowshippers) invited her to church and offered a ride, and when she got to church the next day they just took her under their wing and loved her up. I am so grateful for the Worsleys and all they have done for C! They are just the best. They truly have magnified their callings to be missionaries, and now C is feeling the Spirit both in their home, at church, and in her own personal prayers.

We started teaching a young man named J.  We knocked on his door and he asked us a bunch of questions on the door step.  We asked if we could come back another day and start teaching him these lessons which would answer a lot of his questions, and he said yes.  We taught him for the first time earlier in the week, and I had a very humbling experience.  The whole lesson, I was just a robot.  From square one, it was all "muscle memory" rather than following the Spirit.  I recognized that right off the bat but as I tried to fix it, nothing worked.  I was praying so hard on the inside that God would take over, and nothing happened to me.  But God answers prayers in His own way.  He didn't change my feelings or my actions, he didn't fill me with the Spirit so that I could teach more powerfully, but instead, he opened J's heart, so that even though I was on auto pilot, he still felt the truth of our message.  That was a testimony to me that the Spirit was working through him, and that this work is not my own.  This is the Lords work, and He's gonna do it the way He wants to, whether we're down or not.  What a blessing that was, that despite my own imperfection, he still felt the testimony of the Spirit in our message.

I saw G and M this week!  G is the guy that we taught in the Rushville jail back in Gordon, and M is from Manderson (on the Pine Ridge Reservation).  Gene lives up here so we went and visited him.  It was a blast from the past to see him! 

For the first time in my entire mission, I have been allowed to help someone move in when just walking by.  No one this whole time has allowed us to, and in the last 2 weeks, we've had 3 people allow us to!  It was fun to just serve these people.  One of families we helped move live in the same apartment complex as us, and they were just so happy that we came to help.  They were smiling from ear to ear, and that's the best reward you could get.  He told us that now we are his first friends in the area, and we'll always be welcome in his home.  His name was Dutch, and he's Jamaican.  Sweet accent, for sure.

That's about it for me this week.  Love you all!

Elder Carter V

P.S. Here's those pictures I promised from Mt. Rushmoore.

1) #selfiestick

2-3) I'm sure you can tell what this is.

September 12, 2016 Bikes and Service

Not a whole lot happened this week.

Bro. Mertz, from Bismarck, was here in town and we had lunch with him a couple days ago before he went back up.  That was pretty fun.  It was good to see him and talk about Bismarck again!

H seems to be doing good, although we haven't had much contact with her.  Just brief "how are ya"s and trying to set up appointments.  She's definitely a busy momma!

We found out one night that one of the members didn't have a lawn mower and their grass was getting pretty tall, so we decided we were gonna hunt down a lawn mower and get 'er done!  This was probably the highlight of my week.  We showed up with the mower (we had called them the night before to make sure they would be home so they could supervise our work) and went to town, and they were just glowing!  It was absolutely rewarding to be of service for them!  There is definitely a special spirit that comes into your life when you get to serve someone when they didn't ask for it. 

Well folks, that is all for me.  I love you, and hope you're doing great!

Elder Carter V

September 6, 2016 I have no subject for this week...

To answer the questions!  Rapid City is much smaller than Bismarck, although it has a big city look to it when you first get there.  But now that I've driven through the whole city, I realized that it's tiny.  There are 5 wards in Rapid, and 2 sets of missionaries for each ward, so there are a lot of us out here sharing the city, but we have a very different assignment than we have had in the past.  In the Canyon Lakes ward, we are now sharing the ward boundaries rather than splitting it up into areas.  It is going rather well so far!  It requires much more planning and communication than I've ever had to deal with before, but I think that it's gonna be great once we figure it out.  We just travel wherever we want inside the ward and hope we don't try the same people.  But, that's what the planning with each other is for.  We're some of the "guinea pigs" for this whole situation, so who knows what will happen.

Life in Rapid is good so far, although we haven't really had much happen.  Still learning the area and trying to meet as many people as possible.  We started working with a woman named H.  She's from Oklahoma too!  I was so stoked!  We had fun reminiscing about the humidity, tornadoes, random earthquakes (okay, we didn't actually reminisce about that one.  She just told me about it.).  We had a great first lesson with her.  She truly wants to know what is the truth and how it can help her.  She's been through a lot in her life, but has always known that God was there.  She just doesn't know why bad things happen to good people.  Good thing we're here to answer her questions, eh?  We're meeting with her again this week. 

Aside from her, we've met a lot of people, but haven't met with many if you get what I mean.  There are some grand people out here. 

Well, hopefully next week I have more to report on.  Life is good, my comp is great, missionary life is crazy, and I'm lovin it.

Love you all!

Elder Carter V

August 29, 2016 Rapid City

Howdy all!

My new address is 2880 Belgarde Blvd. #303.

Well, obviously a lot has happened, so here's the run down!  I said a bunch more goodbyes on tuesday, then I woke up Wednesday at about 1 AM hurling my guts out, so Wednesday was spent in bed.  The nurse wanted me to go to the hospital, so I did, and they said I got a virus, which exiled me to my apartment.  Thanks to the great Elders of Bismarck and Mandan, I was well taken care of.  They went to the store and got me all the supplies I needed.  After a little, I started to feel better, but still very weak, so in small spurts here and there, I slowly but surely packed my things in my bags.  Thursday morning I was feeling tons better, but Sister Hess didn't want me to infect the whole mission, so I didn't get to go to transfers, nor did I get transferred on that day.  It was super weird, and I felt like a bum! 

Friday was the day that we left.  I finally met my new companion (who I was supposed to meet on Wednesday), and we rode down to Rapid in the Transfer Van with the Traveling missionaries since they needed to make a trip down there anyway.  But, low and behold, I got motion sickness and was out of commission the rest of the night, and the next day wasn't any better for me.  My poor new missionary pretty much just cleaned our new apartment all day!

Sunday brought better news!  I felt tons better, and we actually did some work! 

Now, Rapid City is a cozy little tourist city.  When I say little, I mean it's small in population, but it seems huge to me!  I feel like I'm in a huge city when I drive through it, but really it is pretty small.  It is absolutely beautiful country out here!  Rolling hills, lots of trees, just stunning.  We are living in a 2 bedroom apartment with another companionship, which means we all sleep in one room and the other room is our study room.  It's a slumber party every night!  Our beds are practically stacked on top of each other haha!  But it is a super nice apartment.  We are staying with Elder Stapley and Elder Webb.  They are super funny.  It's never dull around our place when they are around, that's for sure.  We live out in the outskirts of town.

The ward here seems sweet, although everyone was on Vacation this week so there was almost no one there.  I don't really have a good idea of what it's like yet haha.

Fun little tidbit!  I saw someone at the church from the Gordon Branch!  It was the Tiensvolds!  It was awesome to see them!  Plus, my District Leader who I will be going on exchanges with, is now covering Gordon (the area is closed, but the missionaries in Chadron, NE cover it) so we're gonna have to go visit some folks one of these days.

As for my companion, he is the picture of a new missionary.  He has what we call "Greeny Fire".  He's so ready to go out and do work and share his testimony!  It's sweet to see!  He's also been a little under the weather though, so I don't think I have actually met the "real him" yet.  He is from Syracuse, UT, and he has been out for 3 days.

Well, that's about it.  Love you all tons!  Thanks for all the prayers!

Elder Carter V

These are the last goodbyes from Bismarck.

1)  The Forsyth's and Daniel and Kathleen (I don't know their last name, but they are awesome!)

2)  Sister Swenson