Week 14

Hey Everyone!

No more Patios for you guys haha. i forgot that Google is something that you guys can use while i cant. just not too fair haha. 

I also found out that if you guys wanna write to me more then you can go to dearelder.com and email from there. just leave your email on the letter and i can email you back. there are still a few friends that i wanna hear from lol.

i forgot my journal today so i dont know what day i am on. im also too lazy to go back through my email and find out there haha.

Monday
Today was a pretty good day. i dont remember much of what happened cause its been a week but i know that it was good lol. I do remember that we had a lesson with Kenroy and the Campbell family. We had a lesson about the Law of Chastity with Kenroy. we tried to not have Kadeen there on purpose but she ended up walking in. oh well! the lesson was great and not as awkward as we thought. he was accepting to it and ready to live it. it is awesome to see how much he has changed than from when we first met him in September at Kadeens baptism. The Campbell family we had a lesson on keeping the sabbath. always a weird lesson for me to teach since everyone in Pleasant Grove knows that i would go down to Harts each sunday and buy Mtn. Dew haha. But ive come to a new understanding of it. they were kinda stubborn on closing down their shop on sundays cause they are new. hopefully they will close the shop on sundays here soon. they said they want to be established before they do but they have been open longer than ive been here. they arent that new haha. they come to it at some point tho. i can see it.

Tuesday
It was a very interesting day today. we saw Kadeen in the morning and tried to have a Q&A with her about the law of chastity. i guess that her and one of her friends have been really obsessed with that lately. it didnt work. all of them were answered by the other missionaries last night haha. oh well. but the rest of the day blew out completely. it didnt surprise us too much cause we didnt have any plans. last week i said that we were gonna go to Kingston. ya... that didnt happen. we had no plans and came up with everything last night. we had great plans to work with a lot of the members but most of them werent home or were busy. out last and only other lesson was with Sister Blake. we did the new way of working with members. it worked! we got like 6 or 7 names from it so we just told her that we should have a family home evening to get all the names super fast! she was all for it! we are planning on doing that on friday. and there are going to be people from both sides of Porty so it should be great for all 4 of us missionaries!

Wednesday
this is the first time that i will ever talk about what we did in district meeting haha. today we learned how we can better use the book of mormon. i basically learned that we need to start treating it like a book of scripture instead of something that we just give people. it is the evidence of everything that we teach and it needs to be treated like it. we are gonna start having more lessons where we just read. not just when they dont read, just in general have the lessons. the only lesson we had today after that was with Brother Banton. to quote the joke with me and dad a bit... "he was still pissed". he completely lied to my face about church. meaning that he started to go to a different church. he is too disappointed that he didnt get baptized when he wanted. all it is telling us is that he really wasnt ready. we had a .... collective dropping. he dropped us by going other places and we dropped him cause he was no longer interested at all. sucks cause he was our top investigator. now we have almost no one to teach.

Thursday
Elder Dalley and I decided that we need more people to teach. We are gonna treat ourselves like we are a white wash companionship. white wash is a term missionaries use that means that both missionaries are new to an area. its starting from scratch essentially. so we are talking with everyone. but we had 2 lessons today. and they were both with Kadeen. the first one was a coordination lesson for the lesson we were having with Kenroy that night so it didnt count towards any of our numbers. we prepared her for a lesson about Scripture study. our last lesson of the day with her was at the time we were going to teach Kenroy. he didnt show up and she was our backup. we taught her about missionary work and faith cause she hasnt been as excited about doing missionary work right now. she brought her friend who used to investigate the church. i say used to cause the other missionaries just dropped her like a week ago. the lesson kinda went toward her after a while. it was super spiirtual! more than i have ever felt on my mission so far! we still taught Kadeen that that was how we knew that someone was prepared. her friend was asking really sincere questions. one day she will be baptized. it will just be a while.

Friday
During super planning we decided inorder to get more investigators then we need to contact the formers. we made a plan to do that tomorrow so that we still have time for everything today. if we get extra time then we will do it then too. we had a lesson with president james about branch council. he is the second counselor but he is acting as branch prez cause the actual one is in the states for surgery. we are going to have the 2nd branch council since ive been here on sunday. we will be getting the branch mission plan all figured out. the next lesson i can remember was with Kenroy. we had the lesson about scripture study. it went super well! he is really studying the Book of Mormon! more than i ever did before i left on my mission. it is super cool! the spirit has really changed him a lot. he is probably the most influenced by the spirit that i have ever seen. he is at the point that he wants to know with a burning passion that what we teach is true. him and kadeen hang out a lot and they always talk about prophets and other things that we teach. fellowshipping is awesome!!

Saturday
today was a super weird day. we still dont have a lot of people to teach so we mostly just go with recent converts and less actives. we taught ashagaye today as the only number lesson. i feel super bad for her. she now cant come to church until she is 18 cause her mom will not allow her to. she wants to come but just cant. we taught her about scripture study. it shifted into a CPR lesson where we told her that the best way to get her back to church with permission was for her to pray everyday, read everyday, and also attend seminary if possible. we had a lesson with Brother Forrester today too. he is the person that feeds us on Sundays. he is gonna help us with a lesson with Kenroy tomorrow. it should be awesome cause he used to be a missionary himself!

Sunday
Church was good today. all i can really say about it haha. Kenroy was the only investigator that we had at chuch. that will change here soon haha. Our lesson with him went super well tho! it was on the Word of Wisdom. Brother Forrester killed it! he did a great job at making friends with him super fast! they basically talked about the word of wisdom the whole time! it should help Kenroy get some friends in the church who arent women haha. we also had the other missionaries convert confirmed today. i guess i forgot to mention that they had a baptism yesterday haha. there have been 5 baptisms since ive been in Porty. its not really a whole lot. in 2014 we hope to be baptizing weekly. work in progress haha. we also had a lesson with brother Grant, the branch clerk, on making sure that he is super friendly to anyone at church that he doesnt know and/or who is investigating. he was all for it cause he loves the friendship part of the church a lot. This transfer is gonna be a good one!

Jamaica is just awesome! there is no other place that i wanna be right now than here! the mission has changed my life and easily saved it as well! i feel like im a mini Gordon B Hinkley by gaining the testimony that i have out here on my mission! The church is true and there is no denying it! i so hope that everyone goes on a mission! not only do you change other peoples lives, buy you change your own! you go out a teenager, but you come back a full grown adult!

Love You All!,
Elder Kurt Meacham