And Then There Were Three

Dear Family,

 

   Hey! How's your week going? We've had an awesome week, as usual. I told you last week about Mickey's experience at church last Sunday, right? Well Thursday we set a baptismal date with him for May 15, and today he's packing up all of his stuff and moving out of Rebecca's apartment! She's not ready to get married yet, so he's actually moving in with her parents, who are very active members. He'll be living there til she's ready to make the commitment to get married, which she says she'll do once he gets a steady job, which is understandable. (though if you don't want to marry the guy, why have you been living with him for the last year?) Then yesterday we also set a baptismal date with Timothy Canady, who I told you about last week. He's the one who's wife (who's a member) we met while we were washing our car. They are a sweet family. So that's four baptismal dates right now for May - Melanie Evans for May 8, Mickey for May 15, Tim Canady for May 15, and Chris Cruze for May 22. The two most solid dates are actually the two we set this week for the 15th. Melanie has been out of town all week and won't be back until the end of this week, May 1. So that will only give us a week before her baptism, and she's still got a long way to go before she'll be ready. I'm guessing her baptism will be moved back to either the 22 or 28. Chris should be good to go as long as he quits chewing tobacco before the 22nd, which I think he'll be able to do just fine. The only problem is the same day that Melanie gets back, Chris leaves to go to Fort Riley Kansas for a big training thing.

There are a whole bunch of people in his unit that are all going, including our ward mission leader, another one of our investigators, and recent convert Jeff Barretta. They won't be back until the 16th, which also might mean that Chris's baptism might have to be pushed back. But all 4 of them will most definitely be baptized, they are all solid. Speaking of Jeff, I don't know if you remember but when his wife was down here for 3 weeks for Christmas we were teaching her quite a bit, and though she was tough at the beginning she came a really long way. Then for the last 4 months she's been meeting with the sister missionaries up in New York. Well she'll be moving down here this week! She'll get here Thursday. Jeff's kind of upset because they've been separated for like a year because of his army stuff, and 2 days after she finally gets here for good he'll be leaving to go to Kansas for 2 weeks. But we'll be teaching her while he's gone, because from the sound of things she's just about ready to get baptized and to have Jeff baptize her. There's a chance I'll be leaving the first week of June, and I really hope she's ready before I go. Also we've been working with a man named Brandon, and he has a tentative baptismal date for May 22. We tried to set that with him, and he said he'll be praying about that date. There's a good chance he'll be baptized on that day. He came to church for the first time yesterday and he enjoyed it, but had a ton of questions too. It was very different than the Lutheran church he grew up in. I think he enjoyed it though.

Elder Ewert, Elder Richins, Elder Goodale

Sorry I didn't even mention it but my two new companions are Elder Karl Ewert from Modesto, California, and Elder Blake Richins from Tucson, Arizona. Elder Ewert has been out a long time, he goes home in August (3 months before me), and Elder Richins is brand new. They are both fantastic missionaries. We are really going to see a lot of success with the two of them here. I think that covers just about everything that happened this week. With transfers and whatnot this week was a little slower as far as the number of lessons we taught, but it was still a great week, especially because of the baptismal dates we were able to set. We've been very richly blessed. I love you! Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Amazing Three Transfers

(April 19, 2010)
Dear Family,

Hey! How are you! Sorry I'm emailing you so late, Elder Hirshfeld and I went out to Brother Stith's place today and went fishing. He has a couple of stocked lakes on his property, it was alot of fun. The weather has cooled down a little bit, so it was perfect today. It was really beautiful. The weather has been great. Not enough storms (nothing compared to last spring) but later this week we might get some good storms to make up for that.

So the biggest news this week is that Elder Hirshfeld is getting transferred! After 4 1/2 months together we're finally getting separated. It's been such an amazing 3 transfers. I've had a lot of fun. But he's going down to Branson now, and next transfer should be a lot of fun. Elder Ewert, from Modesto California, is coming in to replace him. I've worked with him a lot before because the 3 months I was in Ava, he was my District Leader. If you look back at my Ava pictures, in one of our district pictures all of us are standing up in a line holding up one Elder in front of us, he's kind of laying across us (see pic posted here). That's my new companion. That call came Saturday night, then Sunday morning right before church started President Merkley called again and asked if we'd be willing to train again! It's so hectic being a Zone Leader and training at the same time.

