Trainer Reunion!

Hello Everyone!

Shashasha SHOUTOUT to my brother! Tis Coby's birthday today! What a great guy he is. Good ole 22. Now you can sing along to that T-swizzle song. Enjoy!

I seriously don't know what happened to this week. Like i feel like i just emailed you this morning... but hey i guess thats alright.

But hey this week we had Trainer/Trainee Meeting! It was so good. I learned so much about how to train! I hope that i didn't corrupt him within the first 3 weeks of training hahaha. I got to see all my buddies from lincoln! My last Companion and my MTC Companion! You probably will see some pictures on the facebook page. And if i had remembered my camara i would have sent some too... but.... Nope.

This week has been a little bit slower just because we had another assignment from our mission president. We are supposed to go find all the people in our area that were baptized within the last 2 years. And our area has like 25 or so. So we have been trying to get ahold of them but haven't quite gotten there yet. But its all good.

Weve been teaching lots of people but once again we are struggling getting them to come to church. A lot of times people will say they are coming but then never show up. And we couldn't go get them because we have ward council. We might stop going to ward council and just go get our investigators and bring them to church... but its hard because we are trying to get the trust of the ward back since we whitewashed. But its alright i'm sure we will figure it out.

So the Zone Leaders live right above us now and so we have had a blast. But anyways saturday night, they got back a little later than normal and we saw that there was a bunch of frogs outside. So we caught probably like 10 frogs and put them in the zone leaders bath tub. It was so funny when they got back and noticed them! I Love catching Frogs though. 

Anyways thats about it!

Love you all!

Elder Carter

Zoo Adventures!

Hello family!

This week we went to the Zoo for P-day so thats why i am emailing later than usual!

It was so Fun! I LOVE zoo's and the Omaha Zoo was voted the best in the world recently! it was so great! Animals are the best. And of course we got to see some penguins so my life is made pretty much. They we awesome with their little flippers and their funny running :)

Anyways this week has been great. We have taught a TON of people. We were tracting one day and we actually found a member that had been lost from our records and he wanted us to start teaching his family. So we have been teaching them and we are hopefully going to be able to get them coming to church and be baptized. 

This week was stake conference for my stake. Again it was great! President Gardner Spoke at it and he actually gave us a shoutout haha. It was pretty funny. President is such a great guy. Seriously hes the best. I'm so lucky to have him as my leader. He's taught me so much and i hope i have the opportunity to work closer with him  because he is inspired.

But after stake conference, we took a gander at our car and noticed that the tire was FLAT... we ran over a screw... and so we had to put on the spare... But the tire was like so rusted on there that we couldn't get it off with 3 missionaries pulling on it.... It literally took us like 2 hours to try and get it off until finally we had some mechanic guy come over and ask us if we needed help. He just got under the car and did some magical thing (smacked it with a hammer super hard) and it came off. But anyways we dropped it off to get it fixed and it was supposed to be done at 3 and... its still not done. SO we don't quite know what to do yet. But thats alright

On Tuesday we have Trainer/Trainee Meeting which is going to be super awesome. President takes all the trainers and talks with them, helps them with any struggles and teaches them what to do. and the Assistants do the same with the trainees. I'm so excited to see all my trainer buddies from my last area too. It's going to be one big party. Except better!

Also Another intersting thing that happened this week, the Zone leaders have moved right above us. We live in a duplex and so its just us and them in this house. Its so awesome. These guys are great haha. We are havin a blast. 

Thats about it for this week

Love you all!

Elder Carter

Revenge on the Turkeys

Hello family!
What a grand week it's been. Lots of things going on been quite busy too.

first off i believe i forgot to tell you we have a turkey infestation here. SO a few weeks ago we walked out of our apartment and there was a turkey just chillin over there across the road. And for some reason it had an extra smug look on its face... And then i noticed our trash can had been knocked over.... And there was trash EVERYWHERE. Gosh dang turkey made a HUGE mess. Anyways last night my companion decided to take out the trash again because we thought the turkey ma have moved on... But got up this morning and Trash everywhere... So now we are devising a plan to catch this turkey. We don't know what we are going to do with it yet but we are going to catch it. It has to pay for its crimes.

But anyways This week we had Zone Conference. Im pretty sure you would have seen some pictures of me on the NOM facebook page or something so this is probably old news. We got to play some inter-zone softball! it was so much fun! Got to show off my sweet skills... well not really i got out both times... haha oh well!

I'm not sure if this has been said before but we have mileage limitations on our car for a 3 week period and since we are "white-washing" the area, we ran out of miles REALLY fast. SO this whole last week we like walked everywhere. We felt like we were back in the good ol days when missionaries didnt have cars. We actually saw a lot of success from walking and talking with everyone we saw. But it was super hot and humid so that wasn't the most fun... but thats alright

Hey nother cool experience... we had someone give us some anti-mormon stuff. It was super interesting because it like wasn't even bad stuff about us. Like it was all pretty much true haha so i don't understand what that was going to do but whatever.

