February 25, 2013

Dear Family and Friends!

Honestly i don't know where to start right now. My whole life out here has taken a 180 degree turn. Also i got a call about a package Saturday so i am going to be getting it tomorrow at our zone conference. Allie i hope you had a amazing birthday and man i wish i could see yours and Derek's house. send me some pic's of it!

So Wednesday i moved into my new house in Orem and man is it the ugliest/oldest basement i have ever been in. haha On top of it i don’t think the carpets have been cleaned or even vacuumed for ten years or more! The have a really bad smell to them and every time i get out of the shower i try to tippy toe into my room and put socks on as fast as i can so i dont walk on the carpet bare foot! There were 3 baptisms scheduled with i got in this area and they successfully happened Saturday. It was a great feeling to come right into a area and have baptisms. It boosted my energy and desire up more and made me have a very positive look on this area, which is something that i need because now that those people were baptized they are literally only teaching 4 other people and that is it! Soo our teaching pool it tiny and we have a lot of work to do looking for new people to teach. This area is also at least twice the size or more then my last one and we cover 5 stakes and and 2 Spanish wards so this last Sunday we went to 2 churches back to back. it was great and we have about 4 correlation meetings a week which are kinda pointless right now since we only have about one person to report on at each correlation meeting.

I have a very funny story to tell you guys that happened Thursday night this week. My companion and i were visiting people so i could meet the new people in this area and we went by the Martinez family who had 2 kids that got bap. this last Saturday. I was sitting there talking with the mom and getting to know the whole family for a little bit and met Andrea who is 12 and Kevin who is 10 who were getting baptized this up coming Saturday. We were there for about 20 minutes and we my companion started asking questions about the there baptism coming up and he asked them who they would like to baptize them. The 12 year old girl Andrea says "well can anybody i want baptize me!?" And of course we explained that she could have anyone she wanted as long as they are a male that has the priesthood. Well right after we got done explaining she immediately stands up and points right at me and says "I want him to baptize me! " Well you can imagine the look on my face as i was shocked to death because i had only known this girl for 20 minutes or less! On top of it i felt a little bad since the missionary that had been teaching them and i came in and took his place, we are really good friends and we were in the same district together in the MTC. I tried talking her out of it and suggesting Elder Hill should do it since he had been teaching her but she was not going to change her answer, so this last Saturday I got to baptize Andrea Zulema Navarro Martinez. It was an amazing experience and I feel like that it is now my responsibility to look after this girl and make sure that she is always active on the church for the rest of her life. It was a very humbling and touching experience for me and am still wondering why this girl wanted me to baptize her.

Last of all i want to talk about my new companion Elder Arnett. He is from Louisiana, has about 3 months left in his mission, and is twice the size of me. He was state champion in wrestling 3 years in a row and lets just say you do know what to be on his bad side. To start he does not like talking to much, so our first day together not too much was said but things have been getting a lot better. We do have a car in this area, so i am not walking anymore, but my companion drives and just in the last 5 days we have almost been in 3 accidents. Oh and also he listens to the radio in the car (mostly the country stations) and lets just say you do not tell him to turn it off. So it looks like for the next transfer or so i might be having to deal with that and he does not like doing planning at all and doesn't care at all about what other people think. So looks like i am going to be in for the ride this next transfer and I hope i make it out alive! haha Also it is soo funny to hear him speak spanish because he has a thick south accent when he speaks English so he sounds really funny when speaking Spanish and the Latinos always give him weird looks when he starts talking. haha

That is everything major that has happened and i feel like i am going to be relying on my prayers a lot this transfer but in the end i am still excited and know that i am going to learn i lot from this transfer. I am so grateful for your prayers and i love you guys soo much. Have a wonderful week in the nice warm weather!

Elder Breinholt

P.S. I have been going to the gym every single morning since we have one right down the street from us and hopefully i will be able to get rid of my chimpmunk cheeks!!

February 18 2013

Time for change!

I felt really bad about not having a letter for you guys last week and I will try to fill all of you in on what's been going on lately.

I don't know if you remember me telling you that this transfer is only 5 weeks instead of 6 so today I got my transfer call and... yes, my time is done in this area and I am leaving. I am sad of course, because I will miss a lot of people but I am not going too far away. I am getting transferred to Sharon park in Orem! My companion is going to be Elder Arnett and from what I have heard he is a really good guy. I could just feel that I was going to change areas and that the Lord needed me somewhere else. I won't lie, I thought I was going to be a trainer this transfer but, President reminded me again today that he wants to use me to help uplift others so maybe one day I will have a son out here on the mission.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Valentine's day and mom thank you for the goodies! You guys can send me any kind of goodies you want now because I am going to have a gym every morning in my new area. This area the past two weeks has been really good and we have been teaching more less active lessons than almost lessons to investigators, just in the last two weeks we have gotten 3 families to come back to church and it has opened up the doors for us to start teaching some of their kids that were never baptized. I have really seen more importantly then ever how important it is to teach less active members.

