Elder Justin Michael Goodale: Busy in St. Robert

In spite of having just talked to Justin on Friday, it was good to get his e-mail today.
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Hello! Happy New Year! It was so great to talk to you on Christmas! How did skiing go after we talked? The rest of our night was great. After we talked I went downstairs (at the members home that we were hanging out at), ate lunch, then won a game of monopoly. Then we went to another members home, the Hurds, for dinner. We had a wonderful dinner, then we watched the DVD "Joy to the World" with them. They had some other friends, a family of 3, over to eat with us, and Joy to the World was the perfect introduction to the gospel! The Spirit was very strong there, and we are going to go over to the Colbs (the family they invited over) house to teach them the gospel later this week. I love this area! St. Robert is so amazing! The next couple of days after Christmas were pretty crazy, though. Zone Conference is tomorrow (Tuesday), but this week we had to go to Tulsa for 2 days for Zone Leader Council and then we had 2 baptisms to plan for so we didn't have any time to even start planning for our instruction until at least Sunday. Well Saturday afternoon our Bishop called and asked us to speak in Sacrament Meeting (not even 24 hours notice), on the topic of setting goals, then a couple hours later the Elder Quorum President called asking us to teach Elders Quorum! So we had both of those to plan for, then when we got to Gospel Principals class the teacher was gone, so without any notice we got to teach that too! So it's been a fun couple of days. It really wasn't too bad, the talks and lessons all went well and Elder Hirshfeld and I are all prepared for an awesome Zone Conference now. Obviously the Lord provided a way, just like He always does. That's just the life of a missionary!

Zone Leader Council 12/22/09 Back: King, Palomino, Jacobsen, Enfield, Paget, Cosgrove, Otterstrom, Pres. and Sister Merkley, Fisher, Horch, Goodale, Anderson. Middle 2 sisters, Buhler, Block, Meteer, Browning, Hirshfield, Front Hancock, Johnson, Erbe, Madsen, Conrad

Lydon Saunders and family

The baptisms this week went really well, too. Jeff was on Tuesday and Lydon was on Saturday. Jeff is a 25 year old guy from upstate New York (he's here because he's in the Army and is stationed at Fort Leonard Wood) who was street contacted by Elder Johnson about 6 months ago. He tried to brush Elder Johnson off and said that he's more into science. So Elder Johnson changed his approach and started talking about all the different laws of nature and basically saying that God is the greatest scientist. That got Jeff's attention and he invited them back. It's cool because Jeff is this big tough army guy (slash ultimate fighter, he does alot of that), covered with tattoos, used to be into drugs and stuff really bad, but he made a ton of changes really fast and now he's one of the most solid converts that I've ever seen. He's SO excited about everything right now. It's so cool to see the changes that the gospel of Jesus Christ can make in peoples lives! He's awesome! We're teaching his wife now too (not to mention how hard he's working on here) and she's awesome too. She's been really accepting. She'll be baptized soon, then hopefully when he gets home from his deployment to Afghanistan (he won't leave for a few more months) they'll be ready to go to the temple together!Then Lydon, who was baptized Saturday, is a 10 year old kid who's great grandparents, Brother and Sister Eyman (who are both around 80) were both just baptized about 6 months ago. Lydon just got baptized, and we're also teaching his grandma, Rose Carter. (the Eymans daughter) She has a baptismal date for January 12. So we've got 3 of the 4 generations! Lydon's mom is a little tougher, she's got alot of stuff she's got to work through, but they are working on her. So things are going really great here, we've been really really busy, and I love it! I love you all! Have a great week!