Hello everyone!

It was a pretty good first week of the transfer! Lots of cool things have been happening. We have been working with one of our investigators, Zach, and he has changed his life so much. He had been in jail a couple of different times, he used to drink a ton and party a lot, and now he has quit all of that. He is working on quitting smoking now. He has been reading a chapter of the Book of Mormon every day and he hasn't missed a single week of church the past two months! It's incredible to see him change and to see how his countenance is totally different. He has more light in his eyes and he is so much happier now. He wants to be baptized but has to wait a while for certain reasons, but he is doing awesome. He said the opening prayer in one of our lessons and he said, "I want you to know God that I know the Book of Mormon is true and that this your true church on the earth. And that Joseph Smith is your prophet and so is Thomas S. Monson. I believe it is all true.".. It was so awesome!... 

On Sunday, we had a new member fireside at the temple visitors center. There were a few recent converts who spoke and the missionaries brought their investigators and other people. The Zone Leaders are in charge of putting the meeting together so we got to set it all up and I had to conduct which was kinda fun. The meeting was really cool! Being able to hear the recent converts testimonies and conversion stories was awesome. Zach came with us and after the meeting we walked around the temple, and he loved it! He wants to do his family history work now and have his ancestors baptized.

Zach & Tyler at the Portand Oregon Temple

Interesting story: On Wednesday we were out tracting and the second door we knock on this guy opens it. He says, "hey gentlemen would you like to come in or should we talk out here?" Elder Craft and I look at each other and we were just like yeah we would love to come in! So we go in, sit down, and this guy is just super nice and everything. We thought he was a member cause this never happens haha! So I was looking everywhere for a sign a that this guy was a member but there was none, and then I saw an entire bookshelf of religious books and different bible books and stuff. I was just thinking 'oh no'. The only people who let us in and have this many religious books are bible bashers (people who try to prove us wrong by quoting the bible and just arguing). So we are chatting with him and he is playing dumb a little bit.  He asks if we are Mormons and if we are on our mission and all this stuff and then he starts pointing out different points of doctrine that we believe that he thinks aren't right. So of course he starts quoting scriptures from the bible and talking about how we aren't true Christians, and he just starts getting worse and worse. He eventually said, "I'm just going to be blunt, you two are both liars. You are brainwashed into believing all these ridiculous lies. Joseph Smith was a lunatic and a liar. So I suggest you stop going around lying to everyone you see.... If you actually want to go to heaven then you are going to have to break away from this blasphemy religion you are brainwashed into following."... Ouch.. Elder Craft and I held our own pretty good. We basically proved all of his theories about Mormons wrong by quoting the bible, and I just said, "look, have you ever read the Book of Mormon? Do you even know what it is about?.... Exactly! You can't claim it is a lie when you know nothing about it. And, do you honestly think that I would leave my family, friends, and entire life behind for two whole years to come tell a lie? Or because I am brainwashed?... I can promise you that I am not brainwashed. I have diligently studied and prayed to know if this true. I know the Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God by the power of the Holy Ghost and you can come to know the same thing if you simply open up your heart."...... It was pretty intense. We told him we had to leave, but we left on a good note talking about Christ.... Gotta love bible bashers. It always strengthens my testimony though! If you receive a confirmation from the spirit that something is true then there is nothing that can prove that wrong. 

Hope you have a great week!! 

Love and miss you all! 

Elder Hill

Tyler & Elder Peterson (left MTC on the same day!)

 Zone Conference & MSL

 Laser tag ...

P-day at Wunderland Amusement Park

It's all a trial of our faith ...

Hi everyone!

So this past week was the last week of the transfer and I am staying in the area!!! Elder Craft and I are staying together here in the YSA Ward! I'm so pumped to be here for another six weeks, I love this Ward!!

 

Tyler & Elder Craft with their different Districts

This week was a little slower - lots of meetings and stuff so nothing too exciting happened this week. On P-day last Monday, we went with some other Elders and Sisters and we hiked up to Pittock Mansion which is like a really old mansion in Portland. There was a really sweet view! 

Earlier in the week I received a package in the mail from some random guy named John Pennington (never heard of or met him before) and it was a pack of CDs and there was a note that said, "Dear Missionary, I hope these will help you with your teaching. Good luck." So we listened to them and they are basically just him talking about deep doctrine haha it was interesting. 