Elder Ewert will be a brand new Zone Leader too, so it'll be doubly exciting! Elder Ewert is a stud though, a far better missionary than I am, so I'm not worried. This will be my 4th time training! Isn't that nuts? I can't believe it.

Elder Ewert

Things around here are really picking up, really throughout the zone. President Merkley has been making alot of changes since he got here 10 months ago, and they are all starting to finally pay off. It's crazy because the last month of President Seal's mission, last May, we had 117 baptisms, which was a new mission record. Well the highest we've had since then is 68, I think. Usually it's around 40-50. It's weird because I've never met anyone who is so inspired and so in tune with the Spirit as President Merkley, and I would've thought that all these changes would have made a bigger impact. Well Satan was fighting it super super super hard, but it seems like as a mission we've finally overcome many of the obstacles that satan was putting in our path. Even just the last two weeks we've seen monumental leaps in performance and in key indicators, in every single area in our zone and throughout the mission. As we've studied it it's very obvious that it's a direct result of those changes that he's been trying to implement. It's exciting. Well that's all I've got time for right now. I love you all! Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Baptismal "Amazing Grace"

Dear Family,

     We had an amazing week! After a 3-4 weeks that were really slow in our zone, this last week key indicators skyrocketed zone wide! We were really pleased with how hard our Elders and Sisters worked this week, a lot got done. We had the best week we've had in awhile too. It was really good. We only had 3 investigators at Sacrament Meeting, which is low for Elder Hirshfeld and I, but other then that things went great. We found a lot of great people this week and had alot of success. We actually set 2 baptismal dates this week, though we weren't together for either one. Wednesday we were on exchanges with the Assistants, so I was with Elder Hancock and Elder Hirshfeld was with Elder Conrad. While Elder Hancock was interviewing Gloria for her baptism the other 2 Elders went and taught Melanie Evans. She's an awesome lady, but she's been having alot of trouble shaking her pentecostal roots. We've been working hard with her for several months, and Wednesday Elder Hirshfeld and Conrad set a baptismal date with her! She'll be baptized May 15. Then on Sunday we had a couple of the young men come out with us after church, and we split off again. Elder Hirshfeld went out with Shawn Botti, and 18 year old priest (he's getting the Melchizedek Priesthood in a couple weeks) who actually just joined the church about a year ago. They had a great day. I went out with Brandon Theolee, who is leaving on his mission to Chicago on May 5, and another Priest from the ward, John Ervin. We had an amazing lesson with Chris Cruze, who we tracted into about a month ago. He is still really struggling with his testimony of the Book of Mormon (even though he's read quite a bit and loves everything he's read) and of the necessity of the Restoration. He's interesting because he has no problem with the Joseph Smith story, he says if got spoke to people back then why not now? He firmly believes in the Gift of Prophecy. What he's struggling with is why that matters for him and why that makes us the only true church. Really what he's not understanding is the Great Apostasy. So we had a really powerful lesson on the Great Apostasy. We used tons of scriptures (he knows his Bible really well, which surprisingly is rare out here) and the Spirit was just super super strong the whole time. I've had tons of amazing spiritual experiences on my mission, but I'm not sure if I've ever felt it that strong for that sustained amount of time before. The whole hour we were in there teaching it was just burning really strong and guiding everything we said. We were really bold and told him "you've said yourself that a 14 year old boy could not have just made up this book on his own. Well based on that that means there are two options: either he was inspired by God or it was inspired by the Devil." We then bore testimony of how it is another testament of Jesus Christ and of the profound impact it's had on each of our lives, and how we know that it's true and because of that we know that Joseph Smith is the Prophet of the Restoration which the Bible itself clearly testifies that must take place. By the end of it he listed several other convincing evidences that he's seen and kind of bore testimony, then he was like, "I'm going to tell you right now - I firmly believe it's true." So we set a baptismal date for May 22! It was such an amazing experience. Then of course one of the greatest highlights this week - Gloria Miller got baptized Saturday!

