More Mighty Miracles

Dear Family,

     Wow, we saw a lot of miracles this week. It was a busy week, but it was definitely worth it. Tuesday was a pretty normal day, except we taught seminary so we had to get up at 5 am. I don't miss that... Seminary was a lot of fun and I'm really glad I went to seminary all 4 years, but I don't miss waking up at 5 one bit. Then Wednesday we had Zone Conference.

Elder Hirshfeld, Brother Holifield and Elder Goodale

President Merkley gave a really powerful talk on the Book of Mormon, and our instruction went pretty well too. I was pleased with how it went. After Zone Conference we lost Elder Robinson, though. Kind of a relief and also sad at the same time. He left with the Assistants after Zone Conference to go down to Ava, as I mentioned last Monday he was getting Emergency Transferred in there. He'll do good. It was tough being in a tri-panionship, so it's been nice since he left, but we miss him. After Zone Conference I went down to West Plains and spent the rest of Wednesday there as well as all of Thursday. I went back to St. Robert Friday morning. It was fun in West Plains, but a little rough too. They didn't have any set appointments (they had tried but couldn't get any) and even their dinner appointment canceled. We didn't teach a single lesson all day, which of course wasn't any fun, plus their car was in the shop so we were on foot all day. And it was pouring rain all day. Needless to say it was a difficult day... We got really wet. We were able to knock on a lot of doors though, and talk to a lot of great people. So it was good. Then Friday morning I got to wake up at 5 again and go teach seminary down in West Plains! Up to this point I'd only taught seminary one time my whole mission (way back in Miami) and this week I was asked to do it twice! In 2 different areas! It was fun. I'm going to skip Friday and Saturday (both good days), and just skip to Sunday, because that's when the biggest miracles happened! First off, we had 9 investigators at church, which was amazing! The whole Clewis family came (Rocky, Jessica, and 13 year old Austin. Plus 6 year old Rocky Jr., but he's not an investigator... The only thing holding them back from baptism is the husband. Jessica is ready whenever he is.), Shawn Jacobi was there,

Elder Hirshfeld

Wyteria with her 2 sons (we haven't taught the 2 kids before and didn't count them as investigators, but she's a new investigator we got Friday. She ended up walking out halfway through the meeting, but we ran into her today while shopping and I think we resolved everything. We were able to set up another appointment at least.), Amber Hook, Mickey, Gloria again (she's still set for baptism on April 10), and Danielle Smith all came. It was really cool. After church Shawn Botti, an 18 year old kid from the ward that just joined the church last year and is now getting ready for his mission, came out with us all day. It was the second Sunday in a row he's done it, which was cool. He's a cool kid and a lot of fun. In the evening we were able to have a really good lesson with the Clewis's, probably the best yet. As I said Rocky is really the biggest hold up, but lately he's been making a tiny bit of progress. He and Jeff Barretta, who we baptized a couple of months ago, are in the same platoon (in the army) and have started hanging out and working out together lately. Jeff's been working on him, so he's made a little bit of progress. Then we went and taught Danielle! Holy cow it was amazing! We could see a big difference in her today at church, like a physical difference. We knew she'd finally gotten her answer. It was just last Saturday that she tried to drop us and we had that really powerful lesson with Brother Norris, but we could feel such a huge difference in her yesterday. All the crazy stuff that's happened with her the last two weeks was just the trial she needed to help her realize that she knows it's true. She told us last night that she knows for sure now that it's true, and nothing can change that. So we asked her what's holding her back from baptism and her response was "Nothing. Let's do it!" So we set it for this Saturday between Conference sessions! We figured she's been taught everything, she's been to church plenty of times, why wait? I'm SO excited! It was such a huge miracle. So that's the biggest news this week. I'm really excited for Danielle's baptism, and Gloria's the following week. There's still a slight chance that Gloria's son Daniel (who's 24) will we baptized on the 10th as well, but it doesn't look too likely right now. We're going to keep trying though. We've got an awesome week coming up, it's going to be great. Have a great week! Welcome home Christopher! I love you all!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Investigators Progressing