President Ballard's birthday was on Friday so Sister Ballard called us and wanted our Zone to come surprise him! So we got everyone together and we all went to President's house and sang to him and had cake. It was super fun! The Ballard's are the best. 

Yeah, nothing too crazy happened this week but we are working with a lot of investigators and having a lot of good lessons! Our investigators and members are the best! I have made so many good friends here in this Ward! 

This week I was reading the story of Job and it is one of my favorite stories! It's crazy to think about everything Job went through.  He lost his children, livestock, house, wealth, he was smitten with a terrible disease, and none of his friends wanted anything to do with him. And even after all this his faith in God never wavered. But even after He prayed to God asking for help, God didn't answer him as part of his test for Job. So after everything Job had gone through, God even stopped answering his prayers and the heavens were closed to him. And then Job says in Chapter 13:15, "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him"... Are you kidding me!? Even after God stopped talking to him, and he lost literally everything, Job still trusted God. Talk about faith. I know that if we can all have faith like Job did, then Heavenly Father will bless us 10 fold just like he did Job. It's all a trial of our faith. 

Have a good week! 

Elder Hill

 Tyler, Elder Craft & the Sisters raiding the church kitchen!

 Tyler & Elder Craft in their apartment ...

Tyler with his former companion, Elder Giles and Elder Giles new trainee

Airplane houses?

Hello everyone!!

Another week gone! I hit my 14 month mark this past week which is super weird. I have less than 10 months now so I'm getting into the single digits, what the heck...... 

The rain came back this week. It rained literally everyday haha. Looks like fall is almost here. 

So first off crazy story.. We got a call from the Elders out in Farmington which is out in the middle of nowhere, and they said that they had a YSA (young single adult) guy that they wanted us to teach. So we meet them at this guys house which was a 45 min drive out in the middle of the forest. The guy wasn't home and so they were like alright we will stop by someone else's place. So we follow them down the road and they pull off onto a tiny trail that lead into the forest. They then say that we have to walk the rest of the way up this hill into the forest where this guy apparently lived. So we start walking up this hill. We start getting closer and we see something through the trees and I was like, "that's a weird looking house." And then we keep getting closer and it turns out it isn't a house, but it is a huge freaking airplane! It is just this commercial airplane sitting in the middle of the forest! And the funny thing is that someone lives there! They had water and sewage pipes going up into the plane and they had steps that lead to the wing and you would walk on the wing to the door. It was crazy! The guy wasn't home that lived there, but we looked inside and all the seats were taken out and he had a nice little setup. It was so weird haha. It was like an episode of Lost or something!  There were airplane parts on the ground everywhere! So strange. 

This week we had some really sweet lessons! We met with this guy named Tyler for the first time and we were teaching him just on his porch and we taught him the Restoration. As we were teaching him, I quoted the First Vision and Tyler says, "dang I got the chills when you said that" and we were just like, "dude that's the Holy Ghost!" So he came to church that week and he is really interested in learning and coming back to church again! 

We had another classic Oregon lesson where we were teaching out in the rain. We met with Ben at the Beaverton transit center and we were teaching him the Plan of Salvation and it just started pouring rain. He said it didn't bother him so we sat on a bench in the rain and taught the Plan of Salvation.  It was a classic Oregon missionary experience haha.

We had another awesome lesson with our investigator Zach who is trying to make a lot of changes in his life and quit smoking. We had an amazing spiritual lesson with him and we asked him what we could do to help him overcome his addiction. He tossed me his lighter and cigarettes and told us to chuck 'em. It's amazing to see how God can help a person change their life so much to allow them to be so much happier. 

Another cool thing that happened was we gave a blessing to a recent convert. Elder Craft did the anointing and I did the blessing and after it was done he was like, "I could literally feel the pain leave my body as you were speaking Elder Hill. That was the craziest thing ever." So that was pretty cool. 

Hope you all have a great week!! Don't be afraid to send me a letter or somethin;) 

Elder Hill

P-day hike to Pittock Mansion in Portland

The orangutans were the best!

Hi everyone!

This week was crazy! On P-day we went to the zoo with the Sisters and one of our recent converts. It was super fun.  The orangutans were the best haha. 

