Quick Update from Bentonville

Elder Goodale's e-mail home today was quite short, and he forgot to tell us his new address. So if you have anything to snail mail to him, please send it to the mission home address posted last week. I have posted some Bentonville links herein; with an estimated population of just under 34,000, it's the 11th largest city in Arkansas. I bet more than half of those are Wal-Mart employees, too! Bentonville is the county seat for Benton County (county website, Wikipedia entry); the county having just over 200,000 people. He's in the big city/county now!!! :-)  He mentions going to Tulsa for several days of training. According to Yahoo Maps, that's about a 125-mile drive. With his zone leader duties having him travel so much, it's a wonder that they get any work done in their own area!

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Dear Family,

     Hey everybody! This email is going to be really, really, really, short, so I apologize. We're leaving in about an hour to go to Tulsa, where we will be until Thursday night getting training and stuff. I won't go into too great detail on it because so many of the other missionaries that are out have talked about it in their emails and stuff quite a bit. But it is some pretty exciting stuff, basically 8 new simplified lessons that the church has come out with, nothing to replace the lessons we teach, these 8 lessons are actually aimed at us as missionaries, to basically make us more effective teachers. It's all stuff straight from Preach My Gospel, but now in a new format and a new way of training us on it. They've already given us Zone Leaders little tastes of it (we've known about it for a couple of months now, actually a few days before most other missions did. Elder Lynn G. Robbins introduced all the changes to us when he came and visited the mission and came to our Zone Leader Council) and I think this will make a huge difference in our missionaries. I guess in the spring they are going to start teaching these things in the MTC, so they are having all the missions do extensive training on it right now so that by the time the MTC starts teaching it all of the missions in the world are caught up and trained on it too. Christopher is picking a really, really great time to go out on a mission. I'm excited to see the difference this will make. Bentonville (city website, Wikipedia entry, Northwest Arkansas News(paper)) is good though, of course I've only been here a couple of days but it's been awesome. This is a really great area, the church is super strong down here, partially because this is the Wal-Mart headquarters and Wal-Mart really likes recruiting from BYU... It's an awesome area. We cover the Bentonville 1st ward and also Rogers 3rd, which is the singles branch. My companion is Elder David Bustamante, he's from Orlando, Florida, and he's awesome. I love him, I hope I get to finish my mission with him. He's been out 2 transfers less than me, so we came out pretty much around the same time. There is a lot of good stuff going on here, so I'm excited. It's been so long since I've been back in Arkansas, I'd forgotten how beautiful it is here... It's really nice. I love you all! Hope you have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Another Transfer!!!

Wow... so after probably what was close to a mission record for length of time in one area (7 months in St. Robert, MO), Elder Goodale transferred from there to Joplin, MO for three weeks, then emergency transferred to Springfield, MO for another three weeks, and this week he's transferring again! Between Michelle and I, we had a number of e-mail exchanges with him today, so I summarize below. Bentonville, AR, by the way, is the global headquarters for Wal-Mart, so maybe he'll teach some Wal-Mart executives!

We do not know his mailing address in Bentonville yet; we won't get that until next Monday. If you have anything to mail to him this week, please send it to the mission office:

Elder Justin Goodale
Oklahoma Tulsa Mission
5215 E 71st Street, Suite 300
Tulsa, OK 74136

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Justin's General E-Mails:

(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.

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Question from Mom: That is cool (your transfer). You haven’t spent much time in Arkansas so it will be nice for you to do that. Do you think you can get a transfer to Kansas in before you go so that you can  be in every state? :-)

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. :)

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A follow-up to some sports/college, etc. discussions that he and I had been having. It's kind of odd... all his mission he's never talked about this stuff, but obviously with the end in near, he needs to start preparing for what's next. We've already done the application for him to go return to BSU, but he's asking us to facilitate different options, as well, just to have all the bases covered.

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.

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And finally, Elder Goodale's reply to Christopher submitting his mission papers and the question of where he thinks Christopher might get called to.

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.

Multiple E-Mails

Today Michelle and I received multiple e-mails from Elder Goodale: one general e-mail to the family, two e-mails answering various questions that I had, and one e-mail to Michelle answering questions that she had. I post them all, below:
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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

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Springfield District Elder Fernelius, Elder Goodale, Elder Lichuk, Elder Shaw, Elder Noyce, Elder Smith, Elder Shirley, Elder Clinger, Sister Taylor, Sister Cluff

I had previously asked him in some of my letters about his duties as a Zone Leader, as compared to when I was a zone leader in Japan 25 years ago. There, we often got permission to stay up beyond our 10:30pm mandated bedtime, when we had to prepare for zone conferences. It looks like they don't do that. I also asked him about phone trees, when all the missionaries (on my mission) had to call in every night and report that they were in (most missionaries to DLs, DLs to ZLs, and ZLs to the mission office). Though Justin started out doing that, they have that no more. I also asked him what the religious demographics were like there. His replies:

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.

