Christmas

Holy Moley family. Well there's so much I need to tell you about these last two weeks but not enough time so I'll have to fill you in on Christmas!

It sounds like things have been really crazy lately! I've gotta say you were making my mouth water when I saw all of those pictures of the cookies and caramel pretzels you made this year... oh man I miss those!! Ok next year I have a new goal. I've only been to Temple Square to see the lights once and I was so little. Plus i've never even seen the statue of Christ or been to any of the visitors centers or museums so next year that's a must see. In the pictures of dad's grave it looked like there's no snow! Hopefully you get some before Christmas or else you'll definitely just be dreaming for a white Christmas. The snow here was running pretty thin until it finally snowed yesterday and is supposed to today and then on Christmas! Oh the missionaries made you miss Kate? Ouch... But it sounds like the missionaries have been following you everywhere.

These last two weeks have just shot by and been really crazy! I don't even know if I told you this but turns out that I'm training Sister Wright's Nephew Elder Jensen! It's been a blast so far. We are pretty different but we get along really great and it's going to be a pretty fun three months :) Starting off in the new area (Beach Lake) was pretty ruff. The last Elders in here left us nothing to work with so we spent the first week just going around meeting everyone and all of our investigators. We went in to church on Sunday and one of the people we were teaching, Michael, walked up to us and said "I want to be baptized this Saturday. What do I need to do to make it happen?" Well we both were pretty shocked but super excited so we were able to teach him the rest of the lessons and he was baptized last Saturday! Even though we've been running around with our heads chopped off we've been able to see a whole lot of miracles. In the last 2 weeks we've been able to pick up 6 new progressing investigators which is really great! 2 of them are set of baptism coming up in January so it should be a pretty good month :)

Hope you have a Happy Christmas!!

Talk to you in a few days!

Love, Elder Brown

Transfer to Eagle River

Hello Hello team! 

Well what do you know transfer calls have came and gone and everything happened just like I was afraid it would... President Robinson called and told me that I'm being transferred down to Eagle River to train a new missionary so I'm having another kid! I was so bummed when I got the news but it's going to be alright! Fairbanks 3rd ward has by far been my favorite area and like I said before I could have stayed here the rest of my mission. It's the place! This week has been awesome! So we had a lesson with our new investigator Alice on Sunday. She was taught by missionaries before in California and she wanted to badly to be baptized last Sunday on the 6th of December but we had to tell her that that wouldn't be able to happen because we still had about 12 discussions that we need to have before she's baptized. I've never met anyone who wants to be baptized so bad so we put her on date for the 23rd of December.
  

The good news is that I might be able to train either the new Elder Brown coming out or else Sister Wrights nephew so that would be pretty cool! 

So I haven't received any updates on Liz and her driving so I'm going to assume that you're all dead because she crashed and killed you. But I got the pictures! The good news is that I didn't see any snow in the pictures and so hopefully that'll help her get adjusted a little bit before then...

Anyway I need to go and get things all packed up for tomorrow. We fly out in the morning at 6 to Anchorage and then have transfer meeting at 1 so it'll be a party! Maybe next week you'll dig down deep and find some love in your heart to email this poor forgotten boy freezing his buns off in the interior of Alaska ;) But I still love you anyway!

-Elder Brown

Thanksgiving

HAPPY LATE THANKSGIVING!!! Looks like you guys had a pretty good one! My thanksgiving was pretty A- ok... Holiday's on the mission are pretty brutal because you pretty much have to go around and beg people to let you in haha! So for most of the day we just stopped by everyones house and told them that we're thankful for them. Just wait next Thanksgiving Ping Pong tournament you all better watch out! There's a ping pong table at the institute up her so i've been workin on my skills :) I can't believe the day has finally come... Liz is officially almost 16! Make sure you don't let her drive around any of her friends because we all know that's pretty hazardous. 

This week has been so great! I have no clue what Elder Jolley and I have been doing but we just keep on having Investigator after Investigator come out of no where! But hey I guess that that's nothing to complain about. Tuesday night we went to have dinner and Brother Wood's house. He was just barely released this summer as mission president in South Africa. We were having dinner and his daughter in law Alice who's from Russia came up to us and asked if we could teach her the missionary discussions because she wants to be baptized. We were pretty shocked but of course we told her that we could probably work something out haha. That night we drove down to Delta Junction for exchanges with the Elders down there which as always what a blast. The whole drive down was a white out with a couple of inches of snow on the road so it was pretty fun but a little sketch mcgetch. One of the members in our ward (My man Doctor Brother Buma) has MS really bad and is confined to a wheelchair. On Friday we went over to his house and taught his assistant Jessica the first lesson. It went really really well so we're excited to see what happens. Last night we had a lesson with Alice and her husband Johnny. Haha oh man she sat us down and made us plan out all of our lessons so that she could know how soon she could be baptized. She's great! The Church came out with their big He is the Gift initiative this week and It's going to help so much! We have 250 pass along cards that we have to give out before Christmas so It'll be fun :) In your Ensign this month you're going to get 9 pass a long cards all to your self so I triple dog dare you to hand all of them out! It's kind of crazy when I think of myself back home I never even thought about doing missionary work and sharing the gospel so I'm so excited to start when I get back!

Transfers are coming this week... Thing are starting to go so great that i'm pretty sure that I'm going to cry if I leave. In the next 2 transfers there 30 new missionaries coming in so I think I'm probably going to leave and train. Pray that I stay!

Love you guys!

- Elder Brown

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!