Snow

So I usually write down all the things in my planner that I'm going to put in my email because I always forget. Well I left my planner in the apartment this morning...

So we got snow last Monday and it basically slowed everything down a lot. People here are deathly afraid of the snow and freezing rain etc etc. It's really not that hard to drive in the snow sheesh. We did a lot of walking in the snow this week. We walked on average 6ish miles a day in the snow because we go to this one apartment complex that's 3 miles away where we have a bunch of people we visit. It's really not that bad. The worst part is getting too hot while walking honestly because I layer up so much and then we start walking and then it starts getting really hot wearing a sweater and thermals. We tried visiting a bunch of people and most the time they were never home. It's really frustrating when that happens. We also have an investigator who has a baptismal date who we see every Wednesday cancel our appointment with him. Probably because of the snow. 

So we have some investigators named Piper and Anthony. They are both 19 and Piper is pregnant. They are not married but they have a wedding date. So we met with Piper once for a little bit and answered some questions she had and she seemed really interested. So we've been trying to meet with them for over a week and finally we caught both of them at home. We had a real good lesson with them and Anthony doesn't seem that interested but Piper does. We gave them both copies of the Book of Mormon. Hopefully we will be able to keep teaching them on a regular basis and get them to church. Anthony did however ask the million dollar question, how do we know that we have a prophet, so we showed the Moroni's promise and it was really good. I don't know if he'll test it out though...

We teach a couple named Carvel and I forgot his wife's name, but they seem to be real interested. They first met with the sisters and then they dropped the sisters because the sisters made them feel like a statistic. Yeah apparently the sister missionaries were generally disliked here. So they've been learning again and we're reteaching them the lessons and it's really good and stuff but the one lesson we had with them wasn't that spiritual so we'll see I guess. They do read the Book of Mormon though, well I guess they listen to it at work or something. They said they'd come to church but they didn't. :( 

There's this guy named Joe that stopped the sisters and wanted them to teach his children so we stopped by him the other day and he told us that he's totally chill with us coming over and teaching and stuff but he's not gonna lead us on because he has already found a church and him and his fiance have already paid the pastor to wed them. If only we would've stopped by earlier because our church does free weddings. Anyways he's basically a dry mormon and he's got a really cool story where he almost died but didn't so we know he's gonna get baptized. 

There's a member in our ward who has these people that work for him. Apparently the missionaries have stopped by his office a bunch of times and stuff and this family wanted to have the missionaries over for dinner. So they had us over for dinner last night and it was strange. They were very nice to us and said that they'd buy groceries for us and stuff and make us cupcakes and have us over for barbecues and all sorts of stuff. They don't really seem interested but they kept talking about how a bunch of stuff they believe is really similar to what we believe. So We're going to try to give them some Book of Mormons. They're pretty much dry Mormons too. 

One Wednesday night we were eating dinner with some members and we got a text asking me to speak in sacrament on Sunday for 15 minutes. So I got to speak in sacrament yesterday. It was fun.

Now for the unimportant things: Some members brought us a bunch of groceries randomly one day. We have like 7 jars of peanut butter in our apartment. I really need a haircut really badly again. I made a sandwich with some bread that seemed kinda stale, after I ate it I looked at the bag and the bread had expired on January 9. I've got a cold. Some members took us to Chuck E Cheese's for dinner for this other kid in our ward's birthday and I almost beat the high score on the basketball shooter thing. We didn't play any arcade games so we weren't being apostate, although you could say we gambled because we spent most of our coins on those machines that you could get a lot of tickets on but usually don't and the only time we really got any tickets out of it was when Elder Woodbrey bumped it and some coins fell of the thing. Then he bumped it again and it started making noises at us and saying 'warning' so I walked away. Elder Woodbrey and I combined our tickets and we got a whopping 14 tootsie rolls out of it. We cleaned our fridge out and I smelled the milk that expired on Jan 28 and it smelled really bad. This member bought me an AC/DC shirt and a really old Book of Mormon we found at a thrift store and a tie with monkey's on it. Elder Woodbrey got a box to mail his bike home and his bike doesn't fit. 

Love, 

Elder Naegle

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Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...

I've been waiting to say I'm not in Kansas anymore since I knew that I was going to Kansas. I all did the last couple of days in Parsons was say goodbye to people. Andie told me she was really mad at me for leaving. Hopefully she gets baptized.  I'm now in Springfield Missouri. It's pretty cool. It's nice being in a city again. The work here seems to be a lot better than it was in Parsons. There were sisters in our ward for about a year and then last transfer my companion shotgunned the area and now I'm here. The sisters got a new apartment and so I'm the 3rd Elder to live in this apartment ever. It's nice but real small. My bed is a lot bigger than the one I had in Parsons and my feet don't hang off the end! It's also really comfortable too, it's like sleeping on a marshmallow. They just spoil sisters for some reason. There's also a squirrel that lives in the attic. It's name is ESPN. We're technically a biking area, but we just walk everywhere, mostly because my companion is going to be mailing his bike home soon because this is his last transfer. We easily walk over 10 miles a day. My legs hurt really bad the first couple of days. It stinks because it was really warm during the day and then it would get real cold once the sun set so it was really hard to dress for the day because it's not like we can just come back to our apartment and grab coats. Last night though it snowed a ton, so there's a lot of snow and what that means for us is that we will be asking a lot of people for rides all the time. It's dumb because our mission has the most cars out of any mission in the world and we have to walk... And the Church is trying to take our cars away! And they still haven't given us ipads. It's funny because on the Church's website it says that all North American missions and like Japan will all have ipads by early 2015 and we were promised them over a year ago. The Church is still true though. Fun fact: Springfield is the headquarters of the Assemblies of God church, which is one of the leading distributors of Anti-Mormon material. Kewl. The other day we were walking to the church building and we saw a mouse get run over by a car. It was nuts. They also have Mister Car washes here. If we had a car I would try to get a free car wash.

