Answers to Prayer

Hey Hey Mommay! 

Ok who's ready for a crazy story?? This has probably so far been the coolest answer to a prayer that any I've been teaching has received! So we were at Dawn and Courtney's house (our recent converts from a month ago) and we were teaching them the new member lessons. This time we were teaching the Restoration and using the pamphlets that we sometimes use for lessons. Aubrey (Dawns Daughter who's already a member) and her non-member husband Nick were also sitting in on the lesson. At the end of the lesson we challenged Nick to pray and ask Heavenly Father if Joseph Smith was a prophet.

 Turns out that as we were saying the closing prayer he was praying in his mind and asking if it was true. Well we left and Nick and Aubrey went down to the transfer station to go and drop off their trash. As he was throwing away his trash he felt really prompted to go and look under this pavilion where people throw random things for people to take home. As he was going through different things he was going through a box and and found a Book of Mormon with a Restoration pamphlet inside of it! To make things even better, the Book of Mormon had a chapter with the page turned down and it was 3rd Nephi Chapter 1 which talks about signs and miracles... So crazy! We're planning on committing him to baptism this next week. 

Anyways things are going great up the the AK.

Have a good week!

-Elder Brown

Quick Little Up-date

Hey Hi Hello family!

Well to start off I can't lie and tell you that I saw the polar bear because I'm supposed to be on my best behavior and all of that great stuff! But! We have two Elders up in Barrow which is the northern most missionaries in the whole world who saw the polar bear and took a picture of it. Apparently the whole town has a polar bear watch patrol to warm the people where a bear is around because they've had problems in the past with polar bears killing all of their dogs along with some people. Pretty crazy! If I stay here another transfer I'm really hoping that we'll be able to fly up and go on exchanges with them :) I'm so jealous you got to go to the Draper temple! That's the temple that's on the top of my bucket list right now. I hear the murals throughout the temple are amazing! Even though there's a temple in Anchorage I'm never going to take for granted living so close to so many. I'm pretty pumped to come home to an all new remodeled upstairs! That stinks pretty bad that you have to go to the laundry mat for all of your laundry though... that was always the worst!

This week has been total chaos between preparing for Zone Conference and figuring out all of the logistics for missionaries coming to and fro and everything like that. This week is going to be the first full week of proselyting that I've had in almost 2 months so I'm so excited! Quick little update on the people we tracted into... Elder Jolley and I went over again this week to their house and right when she opened up the door I saw the Book of Mormon laying on the bottom step of her stairs and immediately knew what was happening. She then went on to tell us that she appreciated what we do but that she had done all of the "research" that she needed to on the internet and by talking to people at her church. She told us that she never saw this going everywhere and wanted to give back the Book of Mormon. My companion and I testified about how we knew this was true and how much it really would help her in her life and then pretty much begged her to just give us 20 minutes of her time. We finally settled on 10 minutes and then an hour and a half later after teaching the Restoration and answering a whole lot of questions we left! No one can say that the church isn't true without reading the Book of Mormon and anyone who's read it can only testify that it's true. We'll see what ends up happening with them! Elder McCusker came back up to Fairbanks this week and we were able to go on exchanges together which was awesome! Haha oh man he's so in love with Kate... he wrote her a letter about 12 weeks ago and then the letter he sent her finally got to him so he was more that stoked. He's dead set that he's going to marry her and that we're going to be in-laws so I guess we'll have to see how well that works out.

Love you guys!

-Elder Brown

Expect Miracles

Hello Family,

I read the article on the Utah game... Poor guy! That's a pretty big bummer. Looks like things would have turned out a whole lot differently if it wasn't for that one mistake! The good thing is that it looks like that Utes are rising up again and getting pretty good so hopefully by next year when I get home they'll be doing great! By the sounds of it it seems like Ben's just a little stud!  I always knew he was going to be an awesome basketball player. I used to tell Dad that Ben was going to be better than me at sports when he got older. haha!

