We had a really great week this week. Both of our singles branch investigators with baptismal dates had stuff come up last minute that kept them from church, we'll have to work on that, but we did have 3 investigators who attended sacrament meeting in the 1st Ward. David, who is being baptized this week, was there, as well as Chris and Jessica. They've now come to church 3 of the last 4 weeks, and yesterday Chris even wore a white shirt and tie for the first time! It has now been 14 days since they quit smoking cigarettes, and they have been reading out of the Book of Mormon together almost every night. They are really making a lot of progress. Chris is going to be baptized around Christmas time (he still has a couple of other things he needs to work through) but Jessica hasn't accepted a baptismal date yet. She still feels that she doesn't know enough, and she is still struggling with accepting a modern day prophet. They cooked us dinner last night though, and afterward we had a powerful lesson with them about everything. Yesterday was also the first time that Chris and Jessica stayed for the 3rd hour of church, and Jessica absolutely loved Relief Society. By the time Chris's baptismal date comes around, I think she will be more than ready to be baptized with him, because she is making a ton of progress. It was tough though last night, Chris and Jessica really wanted to feed us dinner before I go, so we had to suffer through two back to back dinner appointments... That's the fun part of leaving an area. There is a member taking us out to lunch today and someone else most likely feeding us lunch on Wednesday, so we'll be fed 2 meals 3 of my last 4 days here. These last 3 days of my mission are going to be extremely busy, because we'll also be getting ready for a baptism! David is going to be baptized Wednesday night! That will be pretty much the last thing I do on my mission is his baptism, which will be really cool. That will be a great way to go out. I'll look forward to seeing you in a few days!
We had a great week. General Conference was amazing! As usual. I've never been disappointed by a General Conference yet... scary though that that was my last one (as a full-time missionary). My last transfer starts next week! So transfer calls came and Elder Bustamante is leaving, which we expected but it's still sad. He's a really great missionary. The cool thing though is that my new companion is Elder Kowalk! If you remember I served with him for one transfer way back in Miami. It's crazy we are getting to serve together again, I'm excited. It'll be fun because last time we served together I had been out 6 months and he had been out 3 months, so we were both brand new and had no idea what we were doing. We just went out and worked! So it'll be fun serving together again, this time as Zone Leaders, at the end of our missions, with all the extra knowledge we've gained. I haven't seen him since then, so it'll be cool to see how much he's grown. It's going to be a great transfer too, we've got a lot going on. Pwordes is going to be baptized on Saturday, and this week we set another baptismal date for a man named Doug for November 13. We've only taught him once, but he's really cool. He recently moved up here from Mississippi. David (investigator) and one of the church members are going to be married on October 16. Then this one family came to a session of conference, they are doing awesome! They are the part member family I told you about. We were able to get Austin to cub scouts on Tuesday, and he's planning on going back every week. My main goal before I leave is to help that whole family to be baptized. I'm excited for them. What else happened this week... We went and did service Friday morning at a place called Helping Hands, we're going to be going there every week now. It'll be good. The only service we've been able to find thus far has been at the Library, and this Helping Hands thing will be a lot better. How has the weather been there? It's been COLD here! Yesterday it didn't get above 60 all day, and this morning when we left to go work out at 5:45, we had to scrape the ice off our windows! It's way to early to have to use an ice scraper! Especially in Arkansas! I think it's supposed to warm up a little this week though. I was surprised to have lows in the 30s this early in the season. So for exercise here there is a member family, the Fife's, who have their own personal gym right on their property that is really nice. And it's a totally private place. So 3 days a week we get up at 5:45 and go work out there, then 3 days a week we go running, I've been doing a minimum of 3 miles, sometimes more. I feel great, the best I've felt on my mission. I love you all! Have a great week!
Northwest Arkansas is a really great place. It's cheap, it's beautiful (I'm sure you've never dated a girl like that...), and the church is really, really strong here. The city of Centerton, which borders Bentonville, is called "little Provo."
