March 10, 2013

Hello all!

My week was really good! The Piper family came to church this week! That means Tyler and Bryan also came to church. The first time we have had investigators come to church in a while! If they come to church next week they will be baptized on the 24th of March! It is very exciting! They are progressing really well. The Branch President told us that when Tyler went to Priest Quorum he actively participated like he was a member. He showed excitement that he really wanted to be baptized and Bryan enjoyed Primary as well. Things are going really well and I am looking forward to the day they are baptized!

Transfers happened and Elder Sio and I are going to be together for another 6 weeks in Townsville. I will most likely be transferred back to somewhere in Brisbane after that time. Elder Field from the other companionship in Townsville is going back down south and Elder Pickett from Idaho Falls, Idaho will be coming up. I don't know who he is, but he was trained by Elder Davis, who I was in the MTC with. Hopefully he will be a good addition to the Townsville Area. 

The Townsville West Elders had the Wedding and Baptism on Saturday with Meteria and her now husband. It was a good experience. We spent the whole day at the chapel helping get things ready and then cleaning up afterwards. It was a good experience. You could see the changes in the lives when they decided to get married and then have Meteria baptized. They are going to grow in the gospel and they will be sealed in the temple in about a year. 

All of our other investigators just don't want to keep commitments and they don't want to come to church. We are going to keep working with them and we hope that things will start to progress with them soon! 

That was all the exciting things that happened. The church is true! I miss you all and I hope you all have a great week!

Love
Elder Kyler Powelson

March 3, 2013

Hello All!

This week was pretty good. We were able to teach Tyler and Bryan twice this week. Things are going really well with them except they were not able to make it to church because their car had no gas in it. Since they have to come to church at least twice in the ABM in order to get baptized we had to move their date down to March 30th. They have 3 chances to come to church twice. The lesson we had on Thursday was great! We could feel the spirit strongly with the two of them there. We just aren't too sure if their less active mum is making excuses for travel to church. 2 weeks ago she wasn't feeling well, last week they lost the keys to the car and this week the car was our of petrol (gas). So hopefully there is no more problems with the car and we can get them to come to church so they can be baptized on the 30th. As a mission we are trying to break a record and have 75 baptisms as a mission for the month of march. The first week there were 21 baptisms which is the most the ABM has ever had in one week. So this month will be a month of record breaking and I hope we will be able to contribute to that record breaking at the end of the month. I have faith that they will be able to make it to church and we hope and pray that we will be able to baptize them. Their testimonies are strong and they are ready to make the commitment, it is just hard for the to come to church because they live about a 30 minute drive away. 

As for the rest of our investigators. none of them are progressing. They say that they will come to church, but they never show up on a Sunday morning. Australians have a really kick back type attitude, and waking up to come to church on a Sunday morning is apparently a really hard task to complete. None of them seem too promising, but we will keep going over and trying to share things with them and maybe they will come to church someday. We are working hard and we hope the blessings will come soon. 

The other two missionaries here in Townsville (Elder Tukukino and Field) are going to have an amazing baptism this weekend. And it is going to be really good to witness it. They have an investigator who is a partner (not married to but living together) with a member. She really wants to get baptized, but they have to be married first. So on Saturday morning they are going to have the branch president perform the marriage and then she is getting baptized Saturday night. So that will definitely be a good experience to witness. It is going to be awesome. It is both of their first baptisms after being on a mission for almost a year, so it is definitely going to be a great experience for them and I am excited for it. 

On Saturday we celebrated my birthday. It was Clean Up Australia Day, so we went to a park and picked up rubbish for a couple of hours and then we went to a less active members house Sister Starkey and we mowed her lawn that was taller than I am. I took a video of it and not a picture so I wont be able to send it to you. Then at night we celebrated my birthday at the chapel. Some members came along and we ate dinner and it was all organized by our Relief Society President Sister Tapaitau. I took a video of me blowing out the candles, so I wont be able to sent that picture.

The picture attached is a picture of us missionaries in Townsville From left to right it is Elder Sio (My companion), Elder Tukukino, Elder Miles, Sister Miles, Elder Field, and me. 

That was all the exciting things that happened to me this week. We did lots of tracting. We are trying to find new people and make the investigators we have progress. I miss you all and I hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Elder Kyler Powelson

February 25, 2013

Hello All!

My week this week went well! We were able to set another baptismal date for the 16th of March! Last week we set the date with Brian Piper and now we set a date with his foster brother for the same day. Brian is 11 and Tyler is 16. They are both going really well and are getting excited for their baptisms. I am glad good things are happening. It has taken a lot of hard work and determination to get this far. Transfers are in 2 weeks so hopefully I don't get transferred before they get baptized. It has been a really good experience teaching them so far. The spirit is strong in all the lessons and their mom Dorothy Piper has gained her vision back all the way! It is very exciting news! They are going really well. They are growing spiritually and we found them just by being prompted to visit a name on the less active list. We picked that name instead of the 500 other people on the list and it was successful. Its kind of crazy how many in active members are in Townsville. only about 150 people come to church, but we have over 600 names on the list. The senior couple missionaries in Townsville (The Miles) are working very hard to locate all the lost members. Lots of them still live in Townsville but their records were never updated to where they live. We have a strong effort in trying to reactivate some of these people in the area. 

