Elder Williams Mission

Hello everybody!      This week has felt slow, but we also had a lot of really cool experiences and it will be a week to remember! So I am starting my 4th transfer, and I will still be here in Traverse City to finish training Elder Robert's. And it will probably be my last transfer here. It's crazy to think that 1/4 of my mission will be here in this area, but I'm so excited!       Also, you're probably wondering why it says ice volcanoes in my title. Well I'll tell you why. The bay is starting to really freeze over, and the waves have frozen in the shape of mini frozen volcanoes. And the first day we saw that there was water that would shoot up through the tops. It was so cool! I never knew that was a thing, and I'm sure I won't see that again. I will give you some pictures to show how cool it really was.      Also, we had a lady we haven't even taught before that I invited to church and she came! She had to leave a bit ear...

Hello everybody!       I hope all of you had a wonderful week, and a wonderful Valentine's day/Arizona's birthday! This week as you can tell from the title, was our second sprint week since I've been out here! And our mission leaders increased our goal this time to about 5,500 total invitations in the mission. Those include invitations to learn, read the Book of Mormon, come to church, and member lessons set up. Let's just say that our mission had 7,315 total invitations! We crunched those goals, it was so great! I didn't think Elder Roberts and I would make our part as a companionship, but we did! The Lord does provide miracles!      However, we did have a lot of lessons fall through this week which was very sad. But we hope some of those people will be able to meet with us this week, so please pray for them! (Names down below)      But,  we do have some exciting news! We were able to invite our friend Maida Cross to b...

Dear Justin Williams Mom, First of all, let me sincerely thank you for the gifts that you have given me in honor and respectfulness of the friendship that your son has shown in leading me back to Christ and the true restoration of the Gospel as provided by The Book of Mormon! The past seven weeks since your son used social media to reach out to me has been nothing short of miraculous!  I truly believe that our Sovereign Lord did orchestrate this awesome friendship to grow and bloom in His plan of my returning to the true Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints!  Amen! Fast forward to seven weeks of your sons dedication to his missionary assignment to lead, prepare, instruct and bless me with the knowledge of Jesus Christ atonement for my sins if I would humbly repent and ask for His forgiveness that I might be saved! So, with humble and contrite heart, I did repent and asked for forgiveness.  Your son shared that special moment by honoring me with ...

     Hello to all of you kind folks! Here is another weekly from yours truly! So not gonna lie, this week was pretty slow. The past 3 days we've had all of our lessons cancel, and none of the people we are teaching came to church. So that was a bummer. And our in person lessons interviews were cancelled because we got a good amount of snow, and the roads were icy.       But on the bright side, we still did get snow! We got hit with a supposed polar vortex, but we got less than a foot of snow still. But it's been less than 10° the past few days and dipped into the negative a bit. And you know what that means! That's right, the bay is starting to freeze over! That's really exciting, we didn't think it would this year because it's been a pretty warm winter, but alas it is! And we got a solid referral of someone who wants to be taught, her name is Mehgan, and she really wants to know how to become converted! She has no religious background tho...

 Hey there folks! This has been a pretty good week I'd say! So we were able to have our friend Jacob be baptized this week! That was super exciting and he was able to have his dad baptize him! Unfortunately, we weren't able to watch though because they wanted to have a good amount of family there so us missionaries couldn't watch. But we were able to greet them afterwards, and set up for them!       As well, we were able to have our friend Joe accept a baptismal date for February 20th! Joe has been so fun to teach, he is about our age! And even after some technical difficulties, he was able to join us over zoom for church this Sunday because he wasn't feeling well. And two of our other people that said they would come to church didn't. 🙁       We also met 4 new people this week, and most of them have been going through some hard times recently. So hopefully we are able to work with them and share how the gospel can brings them t...

Hola amigos!      This week has been a pretty busy week overall! We had to do some stuff to prepare for Doug's baptism which happened Saturday! What a wonderful day! I'll tell you more about it later in this weekly update!       We had some great lessons with Doug to prepare him more for his baptism, and we had a really good lesson with our friend Joe Wood on Wednesday as well! And he wanted a Book of Mormon, so we were able to give him one! He's a really cool guy, he's got a lot of potential. And we had the Manistee Elder over for trade-offs with the zone leaders that day as well. That evening we went and got burgers from this place called Slabtown and they were soooo good! The burger I got  was cheese filled, so later that week I made some cheese filled burgers for dinner, they were so good! Mine didn't quite compare though.       And on Thursday we had just finished our lesson with Doug when the Zone leaders cam...

Hey folks! It has been a crazy week that's for sure! We had to say goodbye to some valiant missionaries from the TC zone! Elder Keyser and Elder Dunn were two of the saddest to say bye to for now. They will do good work where they go though. We had to drive down to Mount Pleasant for transfers, and then the next day we went down to Lansing to pick up Elder Roberts! He will be my trainee, and he is from Idaho Falls.       Besides that, we are doing lots of studies, and having a lot of lessons actually. (Most of them are with Doug haha) This zone has been super blessed though, we think we have more people on date than ever before. Facebook work is still not what I expected on my mission, and I'm still getting used to it, but it is such a blessing! I'm not sure I would've found someone like Doug if not for Facebook. So the work progresses no matter what!         So yeah, that's what my week consisted of, lots of driving and lessons ...