Week 12 - Monday 12/17

Brother David Klevis! Had a stroke 30 years ago and has been in the chronically ill home since. Kicks my butt in chess every time we play

Hello! This week was super quick! Nothing crazy happened, the biggest thing was zone conference which was super cool! it was fun to see other missionaries and get some inspiration from President Dunnigan. Other than that it was probably the fastest week we have had yet. Haha I don't understand why but it was! 

We tried making cookies. Now, I'm pretty new at this life thing. And I'm even newer at baking. But we decided to try and bake something easy! Snicker doodles! There were 3 major things that went wrong while trying to put these things together. A lot of little things but 3 major ones. The first one being that we didn't know the difference between baking powder and baking soda. We thought they were the same thing so we put baking powder in them. The second was that we didn't know how big the cookie dough balls had to be before you put them in the oven so we put them into baseball sized balls and threw them in the oven. The recipe told us to cook them for 8 minutes at 350 degrees. We cooked them for that long and for some crazy reason, the massive balls of dough were not cooked all the way! Haha so we ended up cooking them for 25 minutes which gave them just a little bit too much crunch. We screwed them up pretty badly. But we tried twice more fixing each thing we did wrong one at a time. We used so much flour trying to making good cookies. But we finally got them haha thank goodness. 

This week was really awesome we had a really awesome lesson with a woman named Millie who I invited to be baptized like 2 months ago who said "no, I've been baptized" and then proceeded to go to new York for a month. Finally she came home and we got to have another lesson with her. other than that it was a fairly slow week. But also really fast. Make sense? Awesome. 

Love you all very much and thank you for supporting me as much as you do. Please send me your addresses so I can write you guys and hopefully you can write me back. Much love. 

-Elder Dorrance

Week 11 - Good Week

This week was good! There was for sure some slow days but for the most part it was a super quick week. This week we got someone on date for baptism!!! Her name is Maria! She is super awesome and really excited to be baptized! She is from Cape Verde so her English is not super awesome but luckily we have quite a few Spanish speaking people in the ward. Which was a huge blessing. We teach and then the ward member translates for us. She came to church yesterday and we set her baptismal date for January 19th. She is already super ready so that date might be moved up. That has been super fun to go through. 

Our ward had their Christmas party this last Saturday and the Elders Quorum was in charge of everything. Unfortunately not many of the men wanted to come to the church on Saturday morning to decorate. Before Elder Jarrett left he volunteered the missionaries in Smyrna to come help. So Elder Pittman and I went to the church on Saturday to decorate! We played florists for a little while! We did the flower arrangements and washed some dishes haha. After that we got some Taco bell and went home to finish studies and do some missionary work for a while. Then It was time for the Party! It was super cool. The ward is pretty small so it was super different to be able to talk to every single person that was at the party. Unlike back in Utah it felt like 2000 people showed up for every event. The party was catered unlike any of the Christmas parties back in Utah haha. We had tons of really good turkey and ham. It was a good old time. It was finished and we help clean up and everything. Went home and went to bed. 

And then catastrophe hit. Elder Pittman and I both got some kind of stomach bug either from taco bell or the  ward Christmas party. and we were both up at around 2:30. To put it nicely we were trying to get rid of the bug. Haha but the pains were there all of Sunday. And usually if I were in that much pain I would have just gone back to the apartment and get myself back together there. But unfortunately we had planned all sorts of sacraments to take to people and lessons to get to so we were extremely busy and didn't go back to the apartment until night time. Which was super busy. Let's just say it was the busiest day I've had in a while which would have been wonderful if I hadn't be suffering. But overall a really good week. I hope everyone had a good week. Don't forget to light your community this week. Love you! 

-Elder Dorrance

"I don't think it's going to look a lot like Christmas"

I tried to give myself a haircut
I didn't like how it turned out
Gave up all hope

Week 10 -Transfers!

TRANSFERSSS 

On Tuesday we had transfers and Elder Jarrett went home and I drove back to Smyrna Delaware with Elder Pittman. He is from Roosevelt Utah he is super cool. We have quite a bit in common. It's been a pretty slow week. Tuesday was pretty much just filled with us traveling back to our area. Wednesday was a rough day. We had nothing planned and what we did plan for was finished in about half the time that we thought it would take. Haha so by five pm we had run out of things to do for the entire day. Which was kind of the worst. 

On Thursday we pretty much did the same thing as Wednesday except it didn't seem as depressing haha we had a few things planned. We stopped by to see a guy named John. He was a Bible referral who started his own church when he was 22 years old. We pretty much got preached to for an hour straight. We kept trying to teach the restoration but kept getting interrupted and got thrown into really off topic subjects. 

Nothing really happened on Friday but on Saturday we saw God's hand specifically in our efforts. It was awesome. So it all started out with us planning on going to the Parade to do some street contacting and sharing a message about Christ. But when we got there we realized most of the people would be watching the parade and not wanting to be distracted by other people. Especially since it was rainy and cold, people Really didn't want to talk to us. So we ended up pulling off into a parking lot to see if we could make calls to get members to come to a lesson with us we had later in the afternoon. The person we are teaching is Maria and she is from Cape Verde. We talked to her earlier in the week and set up the appointment to teach her. So we made like 20 calls to members but everyone was busy. Finally we got a hold of Brother Phillips and so we set it up to meet at her house. When we got there and started teaching her we quickly found out that she didn't speak much English. We also quickly found out thank goodness that Brother Phillips went Spanish speaking on his mission and still was pretty fluent. So we taught her and her daughter in in English and Brother Phillips taught her in Spanish. It was so crazy how he was the only one that was able to go out with us. She is amazing and wants to get baptized. That experience just showed me how important it is to show faith and Heavenly father will do things for you. It was an amazing opportunity. 

That's all for the week. Thank you all so much, keep sending mail and packages and emails everything and anything helps. Haha love yall 

-Elder Dorrance

Only picture for the week - New Companion Elder Pittman