Monday, December 2, 2013

December 2nd, 2013 - DECEMBER ALREADY?!?

Hey Everyone!

It seems like just yesterday November started... but December in fact started yesterday. So, this week pretty much flew by with Thanksgiving, Ft. Sill, and tons of work to be done there wasn't much time for sitting around! But, first things first the mission had a change of policy (the postman got mad at us for forwarding mail...) so now all mail should be sent directly to us! Pretty sweet in my opinion, so my address is:

402 NW Sheridan Rd #503
Lawton, OK 73505

In other news, I ate way too much food this week. Seriously though. Thanksgiving pretty much put me into a food coma, which was alright with me ;) Since that's pretty much the most noteworthy day we'll start there. For Thanksgiving we started out the day with a Turkey Bowl (of course!) and it lasted from about 8-11:30... which was a lot longer than we had planned on, but it was quite fun and tiring and appetite building, so that was good! After that we got to go with a family to have lunch on Ft. Sill, which was super tasty. They had tons of different food to eat, and nothing I had was less than tasty, so I was pretty satisfied. We finished lunch about 2:30... then went up to a part of Ft. Sill that I had never been to before down by a creek with some really old buildings - the guy working there ventured from the late 1800s, but he wasn't really sure. They have this cool animal thing up there, and we got to look at those for a little while and just enjoy the nature of the area so that was neat. Then we headed to dinner... and it was only about 4:30 - just 2 hours after lunch was done if you caught that. Dinner was super tasty and filling and just overall a blast. For dinner we were at the Colpoy's - a super neat couple, with the Senior missionaries, sister missionaries, and a couple other random folks. I ate waaayy too much - about 3 pieces of pie, and two platefuls of the food they had (and remember we just had lunch 3 hours before), so I was pretty well satisfied with that was well :) Then we headed home and did some weekly planning before crashing a little early that night.

Aside from Thanksgiving, this week had a couple noteworthy events. For one thing, we had a couple good lessons with some of our "Okie Talker" investigators - the people who we go to see and they just talk at us the whole time - and actually got to talk to them for most of the lesson! That was pretty neat, along with some of the interesting people that we tracted into while trying to find new people to teach. We did quite a bit of tracting this week, as some of our investigators were out of town for the holidays or had family in town making it unlikely for us to be able to visit them. Then on Friday we got to do exchanges with the other elders, so that was good. We had a good time on exchanges and saw a couple less actives and investigators and set some appointments up so it was a pretty successful day. Saturday came and went - we had one of the awesome priests out with us for a couple hours and we had a couple good tracting experiences with him ;) 

So on Sunday I got to go to Ft. Sill for the first time - since church last week was cancelled. That was a very different experience, for one thing everyone there was dressed in military attire - except for the missionaries. It was weird. Then for Sunday school there was like 7 different classes happening - Regular sunday school, new member discussions, all the missionary lessons, and a group doing interviews/blessings for people who just got to basic. It was crazy as there was sooo many things happening that I couldn't really keep track of it all. Also something that kind of threw me for a loop was the sacrament was passed at the end of sacrament meeting (after all the testimonies and such) so that was different as well. But, it was still a pretty good experience to have. 

So I was going to send some pictures with this... but that didn't work out like I had planned since this computer is pretty aged... So for my spiritual thoughts this week, I did a bit of studying on the conference talks from this last conference. A couple of my favorites from this week are:
  • "Be Meek and Lowly of Heart" - Elder Solares Saturday Morning
  • "The Doctrines and Principles Contained in the Articles of Faith" - Elder Perry Priesthood Session
In addition to that I've been doing a bit of studying in various epistles in the Bible and a few verses from that stuck out to me: James 4:17, James 5:14-16, 2 Peter 1:3-10, and Romans 2:6. A couple other scriptures I found this week that stuck out to me were: 3 Nephi 27:27, Matthew 8:24-27, Alma 31:5, and Helaman 11:23.

That's all I got this week! Love y'all!

'Til Next Time,
Elder Jordan Nielson

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