13 MONTHS AND DINGERS!!

Howdy!

This week was outrageously normal!!! But it was still a good week! Last night we got call outs and found out that both me and Elder Nelson are staying here in Walkersville which I'm super excited about! I was definitely not ready to leave this area because we got a lot of work to do!

The investigators have been doing pretty good, we put our investigator Mariah on date for baptism on October 1st and she is pumped for that! Elder Nelson put her on date too which was awesome to see, such a stud! Other than that, half of our investigators were out of town this week and the other half were super busy so we had a lot of time to tract and talk to a ton of people which was good! We found a ton of potential and the ward members are getting pretty stoked about missionary work so hopefully we get hooked up with some sweet referrals soon!

While we were walking around talking to people in a park on Saturday we saw this brotha out on the baseball field tossing baseballs up to himself and hitting them so of course I offered to toss to him and he let me so I hooked him up with some super good batting practice so he can hit some dingers in church softball. After that he let me take a couple of swings and of course I hit some dingers! We lost one of the balls that I hit (over the fence heh;)(the fence was like 200 ft lol)) in somebody's yard so in turn he tried to bash us!

Have a good week!

-Elder Larson

Pic just so mom won't harass me for not sending pics!!

ILIASSOU!!

This week was a lot of fun!! At the beginning of the week there were some more crazy rain storms that we got caught in but that just made things a little bit more fun! And if you are from Utah you wouldn't understand what I mean by crazy rainstorms.. Literally in seconds there was a couple of inches of rain that we had to run through to find some sort of cover haha, I bet everyone laughs at us when it rains out here! Also I went on exchanges with Elder Wilson to Braddock Heights again (he is from Farmington and went to Viewmont, small Mormon world) and that was a ton of fun!

The work has been going really well lately, we had an awesome day on Sunday! First of all, the Frederick elders texted us saying that some guy who lives in our area just showed up to their ward because he wants a new church and decided to come to ours so hopefully we will start teaching him soon! The past couple weeks a recently re-activated member (Bro. Temple) brought his sister who just moved in with him to church and last night we went over and taught her the Restoration and accepted baptism so that went well! Right after that we went and taught the Restoration to Iliassou, who is from Niger. The problem was that Iliassou hardly speaks any English because he very recently moved here to the states and speaks French. So we brought a recent convert in our ward (Landry, he was baptized in May) who is from Gabon and speaks French as well. It was the sickest lesson! Landry translated the entire lesson and bore his testimony on everything that we taught, it was amazing how strong the Spirit was there even though you couldn't understand half of what was being said! Landry is a stud though, we have been doing a lot of work with him because he is so fired up about sharing the gospel, it's amazing what the gospel can do in peoples lives in such a short amount of time!

Funny story for the week, we were walking around talking to people and a group of hood rats (like 8 yrs old) came up to us and were asking us if we had any Gatorade that we could give them (last time they saw us I hooked them up with Gatorade) but unfortunately I didn't. But they wanted something so they asked if I had any soda, water or anything, but the only thing I had were copies of the Book of Mormon. So the hood rat leader asked for a Book of Mormon. I gave him it but I made him promise me that he would take it to his house right then so he wouldn't destroy it while riding his bike, and that's what he did. Right after I gave him the book he caught a glimpse of Elder Nelson's shoes and shouted "WHAT ARE THOSE???" hahaha then all of the hood rat kids started making fun of Elder Nelson's shoes it was hilarious! Have a good week!!!

-Elder Larson

V HOUSE with Elder Wilson

SAMUEL THE LAMANITE!!

What's good?

This week was awesome! First of all we had our mini missionary with us all week and he is a stud! His name is Justin and he's from Martinsburg, WV. But of course the week went by super fast and we already said goodbye to him on Saturday dang:/

Our investigators are coming along though, we taught Brian the Word of Wisdom and at the end of it he bore testimony of it because he has already seen blessings from it since he and his wife have stopped drinking. The Word of Wisdom is legit! He has actually been reading the Book of Mormon too which is good, he'll get there! Troy is doing good, he read the Intro of the BoM, the testimonies of the witnesses and through to 1 Nephi 3, what a stud! Also this week we picked up Jimmer Fredette's cousin (Chris) and his girlfriend (Megan) as investigators! They are super solid! Megan said that she would read the Book of Mormon in 3 days and they both accepted baptism! They are awesome! We saw Carlos this week too and he said he was gonna come to a baptism on Saturday at the stake center but something came up so he couldn't dang! The work is going well though!

Fun story of the week... I am Samuel the Lamanite!! Just kidding that's false doctrine.. But while we were biking on Saturday we heard a bunch of popping sounds but we didn't think too much of it so we continued to meander along to the next pole where we tied up our bikes. I noticed that the popping sounds didn't stop so I looked around and sure enough there was a guy who pulled his truck over onto the grass and he was hiding behind the door shooting at us with a paintball gun haha!! He probably tried to shoot at least 25 paint balls at us, but he didn't hit either of us once! Samuel the Lamanite!!! Have a good week!