Dear Family,

How are you? Things are going great here. Danielle is progressing again. She's doing great now, and everybody else is doing great as well. Sorry I don't have any more specific news about anyone... We talked to Noni on the phone yesterday (who has a baptismal date for April 17 and just went down to Texas for a couple of weeks for to fight for custody of her kids) and we got some really great news, and some disappointing news too. The good news is that she was able to get her kids back. She now has full custody of them, and wants them to be baptized with her. (they are 9 and 8 years old) The less exciting news is that because of all that the kids have been through in the last year the judge doesn't want them uprooted anymore, and has ordered her to stay down there in Texas until the end of the school year (in June) so she doesn't have to pull the kids out of school mid-year. It makes sense, but it's too bad because they will all be gone again. Of course the baptism is off as well, unless she starts meeting with the missionaries down there and gets baptized down there, which we encouraged her to do. We'll see what happens. Oh and another big piece of news - Elder Robinson is leaving! He's only been here a week and a half, and now he's leaving on Wednesday! President Merkley called Saturday night to let us know, he's sending him down to Ava; there was an Elder there that had to get emergency transferred out, so Elder Robinson is going to replace him. So it'll be back to just Elder Hirshfeld and I... :( President hinted at having us train again though, so we'll see. Other than that, I don't think there's anything new this week. Sorry this was so short. I love you!

Love,
Elder Goodale

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

Busy Week with ZLC in Tulsa

Dear Family,

How are you this week? We have to leave in a couple of hours to go to Tulsa, so I just want to warn you ahead of time that this will be a pretty short email. We've had a good week though. I guess the biggest news is that we got our new trainee,

Elder Brady Robinson from Brownsville, Oregon. He's probably more excited about the work than anyone I've ever seen, he loves to work, and he's just a great young missionary. I'm excited for him. It's definitely been different doing missionary work with three of us, but it's been fun. One exciting thing this week was that we finally got Danielle going again! She had a rough time at church last time she came and just really didn't feel comfortable, so she decided to basically shop around a little bit and try some other churches out. Well she's tried several over that last month and long story short every time she was miserable. She's totally converted to our church as far as doctrine goes, every time she does question anything we just show her in the Bible and that's enough for her. She's been studying a lot and she keeps getting more and more convinced that everything we teach is true. The only problem is that she just wasn't feeling comfortable at church (she came 3 weeks in a row and was really struggling with it). So after a month off we went by and had a really really good visit with her and she basically admitted that her answer is staring her right in the face, then she came to church again on Sunday! Sacrament Meeting went really well, she loved that, Gospel Principles went well as usual (that's always everyone's favorite), and then we got to Relief Society, and some of the things were not quite clear. We went over to Danielle's that night with Brother Norris (her fellowshipper) and were able to have a really good lesson and resolve everything. This was a pretty good week over all though, Gloria was able to come to church again and she really loved it,

Elders Robinson, me and Hirshfeld

James Dean and Shawn Jacobi (two other investigators) came as well. James is going to be coming every week now, he's the one that Tamela Bennett (who got baptized in February) just married. We've been teaching him and he's slowly coming along. Tamela is pretty solid, so I'm not worried at all. But that's all for now! Like I said we're going down to Tulsa today and tomorrow for ZLC, then we have another exciting week ahead of us! I love you all, have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Never Make a Drunk Puerto Rican Woman Angry...

Dear Family,

How are you all doing? I'm glad Dad has some temporary work again now. So how's life there? Can you believe it's March already? Time just keeps flying by faster and faster. I'm coming up on 16 months next week! But there's no need to dwell on that. We've had the craziest week. Well really most of the week was pretty normal and low-key, up until Saturday. Well and Wednesday. Wednesday was hectic too. But Saturday was nuts. I was in West Plains on exchanges Friday, and we got a ride back to St. Robert Saturday morning. So the day started with that 2 hour car ride, which is always fun... Actually it was alot of fun because we were with Bro. Stribling, who is awesome. I love him. So we got back to St. Robert, then we went and taught a man named Mark, who was a new investigator last week. He tried to drop us, but we were able to have a really amazing lesson with him (not at all what we were planning either, it was totally spirit led. It was a really cool experience because we were able to let the Spirit take over and teach him. It definitely wasn't our own words coming out of our mouths) and by the end of the lesson he was really gung-ho again and was even talking about baptism. It was really cool, then we had to go to the church to prep for the Riveras baptism. So Marcos, Michael, and Tino were all baptized on Saturday! It went really really well. It was really cool because Marcos friend Shawn Botti, a priest who was just baptized about a year and a half ago, was able to baptize him. That was really neat. Then they were confirmed Sunday, and their grandma actually came to church for the first time in who knows how many years! It was way cool, and she intimated that this might be a regular thing now too. I really hope she keeps coming. So then after the baptism we went and had an awesome lesson with Gloria Miller. As you'll remember Gloria has a really solid testimony and wants to be baptized (she has a date for April 10) the problem is her boss keeps refusing to let her have Sunday's off. So she's been trying to do everything else she can to live the commandments and to show the Lord her desire. She's been off smoking for 9-10 days now, off coffee and tea for about 4 days now, and Friday she even payed for a cab to take her to the church so she could pay her tithing, then she didn't have enough money for the cab ride home so she walked all the way home! (about 5 miles) It's amazing how much she's been sacrificing. So here's the really cool part. Saturday morning she went in to work, and her boss told her she could have that Sunday off!!! So when we went Saturday afternoon that was the news she had for us. We were SO excited! So as you can tell up to this point (after that lesson it was about 4 pm) it's been a really great day. We were about on the highest spiritual (and emotional) level we could be. That's when it started to go downhill... We spent the next 2 hours or so tracting, which was very unsuccessful. Nothing but slammed door after slammed door after slammed door. That didn't really bother us because that's nothing too unusual, but we obviously weren't still quite on that same sky-high level that we had been on before. So we went and grabbed some dinner really quick, then our 7:00 appointment canceled...