April 10, 2010 Elder Hirshfeld, Gloria Miller, Elder Goodale

It was one of the most amazing baptisms ever. She's so sweet. As we were setting up the program we asked her what hymns she wanted. She asked for her favorite, Amazing Grace, but we told her we couldn't do that one because it's not in the hymnbook. But that night we called Brother Bernotski and asked him if he could find some music for it that we could do as a special musical number to surprise her. Well he couldn't find any sheet music with the short notice we gave him, so without any music in front of him he just arranged his own version Saturday Morning. Sister Housel and Sister Norris sang it at the baptism, and it was probably the most beautiful arrangement of Amazing Grace that I've ever heard! It was SOOO powerful! You should've seen Gloria too, she just started bawling the second they started singing. It was really great. I hope you all have a great week! I love you!

Love,
Elder Goodale

A Bit of a Rough Week

Below is the e-mail we received from Elder Goodale on Monday (April 5, 2010) of this week. Today we also received a package from him which included some of his winter clothes, stacks of his letters, and a couple of picture cards. I have posted a few pictures below his e-mail here, and posted all 50 from one card here on Facebook and here on Flickr (though I have added pic descriptions only to the Facebook library). Sorry I don't have descriptions below each of the pictures, below; I'm having trouble editing this HTML.
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Dear Family,

     Hey! How does it feel to have Christopher back at home? How was everybody's Easter? Ours was awesome here. Conference was so amazing! I love General Conference! All 5 sessions were so incredible, I learned so much in each and every one. The Spirit was so strong, too. It's so amazing getting to sit and listen to the prophet and the apostles, there's so much power with that. It sounds corny but at the end of every session I just felt so wrapped up in Heavenly Father's love, like nothing could touch me. The Spirit at each session was such a powerful testimony to me that those men are called of God. I received a special witness from the Holy Ghost of the divine calling of each and every member of the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 Apostles over the last two days, each of them truly is a prophet, seer, and revelator and a special witness of Jesus Christ. The church is true! There's no doubt about that. It was really good timing too, because it's exactly what we needed at the end of a really tough week. Danielle ended up calling off her baptism because of a whole bunch of little concerns, and a bunch of other stuff fell through as well. We're having to drop alot of our investigators because they just aren't willing to keep commitments. It's tough because this area was so on fire, Elder Hirshfeld and I had 9 baptisms our first 2 transfers together (which is a TON for this mission) and now all of a sudden everything's kind of dead. We're going to have to do alot of finding this coming week and hopefully we can get everything going again. The one bright spot is Gloria's baptism on Saturday! Gloria is so awesome, she came to the afternoon sessions of conference on both Saturday and Sunday, and loved it. She's finished the Book of Mormon and has ordered herself a triple so she can start on the D&C and Pearl of Great Price. She's also been working on Jesus the Christ. :) She's pretty solidly converted. It's so amazing, she's a totally different person than she was when we initially knocked on her door 2 months ago. When we knocked on her door then she said that she wasn't being fulfilled in any other churches, and that she wanted to have that light that she saw in our eyes, in her own life. Well, now she's got it. She's really a neat lady. Other than that we've got to get things going again around here, which they will. Things will pick up again soon. It's just been stressful because so much of our time is spent trying to help the other missionaries in our zone too. We've got some really great missionaries that are doing alot of good work, but we also have several that just don't seem to have any desire to work, and it's been frustrating as we've tried to help them and nothing seems to be working. Why go on a mission if you're not going to work? Why waste the Lord's time? If you aren't going to be working, you can do that just as easily at home. Elder Hirshfeld and I have basically become babysitters, which is NOT what I came on my mission to do! Any suggestions for how we can get them to work?

Other than that things are going very well. We couldn't ask for better weather here, and we've gotten a couple of really great referrals lately that look really promising. Things are going great! I love you all!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Rose Carter baptism

Yes that dog is purple.

Our district. March 10, 2010. Elders Draney and Davis (Salem), Elders Goodale and Hirshfeld (St. Robert), Sisters Bench and Hill (Rolla).

Baptism of Marcos, Michael and Tino Rivera. March 6, 2010.