Jake's South African Adventure

Hello everyone! This week has been kind of crazy. It was the last week of the transfer.  This week we were in the heat if a content competition within the zone so we spent a lot of time making content but that has been great! Reminded me a lot of my days as a social media specialist! Our friend who is preparing for baptism is doing really well! We taught him the plan of Salvation this week! His mother has been feeling sick lately so it has been a bit difficult to meet with them so keep her in your prayers! On Wednesday we drove to Spring Lake for district council and that was pretty sweet. Afterwards we went as a district for lunch at a place called papa bears. The place is super mom and pop style, the restaurant is in a house. But they have been on the food network before on outrageous eats or whatever. They are famous for their Grizzly, it is a 10 pound (they said it was actually closer to 14 pounds) stuffed hashbrown! As a district with 7 of us eating we downed 2 grizzlies...

Hello everyone! It has been a very eventful week here in Michigan! Such an amazing blessing as our mission had the opportunity to sprint once again! We set high goals as a mission this time, 1400 invites to church, 800 member lessons set, 2300 invites to be taught, and 1000 invites to read the Book of Mormon! After some good effort, our companionship was able to accomplish all of our goals and our mission crushed our sprint week goals! On Saturday, we were lacking behind a bit especially for invites to church, and in the morning devotional, President Heap challenged us to get 750 invites to church that day and President Gentile gave an amazing hype up devotional. As a mission we more than doubled that number on Saturday! It was amazing to be a part of.   Tuesday however was crazy! In the morning we had a housing inspection which was fun! And we were hanging out in the early afternoon, and Elder Johnston gets a call from the AP's, and him and Elder Anderson are getting emerge...

Hello everyone,  It has been a very snowy week here in Michigan. We had a storm pass through this week and it has probably snowed well over a foot! For a while, we were instructed to not leave our apartments because of the road conditions. It was really nice though because the snow opened up some service opportunities for us. We were able to go and shovel snow at 2 members homes! Service opportunities have been few and far between lately so that was nice.  As far as people we are teaching, that has been a sad topic of late. We have really tried to do the best we can here, but this week we had 2 people, really the only 2 people, we were teaching completely drop us. Its definitely been slow in this new area, and nothing seems to work. We are looking forward to another mission sprint week this upcoming week though so that should be a great opportunity to redouble our finding efforts and hopefully get more people to teach! With the extra time, I've been able to do ...

Hello everyone! It's been another great week! This transfer is really flying by.  We had a few lessons set up with new people this week that we were really excited about! Except all of them fell through. So things have been fairly slow this week but we have been able to decide some great time to finding new people and it has been a really good week there. We have also been able to spend a lot of time with members over zoom which it has been a while since I've had the time to meet with members and it is great!! On Wednesday we had district council over in Spring Lake and we were finally able to see Lake Michigan! It is beautiful! I loved finally seeing one of the great lakes. We walked out on a boardwalk to a lighthouse and it was super cool.  We also went to a farmers market in Grand Rapids! It was awesome. I bought some really good bread, some smoked salt, and some cheese curds. It was cool to see an actual farmers market and there were some really cool things being...

Hello everyone! It has been another good week here in Michigan! We have some new people that we are teaching! Some truly amazing individuals and I am so grateful for the opportunity to meet with them and for all they do.  On Saturday we celebrated Elder Johnston's birthday and it was awesome! Me and Elder Anderson made him some breakfast, I baked him a cake and we went for a late night Bdubs run. It was awesome!  Lately I've been trying some new things! The first is a thing they call reading. I haven't read a book that isn't scripture in years now! But this week I read "Accomplishing the Impossible" by President Nelson and it is so good! Another thing I've been doing lately is taking some time for family history. Almost coincidentally, I found that I had ancestors buried right here in Grand Rapids Michigan! I have even found out where the grave sites are for two of them and am hoping to visit them sometime soon! Who would've thought that I would ...

Hello everyone! This week we experience our transfer! I have moved from Meridian to Grand Valley! Grand Valley is just outside of Grand Rapids and it is really cool. So far I have been super impressed by the member involvement here. There are a lot of amazing members in the ward and they are always willing to help!  My companion is Elder Diaz and he is super cool. We share an apartment with Elder Anderson and Elder Johnston. We all get along together really well and are enjoying our time here! I will say, we are kind of building things up from rock bottom. We showed up and there was no one being taught. Our area book only has about 20 names in it and no one seems interested. So we will do a lot of work on Facebook! Hopefully things will heat up soon but, it's given us a lot of great time to work more closely with the members.  We were able to join in on a lesson with the other Elders. This lesson was with 2 friends who are both devout evangelists. One is studying to...

Hello everyone! It has been another great week here in Michigan. My mission experience so far has been really interesting. I got to Meridian, was trained here, trained 2 other missionaries, became a social media specialist, and it really felt like I was just taking things one step at a time, and then I look behind me and I have been here in Meridian for almost 5 months! That is insane to me! That being said, we got transfer calls this week and I am finally leaving Meridian to whitewash Grand Valley 2. I'm very sad to leave the amazing members I've gotten to know and the wonderful people we are teaching. Meridian was such an amazing place to be. But, I am super excited to go to Grand Valley. My companion will be Elder Diaz and we will be in the apartment with another companionship too. We will be really close to Lake Michigan too so it should be super fun!  On Friday we played a good prank on Elder Sorensen. We convinced him that we were getting transfer calls on Friday i...

