Well this week went by quick! Today is our p-day and we got to go to the Temple!!! The following is a paragraph from Elder Decker who is in my district and we usually spend p-day with him and his companion.
I'm sitting down at IHOP for lunch looking at the menu and I want a delicious bacon cheeseburger with a side of onion rings. But no! They criticize me for choosing non-breakfast food at a breakfast restaurant. I wasn't going to let that snotty comment get to me, but then Elder Shanklin and Elder Child decide to go all out in a food eating contest of unlimited pancakes! Now I'm sitting here thinking, I like pancakes, but they get tiring after a while. It does come with a side of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns, but that's the easy part. The real test was the unlimited pancakes that come out two at a time. So I give in to peer pressure, (and I may have also done it for the girls who were sitting with us), NONETHELESS, I join the competition! So Shank and Child dive into the eggs, sausage, bacon, etc. I however, strategically wait, and I start on the pancakes. My idea was to eat as many pancakes as I could, and use the delicious side dishes as a catalyst to enhance my performance upon the pancakes... It didn't work as well as I hoped it would. The waitress didn't bring out our pancakes fast enough! So after pancake #4 we're all decently satisfied, I'm already fetching sick of the taste of them already, but I still have a plate full of tasty bacon and sausage. We wait for maybe 15 minutes before she brings out the next batch and we warf them down, me considerably a little slower than Shank and Child. Then she immediately brings forth number #7 and #8. Shank and Child warf them down and are considering making a truce, while I spend a fetching 20 minutes trying to choke down these last two pancakes! I finally do it, Elder Child steals my bacon, so I really don't like him right now. And we called it a truce after a meager number of only 8 pancakes, (it sounds pathetic, I know). But hey, we're all still alive, and I still have some dignity left. That was a fun paragraph wasn't it haha. Last Saturday we had this amazing barbecue at Smokin Bones, and it was sooooo good. On Saturday we went on exchanges and so I was with Elder Franco who is Elder Deckers companion. Elder Franco is from Baltimore and is a Ravens fan so we are pretty much best friends. We were both salty when the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Believe it or not I resisted the temptation to watch the game. #deflatriotshaterlivesmatter
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Another week has passed. Wow, time is flying. Well first, I'm sorry that I told everyone to expect my email on Tue this week. That will be next week. So to clarify I will be sending my emails next week on Tuesday. Anyway, good week this past week. We have some good potential investigators that I'm excited about, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, because we don't have a lesson scheduled with them yet. We met with almost all our Bishops and our Stake President this past week. All good meetings, we are hoping to get busy busy busy. We are going to start helping out with the mission prep class soon and start going on splits with as many Priests as we can. We again had only half of our Ward Mission Leaders attend our last correlation meeting. It breaks my heart, there are people here that I know we need to be finding but we need our members help to find them and it starts with the Ward Mission Leaders. Well onto more happier and exciting things! There was a Worldwide missionary broadcast this past Wednesday. They changed the daily missionary schedule and the key indicators. So starting with the schedule changes: we plan in the morning now instead of at night (still 30min), we do companion study sometime during the day for 30min to an hour, all missionaries are to be out of their apartments proselyting at 10 a.m., and the point of all the changes is really just more flexibility in our schedule and more exercise of our agency in how we use our time. The other changes, key indicators, is just the numbers we report. We used to report about 10 numbers, now we only report four numbers: new investigators, investigators with a baptismal date, investigators baptized and confirmed, and investigators that attended sacrament meeting. This change helps up focus more on our purpose of helping people actually progress instead of just teaching lessons. P-day today was great, we get 2 extra hours every p-day from now on, it used to start at 10am and now it starts at 8am! So we were able to get way more done and get some good exercise in! I'm hoping to report some miracles next week for you guys! Good things are happening and I'm excited to see where the Lord takes us. God loves you, and He knows you, you are His child and He loves you! Please let me know of anyone that wants to be added to this group email! I love you all!