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I had also asked him if now that he was in a big city, he was riding a bike now, or if he still had a car. His reply below; I don't know too many 21-year-old men whom would refer to a minivan as "sweet." :-)

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.

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And finally, Michelle had asked some questions about what they're doing every day, and his reply is below:

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.

Last-Minute Transfer / New Address in Springfield

Dear Family,

     Hey! So this week has been crazy to say the least. Some interesting twists. From last time I emailed, Tuesday was good, we were on exchanges with the Parsons (Kansas) Elders, and we had a really good day. We found some really really prepared people tracting, and got to teach a really awesome Part Member family. I'm so excited for the good things that are happening in Joplin. But then Wednesday morning we went up to Pittsburg, Kansas for a District Meeting, which is about an hour away from Joplin. While at that meeting, we got a phone call from President Merkley around 11:15. I couldn't answer, but about 5 minutes later I went out and checked the message and President addressed me specifically, which made it a heck of a lot scarier (turns out it was just because I'm the senior comp), and said that I needed to call him back IMMEDIATELY, that there was a sense of urgency about this. So I called him back and he said that Elder Conrad, who was serving in the Springfield 1st Ward, needed to go home for surgery and that he would be leaving in the morning and that one of the 3 of us would be taking his place in Springfield (some web links, added Dad: Official City Website, Wikipedia entry, city government website, News-Leader: local newspaper, Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce website). We then spent about 15 minutes discussing different options as far as who could go and what would be best for each of those missionaries as well as what would be best for the area. He then told us we needed to leave the District Meeting early and head home, and that he would let us know by the time we got back to Joplin which of us would be getting transferred. I told him that we could do that, the only problem was that we were planning on going on exchanges with the Pittsburg elders after the meeting so that one of us could do a baptism interview for them that night. He said ok well I'll pray about it right now and make a decision and I'll call you back as soon as I know. So Elder Day, Elder Anders, and I waited anxiously for about 5 minutes then President Merkley called us back and told me that I would be going to Springfield to replace Elder Conrad and that Elders Day and Anders would be staying together in Joplin. So Elder Anders and I, along with Elder Howe who we were exchanging with, left District Meeting a little bit early (though by now there wasn't a whole lot of time left) and headed back to Joplin. When we got home I had about two hours to pack before the Assistants would be able to get to Joplin, since it's about 2 hours from Tulsa, to pick me up and take me to my new area.

Willard District Elder Monson, Elder Dunn, Elder Peterson, Elder Bird, Elder Goodale, Elder Rich, Elder Clinger, Elder Sorensen

By the time I got to Springfield it was about 5:30 pm, but now I'm here! I'm serving with Elder Bryce Clinger, from Lewiston, Idaho. He's awesome. My new address is:

Elder Justin Goodale
1005 E. Division St. Apartment A
Springfield, MO 65803

     It'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.

     Things in Springfield have been really good. A little bit slow, but they are picking up. There is a lot of major opposition that we are facing right now, but there are good things happening too. I love you all! Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Busy Week

Eeek!!! I'm so sorry that I forgot to post Elder Goodale's e-mail from last week, August 2, 2010). You'll find it below:
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     Hey! How is everybody? We had a super busy week this week. Tuesday we were on exchanges with Monett, Wednesday exchanges with Miami, and Friday we exchanged with the Granby Elders. Elder Anders, Elder Day, and I hardly had a chance to do any work together this whole week! It was really cool to go back to Miami on Wednesday for the first time in about 15 months. It was really cool too because there happened to be a ward party the night I went on exchanges there (we didn't plan it that way) so I got to see everyone in the ward! It was pretty cool. The work here is going well. Things have really been picking up here, we had a lot of really good new investigators this week and some awesome member referrals. Maria Figueroa and Richard Wilson both came to church on Sunday, Maria has a baptismal date for the last week in August and next time we see Richard we'll be setting a baptismal date with him. So things are going very well here. Definitely busy though. We've got 3 more exchanges this week, then the following week we'll have a couple more, plus Zone Conference to prepare for. So wer'e staying very busy. Hope you all have a good week!