Hello everyone and happy new year!  It has been a great week here in Michigan! We are coming up on the very last week of the transfer now which is crazy! This week our companionship was able to coordinate and lead a pilot program for a new social media initiative we are trying to launch. 2 of the missions zones are participating in this pilot program so that we can get some projected numbers together for the mission. We are doing something that really no other mission has done and that is the use of area and subject matter specific Facebook groups. We have some really cool early successes and we are excited to see what comes out of it all.  Our zone has also been in a content competition with the Jackson zone which our companionship and the Jackson SMS companionship have launched. Our content creation was out of this world! We have a document where missionaries enter their captions for their content and that document went from being 1 page long to being 117 pages long. I...

Hello everyone! It has been a fantastic week here in Michigan!  Early this week Elder Sorensen got himself a fine geetar. Both of my companions now have geetars from Facebook marketplace! We also had some really great lessons with some more amazing people early this week. We are so blessed to be teaching some of the most amazing people we have ever seen! In preparation for Christmas day, we bought some gifts and some Christmas sweaters! We had a great time on Christmas eve! We sung at a couple of retirement homes here in Lansing which was super fun! We also met with one of our good friends and his family. This was our first real lesson with this friend and he had already done his studying of the Church and taken the initiative on his own to learn. Without us asking, he had already prayed about the Book of Mormon, the prophet Joseph Smith and other aspects of the Church and had received a witness and answer to his prayer that it was true. He believes what we know to be true, tha...

Hello everyone! It has been a very busy week here in Michigan. This week we are teaching like 8 new people! And wow, we are teaching some amazing, amazing people. These individuals truly love God and want to follow him. They are such an inspiration even to me.  Last monday we said goodbye to our AP Elder Schmanski. As a companionship we wrote a song for him and its not too bad!  This Christmas season is so special though. I am so grateful for our Savior Jesus Christ. He is truly our Advocate, always. The comfort that comes from His Atonement is real. It can change lives. We have had such an amazing opportunity to meet with and interact with some really amazing people.  We had an amazing zone conference this week as well! We talked a lot about the Restoration Proclamation and it's significance and the importance of giving gifts and giving the gift of ourselves to God and to others. The Restoration Proclamation is such an inspired and powerful document. We can't get...

Hello everyone!  Its been kind of a crazy week here in Michigan but it has been a very good one! This week we sprinted again. Under the direction of President Heap, we set some new goals as a mission for spirit led invitations and were able to crush our sprint week goal once more We set a goal for 1000 invitations to church and we got 1234 as a mission! We set a goal for 400 member lessons scheduled or had, and we had 738 as a mission. We set a goal for 1800 invitations to be taught and we got 2197 invitations as a mission. We set a goal for 800 invitations to read the Book of Mormon and got 932 invitations as a mission.   It was a great week for our mission. As a companionship we were able to see a lot of success come from this sprint week! It has been a really good week though! We are teaching some truly amazing people. We are so grateful for them and for the opportunity that we have to get to know them and to contribute to their spiritual journey. We've been wit...

 Hello Everyone! On Tuesday we officially said goodbye to Elder Leavitt! Monday night we had one last little party with him. But we drove him to the mission office and said goodbye, then picked up Elder Jensen! Elder Jensen was staying with us for a couple of nights before he flew out to Japan on Thursday morning. It was awesome to be able to spend some time with him before he left.  On Wednesday, we picked up our new Elder. His name is Elder Sorensen and he is from Ririe Idaho! All three of us lived within 15 minutes of each other back at home, just to be united here in Michigan. He is an MLM original, and he stands at a whopping 6'6". I went from being the tallest Elder in Meridian to being the shortest. Wednesday night we had the 4 of us shacked up in our apartment, but Elder Jensen left at 4 in the morning on Thursday.  On Friday we were finally able to meet with our friend from Afghanistan again! He is doing well! It's been about 10 weeks since we last saw hi...

Hello everyone! It's been another great week here in Michigan! I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving. On Tuesday I had the opportunity to have a virtual interview with President Heap and it was an amazing experience. We didn't learn much about transfers, but he told us that our companionship would most likely be experiencing a change. I also baked some gluten free cookies for a really good friend of ours in the ward! So there are still many cookies being baked.  On Wednesday we were on tradeoffs with the District leader and his companions all day which was awesome! On Thursday we had an amazing Thanksgiving. In the morning, we ran a turkey trot 5k as a district! That was super fun. Then we had an AMAZING zone conference in the afternoon. We received some good instruction from our Stake President, President and Sister Heap, Elder Schamanski and Elder Pepa, and our zone leaders and sister training leaders for the zone. It was such a spiritual and special experience! F...