A couple of weeks ago a man came up to us while we were at the ATM and told us to come by to his house for a visit sometime. So we were able to finally catch him at home and share a couple of messages with him. When we went on Saturday again. The Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on the door in the middle of our lesson. So I guess it looks like we have a little bit of competition with him. We hope he chooses us over them eventually, but he said that he needed to explore his options and see what religion fit him best. So hopefully we can help him understand that we have what he needs. His name is Simon and he is about 40 years old. He is really receptive and we hope that we can do some good things with him. 

Now for a funny experience. We went to visit a less active member that we had on our list. He took us into his house. Talked for about 1.5 hours about Old Testament History and then we had to leave. He did not let us have any words in. He just talked about the Old Testament for ages. My companion had a cold that day and decided to go up to him and give some sort of blessing. With no authority he put his hands around the neck of my companion and started speaking in some sort of gibberish. And after he finished with him, he decided to come up to me. He put both hands onto my neck and started to give me some sort of blessing in a gibberish language. I could not help but laughing. I was laughing pretty dang hard and he didn't even realize it because he had his whole power and soul in tune with the Holy Spirit to give me this blessing. Just imagine some old guy putting his hands around you neck, speaking gibberish like some crazy guy moving around and yelling thinking that he has the authority to give a blessing. It was pretty hilarious. Its hard to explain how funny it was. But it was pretty crazy.

We did heaps of tracting. Like always. We were able to teach a few people at their door steps and we are hoping to come back sometime this week! Things are going really well with me. I miss you all and I hope you all have a wonderful week!
Love,
Elder Kyler Powelson

February 18, 2013

Hello All!

This week hasn't been too overly exciting. We were able to teach a lot of potential investigators and hopefully they will become new investigators this week. We have heaps of other investigators and it is becoming really hard to get them to come to church and to progress. The last few weeks have been hard. We try so hard to get people to come to church. we had 7 of our investigators say that they were going to come to Church. Turns out that none of them came to church. We are working hard to find those that are really committed. They don't seem like they are too committed when they say that they will be at church and then they don't show up. Anyways. One thing went really well this week.

We dropped our baptismal date on Wednesday because we are no longer able to get into contact with Melissa and she is ignoring us now. I wish sometimes people would just tell us that they are not interested anymore.

But the good news is that we set a new date on Thursday! and it seems to be somewhat of a miracle. We went to visit one of our part member families named the Pipers to share a quick spiritual thought. He son who has not been baptized has never really showed much interest in being baptized, but when we talked about The gospel of Jesus Christ lesson, when we started talking about baptism he asked us if he could be baptized. It came as a surprise to us and we set him up to get baptized in 3 weeks. I am very excited for the baptism. He is almost 12, so he will be able to receive the priesthood soon. With that they whole family is going to start coming back to church. So that means we will have reactivated a less active family. Sister Piper was sick yesterday, so they weren't able to make it to church, but she said that they would be at church for sure next week. I am excited for it to happen, and to see that family back at church! 

That was the most exciting news I have. we taught a total of 14 lessons this week between investigators and less active members. We are hoping to make more of our investigators progressing. None of them seem too promising, but they may become promising. That is why we keep up with them and keep visiting them. I have faith that good things are going to be happening the next couple of weeks here in Townsville!

I miss you all and I hope you have a great week!

Love,

Elder Kyler Powelson

February 11, 2013

Hello All!

My week went well. We did a lot of tracting. We didn't have many people to teach last week, so we did a lot of tracting and were able to set up quite a few appointments for this week! Lets hope that they all go through and we are able to get some new investigators out of them.

One experience I had this week was on Thursday when we went visiting less active members with a member of the Elders Quorum Presidency. We went a visited a lady who was on the branch list and hadn't been to Church in ages. Her name is Dorothy Piper. She hasn't been to Church in 5 years because she became blind. She got in a work accident back then and lost her vision. The doctors are working on restoring her vision and she told us that she will be coming back to church in a couple of weeks with her whole family. He whole family includes an unbaptized child of hers and a 16 year old boy who lives with her and is keen on learning more about the gospel. We are hoping to have another lesson with all of them this week and we hope that things continue to go well with them. Hopefully we will be able to set baptismal dates with them soon.

Melissa is still sick so hopefully we will be able to have a lesson with her this week.