Well thats about it for this week. I'm sure ill remember stuff i forgot to say because that happens every week! but oh well.

Tornado #2

Hello everyone!

This week has definitely been one of the most exhausting weeks of my entire mission. I have never been so tired in my whole life. But i believe it is a different kind of tired... there's the normal physical tiredness and then mental tiredness as well but there is also spiritually tired too. I have been literally trying to exert any force and every force i can towards the missionary efforts. We have seen a few miracles this week from the lord as well.

So a few weeks ago, President Gardner set apart the 4th of August as a special day where the entire mission did a finding activity. We were given Goals for: how many books of Mormon we were going to place, how many times we were going to share the message of the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and also how many people we were going to set for baptism. The goals were: 2 Books of Mormon, 3 Restorations, and set 1 person for baptism. The time span for the activity was from 5-9 PM.

So we went out at 5 and guess what happens... 12 minutes later when we were out tracting... tornado sirens! we looked around and bam there was a tornado, probably about 2 miles away from us. It was crazy. BUT that tornado was a huge miracle for us. Literally everyone came outside of their house and was looking around which 1) gave us an easy conversation starter and 2) gave us the chance to talk to a ton of people in a shortish amount of time. Because of the tornado, we were able to exceed the goals that we had.

On a kinda funny note, we got invited to a baptist church this week and so we went to it yesterday. It was... something else to say the least haha. If you want more details about it go ahead and ask me but it will suffice it to say that i am very grateful for the true church of Jesus Christ. The spirit in our church is unmatched and it is amazing.

My companion and i are doing pretty well! we are seeing a decent amount of success and hopefully we will be able to find people that really want to change their lives for the better. We spend a lot of time knocking on doors here. Like literally all we do every day is knock on doors pretty much. If anyone has any advice about some effective door approaches, i would be more than happy to listen because we are always trying to try new things to see what works and what doesn't.

Anyways its been a great week. We didn't die! that's always a plus.

Love you all!

Elder Carter

This is a video of a local resident filming the tornado on August 4th 2016.

New Area, New Companion, New Opportunities

Holy Moley what a week. As i mentioned in my previous email, Transfers were on wednesday. And Yes I got transferred. This is the story (yes word for word dad):

Tuesday morning... 7:23 AM we got a call from President Gardner. I was pretty much expecting it anyways because he had told me i would probably be training. Anyways he said "Elder Carter. I Have a new assignment for you... I need you to train a new missionary"

I said "Alright President I will do that."

He said "Thank you. I am also going to have you white wash an area (white wash is the term used when they transfer both missionaries out of an area and send 2 new people into the area instead). You are going to be in the Greenview, Council Bluffs Area."

I was definitely excited for that initially because i didn't want to serve in the middle of nowhere. But then i was totally scared because i had no idea what i was going to do. Neither of us have any idea of who the members are, the boundaries, streets, anything! And it was with a brand new missionary fresh out of the MTC! So i was responsible for teaching him how to be a missionary and also assigned to the task for learning the area. I was pretty sure President Gardner meant to have someone else do that...

That night we went over to the zone leaders apartment and traded ties and said goodbyes and whatnot. 

Then Wednesday morning we drove out to the transfer point and picked up Elder Finicum's new companion. He is also training a new missionary. Should be good. Then at around 12 o'clock I got on the transfer van and drove into Omaha to get my new companion.

So I got to the mission office, got my new companion and got the address to the apartment so that i could go drop off my stuff. We got the address and drove for about 20 minutes... to the WRONG place. The mission office had the wrong address! we ended up being like 30 minutes away from our actual apartment. Started off great if you ask me! haha. good times. I'm sure it wont be the last time we get lost!

Anyways my new companion is Elder Hughes! He is from Ephraim Utah! He just graduated high school and came out on his mission. Interestingly enough  He was probably in the MTC with my cousin Bryce. He seems like a pretty good kid so far and i hope that i will be able to train him well. I'm just afraid that my training with hinder his potential as a missionary... So I have to do my best to be my best. 

The area is Pretty sweet though! we are like RIGHT by Omaha. In the mornings, we sometimes run across the bridge into omaha thats how close we are. In fact part of our boundaries go into omaha, right next to the zoo... so i'm sure youll be seeing pictures of me at the zoo in the next few weeks. A few members said that we can use their season passes too so that will be sweet.

Basically we have been knocking a LOT of doors trying to find more people to teach. Still trying to get Elder Hughes to be comfortable with talking to random people! that will come with more practice. Its been good though! we have seen some success

Thats about it i guess. Again any questions, i would be happy to answer!

Love you all!

Elder Carter