Elder Wilson in Utah!: Welcome Home Sydnee! :)

It's weird not to include Sydnee's email in the list of emails sent out. (my family). Welcome home Sydnee! Now go start dating those lucky boys! ;D hahaha :)
So I'm in my new area now, Taylorsville. It's pretty good, but ghetto hahaha. Well not really, but for Utah it is. Us missionaries call it "shady" hahahahaha. Elder Conley is my comp, he's from Washington (the one above Oregon) and is pretty cool. We get along really well.

After emailing on Tuesday, Elder Davidson and I went to the mall with Elder Weier and Livingston. We walked around for a while, and they almost bought some stuff but didn't. Then I saw a backpack, and I need a new one soon so I bought it. But it was $64 and so I regretted it, so I returned it haha. :) After that we went and played basketball and that was fun. After P-day was over, we went around so I could say goodbye to people. :( It was hard to say goodbye to Dominic and Sonya, and David Carr. I also said bye to the Sharps since I was leaving the area. :/

Wednesday I said goodbye to Elder Davidson/Weier/Livingston. We took a picture together! Haha. Elder Livingston gave me his monopoly!! It's the electronic kind that has credit cards and stuff instead of real paper money. Then I drove to meet my new comp, Elder Conley in Taylorsville. He's from Moses Lake, Washington (the state). He's pretty cool, he likes the same things I like. We went to Leather by's, they have one out here! We get it free too which is legit. I got a hamburger which was scrumdidilyumptious and then we went around trying to find people. Turns out the stake got split and the sister missionaries took the other half. All 8 of the people Elder Conley and his comp were teaching live over there! So we had 0 going into the transfer.

On Thursday we had district meeting which was pretty cool. We did role plays which I usually hate but they weren't so bad. I feel so excited to share the gospel with everyone. The Spirit can affect people different ways it's awesome! Comfort, peace, excitement, joy, so many.

On Friday Elder Conley and I went and contacted people on the unbaptized list. We made an apostasy chart to show how apostasies happen all throughout the bible! Pretty cool. Because that leads up to the great apostasy, and Joseph Smith :) Anyways, so we went around trying to find people. And I got my hair cut at 2:30 b a member. We went out to eat at Cafe Rio (which I actually really like now! I must have gotten a weird thing on the menu last time.) But we were super super full. Dinner was at 5:00 so we weren't very hungry, but luckily it wasn't that big of a dinner. They're big U fans just like the Sharps are! Then we went around and tried to find more people to teach, without a lot of success. We went tracting in some condo's and they weren't very receptive haha. :) One guy opened the door, and I started to ask”Hey, how are you doing today?” But before I could finish, he was already closing the door hahaha :)
So we had a lesson at 8:00 with a homeless guy named Nick Immoos, and that was interesting. He loves to talk, so he would go on tangents about random things and I felt like we were fishing, trying to reel him back into the conversation. The member we brought would always talk with him on those tangents, which was a little frustrating. Then the member tried to invite him to baptism! All the wrong way though. And taught him about Joseph Smith when we weren't to that point yet (so it wasn't relevant to anything and didn't make sense to Nick). Haha. It was a horrible lesson, but afterwards was really awesome! The Sharps dropped by and gave us some of their home-made ice cream that they used to make when Elder Weier and I went there. That was super awesome. :) Apparently the new Elder there isn't too... good haha. He is pretty off I guess. But they still have Livingston!

On Saturday there was a carnival at 9:00 in the morning for the entire stake, members and non-members. So obviously, we would want to be there! ;) there was breakfast which was really good, and then a jump house for the kids and fun stuff like that. We met this guy named Russ Howell who is 62 but was the first professional skateboarder! He's pretty cool. After the carnival we went back home to get our backpacks and then we went and tried to find people. Eventually dinner came around, and it was with the Wirfs'. They are pretty legit. The dad has a bunch of Apple stuff! Computer, laptop, monitor, keyboard, etc. freaking sweet haha. You know how much of a sucker for Apple things I am! ;) And he has 11 terabytes of storage which is 11,000 gigabytes! Crazy. They had turkey burgers and hot dogs, and both of those were really good. After dinner we went and tried to find people from the referrals they gave us, and 1 wasn't interested, 1 wasn't home, and the last one was friendly and let us in.

On Sunday church started at 9, but we had a meeting at 8 with all the other missionaries in our area. 2 sisters, 2 Spanish elders, and 2 senior couple missionaries. There are 2 other sisters in our district, but for some reason they weren't in the meeting with us. So after that we went to 1st ward, and walked over to the apartment to get our people that we were teaching to come to church with us. One didn't answer, but the other two did. So we sat by them at church which went well. Then the 1 o'clock church came, and that was probably the best one (except one speaker talked for no lie 45 minutes hahaha). Elder Conley and I had a meeting at 4 which was correlation with all the missionaries and all of the WML's for our wards. We let them know who we're teaching, and they let us know who they found that might be interested in hearing from us. Then we had dinner, and afterwards we went round trying to find people. If you haven't noticed, we do that a lot. ;) We met up with Russ, who is super legit haha. Then we found 2 Indian families which are super nice.

Yesterday (Monday July 23rd) we taught someone named Elmer Mirza. He's a Palestinian guy but he's soo awesome! We met him Sunday night and when we taught him yesterday he said that he was praying for God to enter his life. The same night was when we ran into him!! Once again, God is real. ;) But he is soo willing to hear about the gospel. He's even been to church once before! :) (This last Sunday actually, the day we met him). So that was super cool. He wanted to be baptized! So he's on date for August 4th. He even knows that Joseph Smith was a prophet! When we got to him in the lesson, Elmer interrupted us and was like hey guys, I already know that Joseph Smith was a prophet. :D How cool is that!? He was so prepared by God. He wanted us to come over every day to meet with him! :)
After his lesson, we went and had lunch then went and taught Russ. He had run into some anti material online, so we had to bash with him a little bit. I hate bashing because the Spirit leaves so quickly :/ that's the only way people will understand! If the Spirit is there to testify in their hearts. But after that we went to dinner, which was nottt very tasty. Haha. I mean it wasn't horrible, but it had a ton of curry in it so it tasted a lot like I was eating cinnamon haha. After that we had a lesson with Nick the homeless guy. He wanted to meet at a park gazebo, so when we walked up he had a freaking laptop sitting there on the table! I asked myself how in the world are you homeless but have a cell phone and a (really nice) laptop!? Haha. But I realize now that I was judging him too fast. There's some things that we don't know about people. About everyone. And THAT is why we should never judge, and always look for the good in people because it's always there. So we taught him, and it went well. He's cautious about going down to welfare square to get a job, even though the Bishop has already called down there to give him a referral. He's just scared he'll get stranded down there. So we're going to try and arrange a ride to take him down there. After the lesson we stopped by a Samoan celebration. It's this HUGE thing that there's a lot of tents set up where they have food stands, and music, and a ton of awesome islanders. :)

I love you all!!
Love,
Elder Wilson!