Jake's South African Adventure

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...

Hello everyone! It has been another great week in Michigan! Last Tuesday I made a bunch of cookies and some giant cookies which was super fun.  On Wednesday we had an awesome district council and we talked about bearing pure testimony, and we all had the opportunity to bear our testimonies and it was a super spiritual time.  Thursday we had some lessons. We also had to sweep the church because the sisters had called us the night before and said that they had to leave the church in a rush because there was some sketchy stuff and they all felt like they should leave. We went through the building and didn't find anything. It was kind of fun though. On Friday, President Nelson gave an amazing message of hope and healing. What an amazing message and an amazing experience. If there's anyone who didn't get the chance to watch it, please do. It is exactly the message we needed to hear during this troublesome time. That message has benefited me so much already. #givethanks ...