Oh man that Lizzy Brown girl... we'll I can't say that I'm not too surprised that she's not the greatest driver in the world. She's awesome though. :) You might want to go to the junk yard and see what clunker you can find her for your pocketbooks sake! That's so weird Ashton's already back... I swear she just barely left before Kate. You know what that means.... 

Well to answer a couple of your questions... Elder Jolley and I aren't in North Pole but we're pretty close! After only being with him for about 2 weeks now I can say that he gets a whole lot of Jolley puns thrown at him. He's great though! Do I ever run out of people to teach?? Haha to be honest that's something that I'm always thinking about.  It's a good problem to have though. What always amazes me is how no matter what as long as I'm being a good boy, working hard and doing what I'm supposed to the Lord never ceases to bless us with people to teach. For example: This past week we've been studying a lot on miracles and trying to recognize the everyday miracles that we have in our work. I started a miracle journal that I write in every night and so far it's been pretty cool! Last Monday night went to contact a potential investigator family and it ended up not turning out so well. It was a little discouraging, so I decided that we should go and contact all of our potential investigators we had that night so we could just get turned down by all of then and get it over with. Walking up to the next door I recognized my attitude and turned to Elder Jolley and said "Elder Jolley we're about to see a miracle" We walked up and knocked on the door and they immediately let us and and we were able to talk with them for about a half hour and set up a return appointment for tomorrow to come back and teach them the Restoration! 

One more little miracle from this week. So last Sunday we had been fasting for help turning our potentials into investigators. We were able to pick up Josh and Ashley (the ones we're teaching tomorrow) and then we had been trying to contact this PM family for about 3 months so that we could start teaching their kids and the father then out of the blue the mom called our WML and told him that she wanted us to come over this Saturday so we could start teaching their kids and baptize them! 

Ether 12: 12

• Book of Mormon

12For if there be no faith among the children of men God can do no miracle among them; wherefore, he showed not himself until after their faith.

Expect Miracles!

As for Zone Conference President Robinson's flying up this weekend and we're going to have it on Friday so it should be a pretty good week! Well that's what's going on in my neck of the woods so I hope everything's going great down in the Lower 48!

-Elder Brown

Halloween

Hey guys!!

 

Looks like everyone had a pretty great Halloween! Oh gosh mom when I saw everything that you made Halloween night it started to make my mouth water! That chicken noodle soup and scones looked pretty darn good! I loved Mase and Lizzy's costumes! Haha that's so funny that he was jumping on the tramp with his cape. But I've got to ask... is Ben too cool to dress up now that his a big old 6th grader? I looked like he wasn't even wearing anything! I'm glad you're hikes are still going good but I can't believe that you went up the trail above the temple... Did you see a ton of rattlesnakes? I always hated that one because everytime I would go I 'd see two or three of those dang things. I found out yesterday at church that Utah lost... bummer. I made a bet with one of the members that Utah would beat USC and if they did then he had to wear my Utah tie to church the next week and if they won then I'd take a hit and wear his BYU tie for the day. He wasn't very happy

 

Well this year's Halloween was a little bit of a bummer. I didn't have the whole church to run around and play in like I did last year in Bethel so there really wasn't too much to do. We had to be in by 9 so we borrowed Ephriams Rescue from a member made some hot chocolate and then fell asleep watching it so it wasn't too bad! But I really missed the scones... haha!

I picked up Elder Jolley (he really gets teased around this time of year) my new comp at the airport on Wednesday and then I was finally able to end the couch hoping run and go home to our apartment. He's a really great guy and we get along really well. So far on my mission I've been blessed with some pretty awesome companions that I always get along with. Since the last two transfer's we pretty much baptized all of our investigators. We've really been focusing on building our investigator pools back up and have a lot of miracles in the making! Zone meeting and Zone conference are coming up real quick so we've been pretty busy running around and getting all of the trainings good to go. Besides that nothing really to great or new has been happening up here!

 

Have a great week!

 

-Elder Brown

 

P.s. thanks a bunch for the package and especially for all of the ties! I loved them!