The work is going awesome here too, at least in Bentonville 1st Ward. We've got a bunch of great investigators right now that I talked about in my email to mom. And it was cool we went on splits with the bishopric on Wednesday, I went with the Bishop and Elder Bustamante went with one of his counselors. Bishop Chandler and I went to go visit those 2 part member families, and we had really great lessons with both of them. Bishop was way excited because those are two families that aren't on the records, that we found through our own efforts, that are going to lead to several baptisms. He was very excited to go to both of them and then when we had such awesome, spiritual lessons with both of them it was obvious that the Bishop really trusts Elder Bustamante and I now. That's not to brag or anything, It's just awesome that we really have such strong trust and support now from him. That will help alot, and increase on the already great things that are going on here. I'm very excited.--------------------
Things are going well here, we have another baptism set for October 9, his name is Portes. He's Pompeiian (spelling?), basically he's from the Micronesian Islands. Remember way back in Miami I was saying there were a lot of Chuukese people? Well Pompeii is another island very close by. Both are part of Micronesia. He's pretty cool. We've got a bunch of others that are close too. There is a part member family that I may have mentioned to you before. There are a couple of other part member families, as well, that are also making a lot of progress. I anticipate Hannah, who is 16, and Nathan, who is 12, both having baptismal dates this week and we're hoping also that another family (mom Andrea, 10 year old Alicia and 9 year old Austin) will have dates soon as well. I would like to see a total of 10 baptisms in this area, which is very very possible with those 7 I just talked about plus the baptism we had last week. That would make 8 that I am very confident will happen, and we have a very large teaching pool right now, and still finding more, with several others that very well could be baptized before I leave in November. I'm really excited for the work that is going on right now.
Elder Justin Goodale
900 NW A St.
Apt. A
Bentonville, AR 72712
Dear Family,
This has been an amazing week. We spent most of it in Tulsa, which has been incredible. They were training us on a new training system that the church is implementing. They are starting to teach this in the MTC in May of next year, so right now the leadership of all the missions in the world are getting trained on it so that when May comes all of the missions are caught up. All the Zone Leaders were in Tulsa last week getting the training, really it was like an extended Zone Leader Council, then all the District Leaders will be going down to Tulsa today and spending the week there. The whole thing is based on 8 new simplified lessons that the church will use to train missionaries from now on. They are designed to help us be better teachers, leave stronger commitments, and mainly to be more in tune with the Spirit. The 8 lessons that we are taught are:
- The Doctrine of Christ - our missionary purpose
- The Role of the Holy Ghost in Conversion
- The Process of Receiving Revelation. (this one is divided into 3 lessons):
- Revelation through Prayer
- Revelation through the Book of Mormon
- Revelation through Church Attendance
- Teach People, Not Lessons
- We Invite, They Commit, We Follow Up
- How to Begin Teaching
It was amazing the principles we learned. It's all straight from Preach My Gospel, but presented in a way that makes us much more effective. Elder Bustamante and I only had a couple of days working in our area this week, but the few teaching opportunities we've had since being back we've put those things into practice with really amazing results. I'm so excited for this next week to really get all of this going! Unfortunately though, that's really all I have to report on because most of the week consisted of that training, but things are going great. I love you all!
Love,
Elder Goodale
Elder Justin Goodale--------------------
Oklahoma Tulsa Mission
5215 E 71st Street, Suite 300
Tulsa, OK 74136
(1) Can you believe I'm getting transferred again? With this emergency transfer it's been really weird with just the 2 3-week areas in a row. I'm still figuring out where I am here and now I'm leaving again. It's tough because I know obviously I was here for a purpose but I'm trying to figure out what that is. It'll be nice knowing that I'm in Bentonville (Arkansas) semi-permanently (at least for 3 months...) I'll still be a Zone Leader out there, in the Rogers Zone.--------------------
(2) I'm a little bummed because there is actually a family getting baptized on Saturday, just two days after I leave! Their names are Chris and Candice, and their 9 year old daughter Taylor is also getting baptized that day. They have two other boys, but one is 7 and the other is 5. There are good things getting going here.