Well there's not much else to say. I feel like I'm the only cool Elder here who has a good balance on being not apostate and on being cool. Well my companion is pretty good but he's pretty weird. I like him though. I think I'll like him a lot more than my previous two companions. One Elder behind me was looking up Magic cards on Wikipedia a second ago haha. It's funny because everybody thinks that missionaries are such awesome people. Well I'm here to tell you that I have seen sooo many loser missionaries out here on my mission it's not even funny. So just because somebody's on a mission doesn't necessarily mean anything. Unless it's me ;)  Oh man it will be really good here in Springfield, we have a bigger teaching pool than I had in Parsons. The investigators seem really good. So that will be good. Also we're in a ward and there's a lot of awesome people in it. There's a big family, the McGees and it's like two brothers and their families and their kids' families and they make up like half the ward and they have us over for dinner every Sunday night and their loaded. 

Peace

Elder Naegle

Transfers and stuff

So this week was pretty slow. Again... Elder Colley got real sick on Friday and Saturday so we didn't do anything those days. It was soooooo boring. You'd think that it would be nice to have a day to y'know sit back and relax but missionary apartments are really boring. I just took naps throughout the whole two days.

I really started trying hard to have good study sessions in the morning. And you'd never guess, but I started having really good studies in the morning. 

We started teaching a former again. We don't know if he'll go anywhere but we thought we'd give it a shot anyway. While we were teaching him he got up and went to the bathroom. While he was in the bathroom Elder Colley told me that he saw a mouse come up from underneath my chair and then it went back underneath it. So that was nice. Then while I was teaching I saw the mouse out of the corner of my eye run underneath the couch that our former was sitting on. I paused, stopped myself from laughing and then continued on with the lesson. 

We were able to teach Andie again becuase she was back in town. It was pretty much just a review, recap lesson. Then she didn't come to church because she had homework I guess.

So we got transfer calls on Saturday. I am going to Springfield Missouri. My new companion is an Elder Woodbray. I've heard he's an interesting guy... It's a biking area so that will be good because I'm getting fat. Also the Bass Pro Shop Headquarters is in my area so I'll definitely be hitting that up. My new address is 2835 South Fort Apt 824 Springfield Missouri 65807. So now ya'll can send me letters and stuff ;)

Everybody keep up the good work!

Elder Naegle

p.s Elder Colley made 4.5 liters of mashed potatoes

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Low week, high weather

So this week was probably the slowest week I've ever had on my mission. Our numbers were embarrassingly low. The weather was in the 60s and 70s though until about Sunday. So that was nice. Since we dropped Steve and Andie was out of town all week that really helped kill our numbers.

So Steve actually came to church again and we didn't even invite him or see him or talk to him at all last week. He brought a little angel statue and gave it to one of the Sykes's daughters. He still was checking out Sis Sykes all throughout Sacrament meeting. The gift really creeped out Sis Sykes and Pres Sykes went and looked at the sex offender list to see if Steve was on it, which thankfully he wasn't. During Sacrament meeting Steve was scratching his head and he scratched off a scab and it started bleeding. Steve has Hepatitis C and it is carried through blood... So after he went and shook the President's hand and his daughter's hand and after he gave his gift to their daughter I went up to President Sykes and told him the story of the scab and he was like 'Thank you for telling me' and immediately he took his daughter to go wash his and his daughter's hands. Oh poor, poor Steve. 

We had a really good meeting with President Sykes after church and we talked about a couple of things we are going to work on to get the missionaries and the branch to work together better and more unified. So I really hope we can get those plans to work. 

Andie got back on like Friday night. She didn't come to church but Sis. Crozier did and she told us that she was talking to Andie and Andie said that she was willing on working to quit marijuana! So I don't know what happened when she was in Springfield but basically the church is true and we are going to jump on that train as fast as we can! So I'm really happy about that. 

Not much else happened this week. Actually we had zone training meeting and it was really really good. We also had interviews with President Shumway and that was really good too. I talked to him a little bit about my companion and he basically just said that I just gotta be obedient myself because that's one thing that I can control. I'm praying that my companion's heart will be softened this week so that I can talk to him about being obedient and about having the spirit with us because those two things have been pretty absent this whole transfer. That's why nothing has been happening. 

In Joplin there's this billboard that is advertising a car dealership called Regal car sales, or something like that. The billboard is just a picture of a big black dude wearing a blue shirt and a yellow tie holding out his hands kinda pointing at nothing. I'm imitating it in the picture of me in the nursing home that I sent out today, if you want to know what it looks like. So me and my companion call it Regalling and we're gonna start taking pictures of us doing it everywhere. It's gonna be just like planking, only better. 

I love all of ya'll so much. The Church is true, always work on growing your testimony and your conversion. It's not one and done. It's a lifelong process. 

"Righteousness is more powerful than wickedness" - President Packer This is my new favorite quote :)

Love, 

Elder Naegle

On a roof

In a tree

 This is me in an old folks home where some less actives live