So we decided to go try by Dave. Dave is a man we met tracting a couple of weeks ago, we've tried stopping by a couple times and they've always been busy, he told us Saturday nights are the best time to catch them. So we went over. Sure enough they were home, they actually had 3 other friends over because it was their little sons birthday party (he was probably 5-6 years old) And they were all totally drunk. Well his wife, who we hadn't met before, invited us right in and shut the door. As soon as she did the Spirit told both of us that we needed to leave the house. So our thought was just to set up a return appointment real quick and then get out. Well just then she said that basically if you want to teach me do it now or don't come back. That wasn't quite what she said but it was along those lines. Well immediately as missionaries our mindset was that we wanted to teach her and her husband, especially if this was possibly our only chance, so unfortunately to say we ignored the Spirit and sat down. We were definitely going to learn from that mistake... At first she was very nice. She gave each of us some pizza and a glass of water (she offered rum, but we politely declined...) and sat down and started to talk. At first she was more funny than anything else. She was just going on about this random stuff (again, this woman is totally wasted) and not making any sense at all and not giving us any opportunity to talk. At this point the only bad thing was her horrible language, she was swearing up a storm. As she went on, though, she quickly got very abrasive. She started berating us about our beliefs, still not letting us talk, and of course the swearing is getting worse and worse. Soon she was screaming at the top of her lungs and full on cussing us out. At one point she was right in Elder Hirshfeld's face yelling at him in Spanish, then she got really mad when he wouldn't answer his question (because he had no idea what she was saying). She's getting worse and worse but things were still manageable, finally when she gave us a brief opportunity to speak Elder Hirshfeld said, "Ma'am, I actually dont think we're going to be talking tonight." When she angrily asked why not, he responded that she wasn't sober enough. Well that's when it really started getting ugly. She flipped out and kicked us out of her house (which was fine, we were more than ready to go). At this point every other word is an f-bomb, and she started to get really physical, she was actually physically pushing Elder Hirshfeld out the door. Apparently she was only upset at him, though, (because he was the one that made the comment) because when I tried to stand up to leave she shoved me (hard) back down into my seat and yelled in my face "I'm not done talking to you yet!" (with a few other expletives thrown in there) Then they proceeded to even more physically kick Elder Hirshfeld out of the house. As he was pushed out of the door, he had the strongest impression to turn around and stick his foot in the door because they were going to try to close it behind him. Slam it she did, and it messed up his toe pretty good but at least the door was still open, because I was still inside. I'm really glad that door didn't get closed! But now he was outside the house holding the door open and I was in the living room trying to leave. We were only 10 feet apart but there were 3 angry drunks between me and the door and they didn't want me to leave. That was a scary feeling, I've never appreciated having a companion more than in that moment when we were physically forced apart. I don't remember much of what happened after that but I know that we got out and we're both safe and sound and we're definitely not going back there again! And we definitely learned a valuable lesson - when the Spirit prompts you, listen to it! The whole ordeal only lasted about 10 minutes (from the time we entered the house til the time we left) but it was probably the scariest thing that's happened on my mission. One part that is kind of funny though is that early on in the conversation, when she was still just being funny and not attacking us, Elder Hirshfeld opened the phone in his pocket and began recording, so we have a voice recording of the whole thing! We've re-listened to it a couple of times.