This week we were so busy. We taught 30 lessons and found 8 new investigators! We met a lot of really interesting people. There was one person in particular that was really cool who had a crazy experience.... We met a guy who had a "death" experience where 5 years ago he overdosed, was in a coma in the hospital, and was "dead" for a short period of time. He had a dream during that time where an Angel walked him through his life and what he had done. He explained how he was like a "Spirit" and he was able to review his life with this angel speaking to him about it. He basically described the Spirit World and what he said lined up almost perfectly with the Plan of Salvation and what we teach. He said how through his experience that he believes God loves all of His children and none of us will be sent to "hell," but we will live in different levels of happiness. We were just like dude that's very similar to what we believe! And the thing that stood out to me the most that he said was, that as the Angel walked him through his life he said he didn't necessarily feel eternally damned for doing drugs or breaking the law of chastity. He said yes it definitely mattered because it made him unclean and he felt bad about it, but it didn't matter cause it already happened. He said the thing that pained him the most during that experience was when the Angel showed him the times that he made fun of people who believed in God and he tried to lead them away from that. He said that was by far the worst feeling he felt. The Angel asked him what he would do if he had a second chance, and then he woke up from his "coma". He said he knows that God exists and there is a heaven...... So then the next day during my studies I was studying Alma 36 about how Alma had a very similar experience. What I thought was interesting was that Alma never mentioned any very specific sin that he committed (he said he didn't keep the commandments as a whole).  The thing he was specific on was that he was "seeking to destroy the church of God" and also when he said "Yea, and I had murdered many of his children, or rather led them away unto destruction" other than this, Alma just gives a general overview that he didn't keep the commandments of God. I pondered that and thought how interesting that is, how both this man and Alma felt the worst knowing they "lead them away unto destruction". Definitely a testimony builder for me and how real the after life is. And also how important the things we do here in mortality are. 

Everything else is going great! We are trying to teach all of our investigators and get them baptized!.. The weather is super nice and we are just trying to get our Zone pumped up and working hard! 

Thanks for the support!

Love you all! 

Elder Hill

 Missionary work on Facebook!

Are you an Eagle or a Hog?

Hi everyone!

So this week was pretty good! Elder Craft and I had to give a training at Zone Conference on Tuesday and we didn't find out what we were training on until Monday night and so we were up until midnight planning it out haha but it went pretty well... 

Nothing else super exciting happened this week. We had been teaching a guy named Everett and he is 20 years old. He has high functioning autism and so he is pretty normal, but can be very child-like sometimes. We were teaching him this week a couple times and every time we asked him a question and he answered it right he would start doing a slow clap. Then throughout our lessons he would just randomly bow his head and start praying. He told his mom that he was going to church and sadly she said that she wasn't comfortable with that and he had to stop meeting with us. So we were super bummed about that.

We have been teaching another guy named Ben for the past month. He had no religious background at all and had never prayed before.  We met with him again this week and he said that God has answered so many of his prayers this past week! It was pretty cool, and he wants to be baptized! So we are working on that with him. 

Spiritual Thought: During studies, I was reading a talk about character and how you know the character of a person by the activities they do in their free time or when no one is looking. The speaker used a comparison of an eagle and a hog:

"He said: Let us take the eagle, for example. This bird works as hard and as efficiently as any other animal or bird in doing its daily work. It provides for itself and its young by the sweat of its brow, so to speak; but when its daily work is over and the eagle has time of its own to do just as it pleases, note how it spends its recreational moments. It flies in the highest realms of heaven, spreads its wings and bathes in the upper air, for it loves the pure, clean atmosphere and the lofty heights. On the other hand, let us consider the hog. This animal grunts and grubs and provides for its young just as well as the eagle; but when its working hours are over and it has some recreational moments, observe where it goes and what it does. The hog will seek out the muddiest hole in the pasture and will roll and soak itself in filth, for this is the thing it loves. People can be either eagles or hogs in their leisure time." I thought that was really cool! I think we would all much rather live the eagle life than the hog life! 

Have a good week! 

Elder Hill

Tyler & Logan (he was baptized a couple of weeks ago and is now moving to South Carolina)

A New Elder & a Homeless Man

Hello!

So this week wasn't as exciting as last week. I really don't remember what happened. I swear each day is such a blur. One moment I wake up and then an hour goes by and I'm back in bed. It's weird how fast time is going. 