-Elder Larson

Justin aka JMoney (mini missionary)

Yummy!

Ricardo my man!

Temple with Elder Nelson

DC Temple

The 3 Amigos (Elder Nelson, Justin, and Elder Larson)

POLICE OR MISSIONARIES??? & flooded basement:/

Hey fam,

This week was bien!!! First of all, yesterday we picked up our mini missionary, Justin, who will be with us until Saturday. I love mini missionaries because the work is always better when they are with us! This week was wild though! It was temple week so we didn't have our preparation day until the day we went to the temple, which in our case was Saturday, so we had almost 2 weeks with no preparation day! In other words we couldn't shop or clean our place for 2 weeks..

The work has been going a lot better thankfully, we knocked a ton of doors and talked to a ton of people and in return the Lord blessed us with new people to teach! We finally were able to get in with this guy named Troy who we had talked to several times but never had the chance to teach him, and he was super stoked about the Book of Mormon! He and his girlfriend just had a baby a little less than a month ago and the gospel is gonna be clutch for them in raising her. Also we contacted his next door neighbor, Mike, and he has talked to missionaries before so he invited us over and we picked him up as an investigator too! He is pumped about the gospel too and is excited to start reading the Book of Mormon. Brian is doing well, we feel that he is getting close to breaking through towards baptism. While we went to the temple as a ward he hung out at the temple visitors center and he said he loved it! Also Carlos has read all the way to 2 Nephi 1, a lot of good stuff is happening out here!

Just to make things spicy this week, our water heater decided to malfunction and flood our basement twice this week which was pretty annoying not gonna lie! The first time we assumed it was from all the crazy rain storms that happened last week that flooded everyone else so we called our land lords and mopped everything up so there wasn't any damage, luckily the basement is unfinished! But they told us to check on it the next day to make sure it wasn't something else. Sure enough, we went down the next day and it was flooded again! Dang! Turns out that the water heater was super old and was leaking water everywhere.

To make things even spicier, we got to do some undercover police work this week😎  We were walking around talking to people and a cop that was chillin in his car yelled for us to come talk to him (uh oh) and I thought he was going to try to get mad at us for proselyting because he was a servant of the devil but it turns out that he just needed help from some fresh Mormon brothas. Apparently the cops were onto some guy that was armed and dangerous and he needed us to walk up through the neighborhood where they thought he was and get the license plate number on his white Mitsubishi, but he made it clear to us not to talk to him because he is dangerous. Dog, we've got the Lord on our side! But we still obeyed him and went up there but he wasn't there so we failed our objective:/

Anyways, I hope y'all have a good week!!

-Elder Larson

(I left my camera at the apartment:/ pics next week (sorry mom))

Elder Nelson, Elder Wrye (mini missionary) and Elder Larson

1 YR

What's good??

This week was super bien! I hit my year mark on Friday which was super weird but I guess they are right when they say time flies! This week was very wet! I was drenched when it wasn't raining #sweat and also when it was raining, how does that work? The Lord has been treating us well though!

To start things off last week we were at zone training and everyone was getting super stoked about going out to work and seeing a bunch of miracles and everyone's faith was super high and right as zone training was about to wrap up we got a text from church headquarters with a referral for somebody in our area that "wants to join the church". SUPER STOKED!!!! We will be going back this week to meet with them, hopefully everything goes well there! We were able to teach the Restoration to a lady that kinda speaks English but mostly speaks Chinese but that still went really well, the Spirit speaks all languages! Brian is coming along still, and same with Howard. Howard got a new job that has been really hard for him because he has to commute almost 2 hours every day down to Virginia, yikes.. So that has been tough on him, we're working on trying to help him find a job somewhere closer that will be a lot more convenient for him. Pedro is doing really well but we found out that he will be moving out of our area this week so we are gonna have to pass him off to the missionaries where he is going, even though he said he would come drive up here to pick us up so that we could teach him haha!

Everyone out here has been freaking out because they think they are in a drought (I don't know what they're talking about #Utahprobs) but finally the "drought" ended and there was a ton of crazy rain storms, for example our bikes were tied up to a pole and we were trying to put them on the sisters car so they could take them to our apartment but we had to basically swim up the river which was trying to take our bikes down with it in order to get to them. Just kidding it wasn't that bad but for real we had to run through 4-6 inches of rain to get somewhere dry, it wasn't a good week for my attire!

On Sunday we got to sing in sacrament meeting which went pretty well! That sacrament meeting a missionary who just got home gave a talk and a missionary that is leaving this Wednesday gave a talk as well so they decided to make the whole meeting about missionaries and made us sing.

I hope y'all have a good week!

-Elder Larson

Where's Noah at??

Burnin the shirt

Get em in Guatemala Ian!