So anyway...that was our night. Except it wasn't over yet! We obviously needed to wind down now, so we went over to the Stribling's home, who lived just a couple blocks away. We relaxed a little there then did some role plays with the whole family for how to share the gospel. (Bro. and Sis. Stribling, btw, are recently reactivated, and the kids were just baptized back in September. The whole family is on fire right now) We committed everyone (mom, dad, and all 5 kids) to share the gospel with at least one friend that week. It went well, and we were feeling a lot better after that. So then we went home and waited for President to call! Saturday night was transfer calls, and we knew that we would be separated since we've already been together 3 months. Nobody's together longer than that... Well President eventually did call, and we're staying together for third transfer! That means 4 and a half months together! We've had 9 baptisms in the 12 weeks we've been together, so I guess President decided to just leave us together. We're pretty excited. So on the phone he told us about all the other changes that are happening in the zone, then said good night. We were pretty happy, but then less then a minute later he called us back saying he forgot one important detail... Elder Hirshfeld and I are going to be training a new missionary together!!! I can't believe it! 2 Zone Leaders training a new Elder together. That NEVER happens! But it is! We are both SO excited. You should have seen us Saturday night after that call. So Thursday we're going to be getting our new Elder, I can't wait. It'll be different with 3 of us together, but it's going to be good.

Then Sunday went really well too, Gloria loved church, she was bawling basically the whole 3 hours. And now it's Monday again! Already! I'm so grateful to be here in St. Robert, we see so many miracles here daily. We've been so blessed, in spite of how little we deserve it... In spite of that story though, don't worry about us. We're healthy and happy and safe, and I love being a missionary! I love you all! Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale

Busy with Splits & Baptisms

Dear Family,

We had another really great week. It was super busy, though, with 3 exchanges again this week. Tuesday I got to go to Salem, which was alot of fun. (it's a tiny little town out in the middle of nowhere, just like Ava or Stockton. Except not quite as small as those two towns...) Then Wednesday we were both back in St. Robert, but not together, because we were on exchanges with the Assistants. I got to be with Elder Conrad again for the day which was a lot of fun. If you remember we served together in Miami last April/May back when we were both really young missionaries, before either one of us were in leadership. Now I'm a Zone Leader and he's an Assistant, so things are way different then when we were together. It was a lot of fun remembering the good old days back when we didn't have any responsibility (and we were so young we really didn't know what we were doing...) we just went out and worked hard! And had a lot of fun doing it. We had so much fun together. So this Wednesday was alot of fun being together again. It definitely made me feel old though, realizing that it was almost a full year ago that we served together. Thursday we were on exchanges again, Elder Hirshfeld went to Eldon for the day. Wow I just realized that I totally had that backwards. He went to Eldon on Tuesday, and I was in Salem on Thursday. I had them switched. These days all my days just run together. I never know where I am... We also had interviews with President Merkley on Thursday, which I always enjoy. Transfer calls are coming up on Saturday, but he wouldn't give us any hints about what's happening. We've already been together 2 transfers though, so I'm guessing that most likely Elder Hirshfeld will be leaving next week. The best part of the week was Saturday though, when Tamela and Daniel Bennett got baptized!!!

I know I've already talked about Tamela, but I don't know if I've mentioned her 9 year old son Daniel before. He's an awesome kid. We've been teaching him along with her, but for some reason he just hasn't wanted to get baptized. He wouldn't do it, and we couldn't figure out why. But Tamela wanted to go ahead with hers on February 27th, and just hope that he would come around later. Well Friday (the day before the baptism) we pulled up to their house and Daniel was outside playing with some friends. So we called him over to the car and he ran right over (he loves us) and we asked him "so Daniel, are you going to get baptized with your mom tomorrow?" And he was just like, "Sure!" We were shocked! It was pretty amazing. So we told him to go inside and tell her, and she just ran outside crying, she was so excited. She is SO excited about the gospel and she was so happy that he had decided to be baptized. Meanwhile while he was inside telling her, we called our District Leader in Salem and asked him if he could come down that night and do the interview. He was very flexible and came down on very short notice to do the interview, which we really appreciated. Daniel was totally ready, since we'd been teaching him too, he just needed to be interviewed. The coolest part, though, was that we had to leave to go to a couple appointments before the interview and while we were doing that Tamela, who had just had her own baptismal interview the day before, took about an hour and sat down with Daniel and very thoroughly went over all of the interview questions to help him make sure he was ready. So then Saturday they were both baptized! And confirmed on Sunday. It was one of the best baptismal services I've been to on my mission, too. It was really awesome. I really love that family, it sucks they are moving to Tennessee soon. When we come back to tour the mission, we'll have to make a little detour to Tennessee (only 5-6 hours from here...) to see them too. So it was a great week. We also saw the Riveras last night, and they are all set for their baptism this Saturday! Their interview is on Wednesday. They are totally ready too. Marcos (the 14 year old) even brought a friend to church yesterday! His name is Juan, and he's really cool. We taught him at the Riveras home last night. So everything is still going great here! I hope everything is going well for you as well. Thanks so much for all the letters and constant updates on what's goin' on at home, I love it! I love you all, have a great week!

Love,
Elder Goodale