We started teaching an African family who is 7th Day Adventist religion. They are too hung up on the 7th day worship stuff its hard to teach them anything that we have to share. Hopefully they start to listen and things will go well.

We taught a few lessons with people and we will be following up with lots of them this week and we will hopefully have some new investigators.

It was a pretty slow week, but hopefully things will start to speed up soon, not that we have quite a few potentials. We visited some less actives and we are trying really hard to baptize and to reactivate!

I was finally able to get a drivers license after my wallet getting stolen in November. So once we get our car back I will be able to drive again. I am doing well and I love being a missionary. I miss you all and I hope you have a great week!

Love,
Elder Kyler Powelson

February 4, 2013

Hello all

 

This week was an alright week. Unfortunately lots of our lessons fell through and not much was able to get done. Some bad things happened but we also has something really good happen.

The sad thing that happened this week was when Pierson sent us a text saying he didn't want to meet with us anymore. We tried calling him. But he just started ignoring us when we tried to visit him. But his dad told us to go away. It's sad that it had to happen. But like I have said before. When one door closes. Many doors open. So now we are trying our hardest to find some of those open doors. After being on a mission i have learned to care about people more. It does stink when you put heaps of work in for someone and then all of a sudden they are gone. It makes me care a lot about the people i teach because I put all my time and effort into them. All I can do now is pray that he will find the gospel again later in his life. All the experiences I have had have helped me grow as a person. This one made me care more about the people i teach. The work is hard here. But I am trying my hardest to bring these people to baptism. I hope I can make it happen with so,e more of the people here in Townsville. I am trying my hardest to make this area flourish.

 

OK. Enough of the negative. There is some positive.

 

A few weeks ago a non member name Erin came to church with one of her friends. And what makes this crazy is that about 2 months ago we tracted into Erin. She refused us at the door. So we were surprised to see her at church. After we saw her at church we set an appointment to meet with her and we had a great lesson with her. She said that us knocking on her door was the first sign she received about our church and that many more signs came after that. So she decided to come to church. She had lots of questions for us in that lesson and we were able to answer all of them. We shared the plan of salvation lesson with her and she said that everything we said is what she believed as well. We went later in the lesson and committed her to baptism. She said yes and we hope we can go later this week and set a date with her. She is really busy all of a sudden though because she producing music for a famous guy from New Zealand names Peter t. So we hope we can meet with her in the midst of her business. I am glad we were able to start teaching her. I hope we can meet with her this week and help her progress towards baptism.

Melissa was sick all week so we weren't able to teach her. But we will this week.
We are also working with an in active family with hopes to reactivate them.
I miss you all and i hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Elder Kyler Powelson

 

January, 28, 2013

Hello All,

My week went really well especially because being a missionary is always a great thing!! Things have gone a little bit slow because of all the rain that we have gotten. If you look on the news and see the bad floods in Brisbane, don't worry because I am 1100 km away from Brisbane here in Townsville. It is just really hot here. It has been 40 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) and humid. So basically I sweat all the time unless I am in Air Conditioning. So it is good our apartments have air conditioning. But besides all that the work is going great. We set another baptismal date this week and hopefully we will be able to set another one this week!

Before we get to my week lets talk about the pictures I attached. Yes, I am in the drivers seat of a city bus. and I may or may not be driving it. But the story is that the bus we got onto broke down and the bus driver got off the bus because we had to wait for another bus to arrive, but in the meantime we asked the bus driver if we could get pictures of us driving the bus, and he said yes. So basically I got one of the coolest pictures ever of me driving a city bus! be jealous.

Our first baptismal date that we set a few weeks ago was with Pierson. He is progressing really well, he wasn't able to make it to church because he had to go to a Cricket tournament. But the lesson we had was amazing. We decided to teach about the Tree of Life to help him understand that you can apply the stores in the book of Mormon to our everyday lives, but he told us that the more he meets with us the more he knows the things we share to be true. It is great to see that his testimony is growing. He will be ready to be baptized on Feb 23rd. It will be here soon and I am really excited for it. He will become a great member of the church!

On Wednesday we were able to teach one of the random people who came to church and her husband. The lesson was really good and we committed Melissa to be baptized on March 2nd. And Yes that is the 20th anniversary of my birth. So it will be a really good birthday for me! But by the two lessons we have had with her things are going really well. She is starting to gain a testimony and it is going to be great to see how much she will progress in the next month.
But that is definitely exciting news for this week.!

We have been teaching some other people, but they aren't progressing much. We will work with them and we hope that they will be progressing sometime soon.

Saturday was Australia day, so we weren't allowed to proselyte because of all the drunk people who were around. Any holiday in Australia is just another excuse for half the country to get drunk. 

That is all the exciting things that have happened to me this week. I miss you all and I hope you have a great week!!
 

Love,
Elder Kyler Powelson