(3) We had another cool miracle this week from doing service. Last Tuesday we went and volunteered for a couple of hours at the Ozark Food Harvest (we'll be going again tomorrow morning, and basically every Tuesday) and there was a really cool kid there named DeMarcus. He's 17 and he goes to school with several of the members here. We were working with him and got to talking (it was actually him that brought up the gospel) and he was pretty interested and really cool. So the next night we talked to one of his good friends and told her she should invite him to church and see was he said. And he came! That was pretty cool. We're seeing a lot of awesome stuff with service.
Reply from Elder Goodale: That would be nice, but I doubt it... Especially with only two transfers left... Actually I can guarantee you I won't because even if I do get transferred again (which I seriously, seriously, seriously doubt) I would stay a Zone Leader and there aren't any Zone Leader areas in Kansas. I consider myself a 4-stater, though, because when I served in Miami part of our area covered Kansas. In fact the second biggest town we covered was Baxter Springs, Kansas, and we worked there at least once, sometimes twice, a week. We also covered Treece Kansas, but we never worked there because it's like 3 blocks by 4 blocks. The whole town. But we did plenty of missionary work in Baxter Springs, so I think it counts as serving in Kansas. :)--------------------
Elder Goodale: So I heard a rumor that Fresno St and Nevada were going to the Mountain West, and that the WAC is basically dissolving. That is one thing that may seriously keep me from going to Utah State. I mean their football team was already deterrent enough, but now as if the WAC wasn't enough of a joke already it's going to be really bad with Nevada, Fresno, and BSU gone. It'll be scary bad. I'm not sure I want to go to a WAC school.--------------------
Elder Goodale: Wow. That's so amazing. That's really awesome. I'm going to guess the Philippines if he goes foreign and if he stays stateside I'm going to say Florida.
Dear Family,--------------------
Hey everybody I don't have a whole lot of time but we did have a pretty good week. We had Zone Conference this week, that was really good, there's a family that we're teaching that were all at church and they are doing pretty well. They are going to be baptized in the next couple of weeks. We've still been doing a lot of finding, but we've been having a lot of success with part member families here and just this week we sat down and talked about it and really revamped the way we work with members and I think we're going to see a lot of success from it. Nothing else is really new this week though... Sorry I didn't give you more detail. I love you!
Love,
Elder Goodale
To answer some of your other questions, we don't do nearly as much as you did with Zone Conferences. For one, one of the big agenda items at our monthly Zone Leader Councils is planning the next few Zone Conferences. So we all have a part in that and we get plenty of advanced notice. Second, the mission president and the assistants do most of the instructing. We usually do about an hour’s worth, though this last one we didn't even instruct at all. I conducted the meeting, and we had to make all the assignments (as far as like prayers, who would lead us in D&C 4 at the beginning, stuff like that) but other than that we don't have that much to do with that. We work the same hours as everybody else. :) That's something big the missionary department is trying to do worldwide, lessening the responsibilities of leaders so that they are more like other missionaries, I guess you could say. Mainly they've been really changing the role of an assistant to the mission president. They don't do nearly as much traveling now, they only go on a couple of exchanges a week (they used to be on exchanges every day, with lots and lots of different missionaries, now it's just once a transfer with each set of Zone Leaders) and they have their own proselyting area that they spend a significant amount of time in.--------------------
Also, when I first came out we had to call in like what you described, every night everyone called in to their district leaders, who reported in to the zone leaders once everyone had called them, and so forth. But about 6 months ago President Merkley received some instruction from the missionary department that said "destroy nightly phone calls." So he did. We don't do that anymore. Now they just call us on Sunday nights to report all of their key indicators.
