Hey hey!

This week has been pretty hectic! Rarely has there been a time we had to just find people this week. Lessons, meetings, the whole shebang.

Tuesday I went on an exchange with on of the district leaders – Elder
Argyle. Bro Parish recently asked us to go try a brother in the ward
he couldnt get ahold of. Elder Argyle and I gave it a try that morning. A man opened the door and seemed really excited to see us! We
shook his hand and asked for the man we were looking for. He said the man had moved, but then called his daughter to the door. Kathy asked us to come in and sit down! She told us that she is Catholic and served a “mission” in the Philippines and told us that it just broke her heart as she saw many of the catholics over there converting to our church. I was thinking, “No duh, President Ostler is the Mission President over there” haha. But Kathy said she just wanted to understand us more to see where we were coming from. She then basically started trying to tear us apart – saying that her church is correct, shes gone through the studies and school for it and that we were wrong. “I know my faith is correct, so it really concerns be by what power your faith has its miracles!” yata yata. Her battle was a battle of stories, “Or church has miracles! What does yours have?” kind of thing. Elder Argyle would explain some, but then she would find some anti to try to throw at us. So I kept telling her we could talk all day about this, but we should go to the bible to settle the debate and she kept pulling it away from that each time I tried. So we thanked her and left! As we left she was saying things like, “I really do pray for you! I hope you’ll come to the truth!” haha We were like, “Same here!”

Our stake presidency has asked us to teach the youth in the ward the lessons, so we had a couple of those.

-We had Mission Leadership Meeting on Friday! Good to see a bunch of my old buddies, Elder Reed, Elder Judy, and Elder Thomas – 2 of which became Zoneleaders this transfer! President talked for a couple hours on repentance. How we need to first be repenting ourselves, and how we need to help our investigators repent. It was very spirit-filled and President was in tears a couple times. It is great to see so much love and devotion in a leader – someone everyone can respect without the slightest hypocriticism.

-After the meeting Jessica came for her interview with President! She came out in tears as President said, “You were right, she is ready!”

-Before Jessica’s baptism on Saturday, we had to prepare the Stake
Mission Council document (some 36 pages long) for the Council
yesterday. Jessica was well supported with a big part of the ward in
attendance in her baptism. Brother Chesney’s parents even visited from Kansas!

-Jessica has gotten close to a couple people in the ward and 1 of them gave the talk on the Holy Ghost. Both the speaker and Jessica were crying during the talk and program. Very Spiritual!

Sunday was complicated! We had our Stake Mission Council at 10am (the same time as our sacrament meeting). Elder Evensen was asked to confirm Jessica, but we were expected to be at the meeting that happens only once a month. So we woke up early and picked up Elder Argyle and Elder Rowe from Keller and brought them to our building. I dropped Elder Evensen and Elder Rowe off at sacrament meeting and Elder Argyle and I went to SMC. Again, we were in a room with a bunch of multi-millionaires such as: The Stake Presidency, President Ames, his counselor President Pratt, and all the ward mission leaders from the stake in the high council room and the Stake Presidency drilled me on the report we had put together of the missionary work and retention in the stake. Pretty crazy! But it all worked out haha

We had Brother Procter, Brother Healy, Jessica, and Brother Chesney come with us to the Mission Presidents Fireside last night and they loved it! Got to see Bobby too!

Everyone, remember the words of President Monson: “A vision without work is only a daydream, while a work without a vision is drudgery.” Goals are a must in order to have success in life, but without hard work, it wont happen!

I love all yall so much!

Elder Householder

PS: We also had to stay up thursday night to help the office elders organize all the materials to be given to the mission at MLCs