Also we had something amazing happen that I wanted to tell you about last week. Hopefully you remember the De La Rosa Family and how everyone in the family was baptized besides the mom. Well a miracle happened where the mom has a friend "Dulce" and her daughter living with them from Mexico. One day we went over there and started talking to her friend and she was interested about learning more right away, so we have been teaching them for the last couple of weeks and the mom has been sitting in on every lesson with her friend. It's amazing how the Lord works, since the mom wouldn't hear us out at all and now that her friend is interested she actually wants to learn more too. In my eyes this friend is a answer to many prayers.

Besides that we have found a couple more people to teach and are still planning on having two baptized at the end of the month. I can't think of anything else to say right now, but my head is still kind of going crazy thinking about my new area right now.

The hardest thinking about being in a area for too long is that it is so hard to leave and I am just hoping that I will have enough time tomorrow to say goodbye to everyone. I was shown once again though that God has a great sense of humo,r because I said yesterday that the one place I don't really want to go to is Orem and of course that's where I'm going! It's like the time I said, I don't want to serve a mission in Utah and then I got called there! ha-ha, but look at me now. I love this mission and I know that I will probably love it in Orem. I want to congratulate Derek and Alli in getting their house finally, and mom and dad with having another anniversary! I love you all and I want to hear how Coles farewell goes! Good luck Elder Stechnji and I know you will do great! Have a good week everyone and preach the word!

Elder Breinholt

February 11, 2013

Dear Family,

Well if you guys want to know of the worst thing that could ever happen. I was just about done typing my letter this week and all of a sudden everything I was typing just got erased. I feel horrible and I wish I could just re type it all for you again, but I don't have any more time. But I just want to say that Young I love you and I am proud that you made the right choice. Cole I am so excited for you to be up here soon! Cheyenne, that is awesome that you got your patriarchal blessing and always read it for guidance. and last dad I can't believe that mom out worked you with that trainer on your vacation! ha-ha its all good but the church is true and I love you all. I am sorry you can't hear about my week, but just know that is was really good and I saw some big blessings come through this week.

Elder BREINHOLT

February 4, 2013

Feliz Cumpleanos Papa!

By the sounds of it, you guys gave dad the best surprise party ever! That is so awesome and you ever thought of having the cop call and be there was a genius! I would have never thought of that! I wish I could have been there to see it all, but it's all good I guess.

I don't know if you remember me saying that I am done with the snow, but it came back to bit me in the butt this week! It snowed for two days straight here and the snow was deep! It is melting faster than it did before but I found out that it's pretty fun riding a bike in a foot and a half of powder. I just tried to visualize that I was snowmobiling and I got my own thrill out of it. ha-ha, My companion was hilarious to watch as he tried to ride in the snow. Just imagine a 250 pound Mexican riding a bike in the deep snow, I can't even count how many times he fell. The best one, was when we were trying to ride through these big piles of snow on the side of the roads and they were pretty soft to where you could just plow right through them. My companion was ridding as fast as he could into one and half way through he hit something hard in the middle and he FLEW over his handle bars and landed on his face! ( luckily he landed in the snow.) I was laughing soo hard though!! I love my companion though. He might say some weird things in the middle of a lesson sometimes and think he is a gangster from Cali, but he has a soft heart.

With teaching this week we had a wonderful lesson with Izabel Cruz who I have been teaching since I have been here and it was the first time I had ever seen here cry in a lesson. she is so ready to be baptized, but she just doesn't feel like she is herself because she says that sometimes she is just lazy and doesn't feel like going to church or reading every night. She doesn't realize that all of that is normal! ha-ha She had a boy friend though that is a member and was a horrible example to her and also broke her heart so that is another obstacle we are trying to tackle. She is going to meet with the Bishop of our ward this week to talk to him about it and get these feelings off her chest. We ended up dropping another investigator this week though. The worse part about it was is was a 10 year old girl! We have been teaching her for a month and a half and she is just not understanding anything we tell her. She has ADHD and said that she would love to be baptized, but she can't even comprehend the meaning of faith and won't give us any response back when we ask her a question. I honestly don't want to baptize a little girl if she doesn't even know what she is doing. We finally told the mom that she just needs to talk with her daughter about it all and call us when this week if she has agreed or not to work with us as we teach. Hopefully it can still work out in the end...

That is all the info I got for you peeps back home for now. Mom, Dad thanks for the sweet pic you sent me and be save out there on the slopes. I hope all of you that had birthdays last month and got my letters. But please pray for my investigators and especially Izabel Cruz, Maria De Los Angeles, and Hermana De la Rosa. I love you all!

Sincerely,

Elder Breinholt