In all my previous areas, we were the only missionaries in the city. Actually in each of my previous areas (before Joplin) we were the only ones in the county, and sometimes we would cover 2-3 counties. Our area was always just the ward boundaries. I've also never covered more than one ward (though some missionaries here do). In Springfield itself there are 5 family wards and then the University ward. The north half of the city is part of the Springfield stake, and also goes all the way out to Marshfield, Bolivar, Stockton, and Aurora Wards (you can look at a map for those, and remember those ward boundaries went way further than those towns themselves; for instance the Stockton Ward goes all the way up to Roscoe, MO). Then the south stake takes in the south side of Springfield (3rd, 4th and 5th wards) then down to Ozark, Ava, Branson and a Spanish Branch there, and actually all the way down to Mountain Home, Berryville, and Harrison, which are all in Arkansas. So the stakes are still pretty big. There are a decent amount of members here, it's not bad. They are a lot more heavily concentrated in the south half of Springfield. There are a little more Assembly of God here than in surrounding areas, there are a lot of them, but it's still mostly Baptist, just like all of this area.
We are actually in a sweet minivan, one of just 2 in the mission. We have a 2010 Dodge Caravan. We have one, and then the Zone Leaders down in Springdale, Arkansas have one. The reason those two sets of zone leaders get them is for carpooling to Tulsa for Zone Leader Council every month.--------------------
Sorry I didn't email much earlier. We basically do the same thing every day...
Things have been a little slow, just trying to find solid people to teach. We've had a lot of success with Part-member families, we're just trying to get some of them moving, and we've seen some amazing miracles doing service. Last Friday (the 6th) we stopped by this part members house who we had never met before. The husband, who was the non member, was ICE cold. He wouldn't even talk to us, and was very rude when he did. We finally were able to get him to go get his wife, and she told us that he's very against the church. We asked what service we could do and she jokingly said "well I need my yard mowed..." and before she could stop us or say anything else we grabbed the lawn mower and went to work. I mowed the front yard and Elder Clinger mowed the back, and while he was mowing I helped her put together a new table and chair set on the back patio. Her husband has some health issues related to a really bad car wreck, and so he can't do any of this stuff. As we did it, it made such a huge difference! It was like night and day! All of a sudden he was really respectful and appreciative, and we told him we would be back the next week to mow it again. So the next Friday we went by and he was outside and as we pulled up he came up and told us they were leaving and very sincerely said we'd be welcome to come back tomorrow. It had been very dry (it's been super hot, like up to 105 with very high humidity, creating a heat index sometimes as high as around 115-120) and so the grass hadn't grown any, so instead Saturday we helped pull weeds and do other stuff around the house, and while we did she cooked us dinner! Her husband was completely different. He started being really really friendly, talking our ears off, showing us some of his hobbies... it was awesome. The second service miracle was the next day (Saturday) we went and mowed the lawn of a less active families house. They hadn't been to church in forever, but the next day they came to church and they were there yesterday too, so two weeks in a row. Just from service. We've been trying to get some more organized service going, tomorrow morning we are going for 3 hours to volunteer at the Ozark Food Harvest. I'm very excited for that.
The package I sent home I just threw together as I was leaving Joplin, just the letters I received while I was there then a few things I didn't really want to pack and figured I would be fine without for my last 3 months. By the way, on Thursday the mission office called to confirm all my home info and where I'll be flying home to so that they could book my flight home. Scary! I love you. Have a great week.
Elder Justin GoodaleIt's really interesting to see the Lord's hand in things. This was Elder Conrad's last transfer, and prior to this he had been serving as an Assistant to the Mission President for the last 9 months. As transfers neared, President told him that for sure he would be staying as an Assistant until the end of his mission. But when transfers came 3 weeks ago, two really surprising things happened. One, Elder Conrad was sent to Springfield to be a Zone Leader again for his last transfer. Second, there was an odd number of missionaries in the mission and so a need for a threesome somewhere. President did something I've never seen before and put 3 Zone Leaders together in Joplin 1st. None of us were sure why there were 3 zone leaders there, but this all happened for a wise purpose. I'm sure even President Merkley didn't know why he was doing what he was doing at the time, he was just following the Spirit's promptings. But it worked perfectly because if Elder Conrad had still been an Assistant it would have been a lot more hectic for President to have to call a new assistant mid transfer (the week before Zone Conferences, no less) and get a new Zone Leader in somewhere as well. So this all worked out perfectly. President is so inspired, it's incredible.
1005 E. Division St. Apartment A
Springfield, MO 65803