So on Tuesday, we were walking down the street in a more ghetto part of town, and we saw a 20-year-old rough looking guy sitting on the sidewalk. We are always looking to find YSAs so we go talk to him. We sat down by him and he was just like, "oh hey, guys what's up?" and we started talking to him and he ended up just venting to us about his life and how he just wants to grow weed but people keep lying to him. He was also talking about how he is homeless but is working on his rap career. He said he is super, super depressed though. We read in Alma 7 with him and gave him a Book of Mormon and he thought that was awesome. He started crying and he said that he would read the BoM and come to church. It was pretty cool!... So we exchange numbers and we texted him that night and asked him how everything is going and if there was anything we could do for him. He was like, "yeah there is actually. Tonight is my last night before I go to rehab... Do you have a gram of meth that you could get to me?" Hahaha we were like, "man I don't think he read the BoM!" We told him that reading the BoM and feeling the Savior's love is far more powerful and enjoyable than any drug he could take. He said "okay," but we haven't heard back from him since. Hopefully things workout for him! 

Another cool thing that happened was when we were on a split with some other Elders. We went tracting with another pair of Elders in another area. I went with Elder Ahlemann; he has only been out two weeks. He is a little shy and doesn't like to talk to people that much. We were knocking doors and no one was interested and he was getting a little discouraged. So we were standing in front of the next door and I stopped Elder Ahlemann from knocking on it. I asked him if he actually had the faith that this person will be interested and he said, "ehh not really." So I told him that if he doesn't have the faith to find people to teach then the lord won't help us find people either. We talked about it for a little bit and he got pumped up to find people, and we then knocked on the door and the person was super interested and became a new investigator! It was sweet. Elder Ahlemann was pumped haha. 

We have zone conferences this week so it will be our Zone and two other zones. We have to give a training on something we don't know about yet so it should be interesting! 

Thanks for all the support! 

Love you all! 

Elder Hill

Tyler holding the "Liahona" with Elders in his Zone

Missionary Leadership Conference at the Mission President's home

Busy, crazy, stressful ... awesome!!!

Hey Everyone! 

This week was probably the craziest, busiest, most stressful, most awesome week of my entire mission! 

So first off we had a baptism!! My good buddy, Logan Martin was baptized on Saturday and it was such an amazing experience. He has completely changed his life around in every way and he says he wants to be a missionary as soon as possible! He asked me if I wanted to baptize him and of course I said yes, absolutely! It was such a humbling experience to be a part of his baptism. After the baptismal ordinance, Logan and I were walking out of the font and he could not stop smiling. I think the happiness that we were both feeling was overwhelming. I was filled with a feeling that I can't really describe. It's hard to put into words but it was the best, most joyful feeling ever. I can't even imagine how Logan was feeling! And it's amazing to think that the feeling that we both had is only a tiny fraction of the happiness that we can feel in eternity. I caught only a small glimpse of the love that God has for all His children. D&C 18:15 "And if it so be that you should labor all your days in crying repentance unto this people, and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father!" 

So some other crazy things that happened this week - we now have Facebook and Facebook messenger on our iPads! We are 1 of 15 missions in the world that are piloting the new online proselyting for iPads. On Wednesday, we went to MLC (missionary leadership conference) and received the new training from the missionary department on how to use it. The next day Elder Craft and I had to train our Zone on how to use it and WE had no idea how to use it, but it went pretty well! It's super weird having Facebook on our iPads, but it's really cool cause we are able to teach and talk to a lot more people using group chats and video call-ins. We had a couple video lessons this week and a couple Groupchat lessons! It was sweet! We will see how it goes the rest of the transfer! 

So this week we started teaching this guy named Everett! We found him looking for someone else and he saw us and told us he wanted to take the lessons! He has mild autism so he is pretty norma,l but then he will get really child-like but we have the best lessons with him. We were teaching him how to pray and he couldn't remember and so we kept practicing and he finally said all the words right with the beginning and the end of the prayer and he got so excited! And so we kept going on with our lesson and then when I was in mid-sentence he quickly bowed his head and folded his arms and starts, "dear Heavenly Father..." And he said a prayer and looks up and says, "I did it again!" He kept doing the random prayers throughout the entire lesson. It was great!

Elder Craft is a super good missionary and we have been doing well. I'm excited for this transfer!! Thanks for all the support! 

Love you all!! 

Elder Hill

Hanging with missionary friends - Sister Ball, Sister Hulet, Elder Itufia, Tyler, Elder Hintz, Sister Downing

Sweet, matching ties!!