-Elder Shanklin Hello everyone! Thank you for all your responses. Please expect my emails next week to be on Tuesday, our p-day is getting switched, just next week to Tuesday. This week started slow and has ended with a bang. Not much notable happened Tuesday. Wednesday I got my new companion, his name is Elder Child. We met with server all Bishops and Ward Mission Leaders this week. Just a couple left to visit. We are meeting with a ton of less-actives currently and hope to have some of them return to full activity in the church soon! There is one couple in particular who is really close! There is a non-member 12year old who has been to church for the past four weeks and we are hoping to finally catch him soon and start meeting with him. He goes with one of his friends in our Stake. We have had the opportunity and blessing of staying busy shoveling all this snow, it really helps us meet more people and get some good exercise in which helps me sleep well! I'm sorry this is so short, but I'm out of time. I love you all!
-Elder Shanklin Hello again! Today was a good week, kinda slow, but still a good week. On Tuesday we met with our recent convert, and are teaching him the lessons again after his baptism. Later that day we shared a message with a family we reactivated about a month ago. The message we shared is one we like to share with members called Ask-in-Faith. They are an awesome family with three kids, the oldest of whom is seven. Then on Wednesday we met with a couple who asked us to come to their home each week to have the Spirit more. They have recently started to read their scriptures every morning and it has been great! I really look up to them and all that they do. They are awesome people. On Thursday my companion, Elder Robinson was sick so not much happened. On Friday we taught two less-actives. One recently slipped on the ice and broke his ribs so his is recovering and he told us he knows meeting with us is the right thing to do, but he feels the adversary providing opposition to meeting with us. He has already had a very difficult life and we hope we can help him stay on the right track. The second less-active we met with is divorced and has a son who is a junior in high school. We committed them to go to church and we still have to follow-up and see if they did because we weren't able to make it to their ward on Sunday. Unfortunately not much happened on Saturday or Sunday. We got some big news today. Transfers are every six weeks, and I've been in the field for two transfers. This transfer I'm staying in the area I've been in, but I'm getting a new companion, Elder Child. Also we are getting moved into a new zone, so that'll be a change as well. So I'm serving in the same area, Bountiful South, but I'm switching to the Bountiful Zone from the Farmington Zone, and I'm getting a new companion. It'll be interesting, and I'm determined to make the most of this transfer. I love you all! Oh and we just had one last nerf war for all of us Elders that are leaving the zone.
-Elder Shanklin If there are others that need to be added to this group email please let me know and or forward it to them!
This week went well. Monday we had a nerf war in a church building that had two levels. We made the Chapel off-limits. We played capture the flag and zombies and other games and it was fun. On Tuesday we had a trainer-trainee meeting. My favorite comment was when the commandments were likened to brakes. But dont brakes slow you down? Yes, but they also allow you to go faster. If you didn't have brakes then you wouldn't go 70mph on the highway would you? So I thought that analogy was cool. That evening we had a member of the mission presidency shadow us. We didn't have any lessons scheduled so we did some finding. We scheduled three lessons in about an hour which is awesome. The next day we went down to Salt Lake City for a meeting and we ate at Neilsons on our way back to our area. I got a doublediner burger with fries and a chocolate chip concrete. A little later that day, we had a first lesson scheduled with a 15yr old non-member and we were going to meet at the church but he never showed :( Hopefully we are able to meet with him this coming week. For dinner that day we went to a less-active and non-member couples house. They are really nice people. It was nice because we haven't been able to see them in a while. After the meal we showed the Mormon message "Flecks of Gold" and talked about it and invited them to church. Not much notable happened Thursday. Friday we had our weekly meeting. Once a month it is a Zone Training meeting led by the Zone Leaders, Sister Training Leaders and District Leaders. The Zone Leaders led a training on studying. One of them shared about one of the best basketball coaches ever, I can't remember who it was, but he said that every year, for the first practice, the coach would teach all us players how to tie their shoes, for the whole practice, and that was it. And he explained how tying our shoes is like studying our scriptures. It's simple, it's what we need to be able to move forward, it's important. On Saturday we went on exchanges, which is where you switch companions just for the day. So I stayed in my area and Elder Garvin came to my area. We set up a few appointments with members and scheduled a lesson with our recent convert of a few months. We like to share a message with members called Ask in Faith, based off of the conference talk of the same title given by David A. Bednar. In it we share the message of the Restoration and we recite the First Vision and share pieces of the talk Ask in Faith. Also it's been snowing all week on and off and it was below ten degrees so that was fun haha. The accumulation of snow is the most I've ever seen. Speaking of which, someone left their car in the church parking lot and the snow plow literally buried the car in snow. And so we helped dig it out. The family that owned the car was Tongan, and they invited we come to their house so they could give us food. And so we did, and they sent us away with three full grocery bags of food and freshly made pork and rice and mango juice. I mentioned that they were Tongan simply because they are some of the most loving, generous people I have ever met. That was most of what happened this past week. Love you all!! I'm finally starting a weekly group email! If you know of anyone that I need to add to my list please send me their email and I will add them to the list. Thanks!
