Monthly Archives: August 2012

Last Week in Howell? Letter from Aug 27th 2012

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This week was a pretty awesome week for us. I spent two days away from home which was kind of lame but I got to finally go down to Ypsilanti and meet a couple people that Elder Erickson told me about.  I spent a day and a half in Chelsea too with Elder Minick and that was really fun. Our district is doing awesome and I’ll be sad to leave it. We have 3 districts in our zone and we always have the highest numbers. Which is especially awesome because they other two districts have 4 companionships and we only have 3!! In the end though, numbers don’t really reflect your effort, but it is nice to have some stats to back up your decisions.

Nothing really new happened this week, but we had a lot of people make good progress. We had two investigators come to church and that was pretty sweet. Plus we had a lot of less active people that we have been working with finally come to church. Hopefully we can keep them coming out and get activated again. We helped another person move this week so I was a sore for a day or two again. It sucks not really having any time to work out at all except for the 30minutes we have in the morning. Oh well, I’ll fix it when I get home!

I don’t really know how emailing around labor day will work. I know our library will be closed and normally we would email Tuesday morning. But chances are I will be transferred that Tuesday but I’m still not sure how it’s going to work. We get transfer calls this upcoming Saturday and I’m still on the fence about leaving or staying. I would love to stay, but at the same time it’s nice to get a fresh start in a new area. Plus two of my favorite families have already moved out. And I don’t want to leave Howells apartment because it’s so awesome and big!

Last week I also taught someone how to change the strings on their guitar. I’m using skills from home more and more everyday! I ended up pulling out my guitar for awhile too because I was missing it. I’m starting to finally get ok on one of the songs out of the book you sent me while I was in Detroit. I’m going to be taking it to a family home evening tonight too so that should be fun. Other than that we don’t have to many special plans for this week. We have a lot of dinners set up though! Which is great because I’m starting to get tired of Wal-mart rice, tortillas and potatoes! Haha I have other stuff though so no need to worry.

Well, hope you guys have an awesome week! Love you and talk to you later!!

 

-Erik

 

21 Still Feels Like 19 When You’re a Missionary

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Note: Erik just turned 21 on the 19th of August! (check out his link below!)

So this week was pretty hectic and crazy for me. I had my one year temple trip on Thursday and that was pretty sweet. But then I got sick and was totally out of it on Saturday and Sunday. I’m still getting over the last of it today too. The temple trip was pretty cool. I forgot that all the temple workers from Howell work on Thursday so I saw about 5 people from the Howell ward there. I was hoping to see a couple from Romeo, but they don’t work until the evening usually. The Detroit Temple is pretty nice. It’s really small though. You can really only fit 20 people in the celestial room before it starts to feel crowded. It was good to go though and I got to go with a couple of my missionary friends too. Afterwards we had a big lunch and testimony meeting at the mission home and that was good. It’s always good to be fed well too!

On Saturday we went to downtown Howell and checked out the Mellonfest that was going on. There were a lot of cool booths and a pretty good band that was playing so that was a lot of fun. I always like to get out in the public eye and show everyone that missionaries are normal people who like to have fun too. We stopped in at Howells music store and I talked to the owner for awhile about Bonne Nuit and how I gave it all up to be a missionary but I’m lucky I get to use my guitar occasionally! We had a good talk for 15min or so and then I left him a mormon.org card and told him to check out my profile there. I forgot to tell you guys that I created one. You can check it out at http://mormon.org/me/7T1N/Erik. (check out his link!) And if you get time, you should make one too. It’s the easiest way to share the gospel! I’ve encouraged all the members to get online and make a profile.

Other than that our week was pretty standard. Our numbers were low this week with me being gone for an entire day and then mellonfest going on and also me getting sick. It was kind of dissapointing but what’re you going to do? We have a couple baptisms coming up that will hopefully happen in the first few weeks of September so keep your fingers crossed. My time is Howell is probably growing short too. I put in a special request to President Holmes when I had my interview with him that I wanted to stay for another transfer. All he said was, “Well we have left missionaries in an area for a long time before…” I really would like to stay even though one of my favorite families just had to move out. I’m pretty sure I’ll be leaving in two weeks though so I’ve already started having people write in my mission memories book. Well, thanks for all the birthday wishes and tell everyone at home hi for me!

Love, Erik

Erik’s Letter home from Aug 13, 2012 (Photo’s coming!)

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So like I said in our email chat earlier, we have an investigator on a pretty solid baptismal date for Aug 25. We have to wait for him on a few things so that may take until the middle of September… But hopefully it doesn’t! We also have another investigator on date for Aug25 but that one is a little more flaky.

Yesterday at Ward Council, the bishop brought up the fact that in the past 6 months we’ve lost a ton of power families. All in all about 20 people. He told everyone that we all need to step up our game and re-build the ward. Every Presidency is now re-assigning home teachers to everyone and we’re placing a huge emphasis on easy missionary work. Stuff like inviting your neighbors and friends to ward activities, inviting them over to dinner etc.

Other than that, things have been pretty standard. We had 2 long meetings this week on Tuesday and Thursday. Each of them were from 9:00am to 4:00pm. We usually have one long meeting a month and I can do that, but 2 huge ones in the same week is tough. We always hit rush hour through construction on our way back to Howell to so we usually don’t get home until around 7:30PM. The meeting always runs over too so that doesn’t help. Still, we learned a lot of cool things to help us teach better. And training meetings have awesome food we don’t have to pay for so that is a plus 🙂
Well, I don’t have much more time so I guess I better. I’m attaching some pictures of our apartment so you can see my awesome district leader wall and just how nice our apartment is (we easily have the best in the mission; another reason why I want to stay). Also how hard the rain was pouring the day that the bottom floor apartments flooded.
-Erik
ps: that storm brought in a tornado warning in Chelsea which is about 45 minutes away from us.