Overview: This past week was a good one. We were spoiled by the members on Christmas and Christmas Eve, however; it was a slow week in the actual missionary work sense. Monday was p-day and we had fun with a nerf war and a game called scatterball which is kind of like free for all dodgeball with some extra rules. On Tuesday we had Zone conference, which is where our Mission President and the assistants to the president give some inspired training. We always talk a little about 3NE 5:13 to start our meetings, it is our mission scripture. We also talked about virtue and valor. One of my favorite things I took away from the conference was a quote from my Mission President . He said whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. We had dinner with a family on Tuesday night. We had some amazing spaghetti and garlic bread. Their youngest son is a senior in High School and older than me so that was weird and he made it weirder when he said, referring to me and my companion, "you two look like you're old enough to have kids." One of his older brothers was super friendly went on a mission and everything, but had some hard times on his mission and ended up coming home with a tattoo. He didn't know if he wanted to go to church anymore or if he even believed, but when he got home many of the members judged him really bad instead of loving him. So he had his records removed from the church. It is unfortunate, but situations like these are what we work with the most. Please love those around you. Look to Jesus Christ as your example. And if any sort of judgement comes your way from other members of the church, please do not let it affect your testimony of the restored gospel. Their judgement changes nothing. Sorry for that little tangent. Anyway we asked him if he had any interest in coming back to church and he said no not really so we left it at that and he gave us a ride to our lesson after dinner. We are currently teaching a recently turned eight year old because his dad wants us to. He doesn't need the lessons but they are good for him and help keep us a little busier and help us teach more simply. His dad is a convert and they moved here from the Philippines several years ago. Wednesday was a slow day, our one scheduled lesson canceled and not much happened. We came up to a stopped car just as the owner of the car and another person were finishing putting the spare tire on. We asked if there was anything we could do and gave our number to the owner of the car who seemed to be a non-member and the other person was a member of one of our wards. That takes us to Thursday, we went to one of our favorite places to eat for lunch, Joy Luck, and I got the Mango Chicken. Later we had dinner with a Tongan family who had us eat before them and then they ate after we left. Both of their sons are inactive. One was really nice and said he would like the lessons to help him become active again, but he is 24 so we will be giving his info to the YSA Elders to teach him. Then on Friday we had district meeting. Not much else happened Friday. Saturday was also a slow day. We watched the Lego movie as a district and played some board games until about 9:30 and then we went home. The Lego movie was funny and everything is funnier on a mission so we were all cracking up. I love you all!!! -Elder Shanklin My companion is good. I know he is going through a little bit of a rough patch so I'm going to do my best to help him out. Maybe I'll start making breakfast or something haha. He is 6'4" and very sarcastic so we get along well. Thanks for emailing me it's always nice to read them. How's your ward? got some good homies? You doing well on all sides? Spiritual? Physical? Emotional? Mental? I hope so. We are teaching a few people, but my favorites are moving so I'm sad about that, but nothing I can do about it. Have not made any snowmen, but I have thrown and been hit by many a snow ball. My favorite part about being a missionary is the closeness I feel to God and Jesus and that loving everyone comes very easily at this point in time. I haven't had to deal with much homesickness and rejection is easy to shrug off, but the best remedy for those things is to forget myself and go to work. I wish I had studied PMG. A woodchuck could chuck 3000 smigin loads of wood if a woodchuck could chuck wood. How many tootsie rolls licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? Love you Bob.
-Elder Shanklin I apologize because I am out of time to email, so I will send a good
overview email next Monday. I love all of you! -Elder Shanklin |
AuthorBryson Shanklin. On a mission to serve the Lord. Great friend. Greater lumberjack. I give you, the Forgotten Third King. Archives
April 2017
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