“Hope y'all had a good Christmas”

Hey everyone! 

So this last week and a half has been NUTS! Lots of good stuff happening here! So first, transfers: Elder Palmer is leaving :'(   He's headed to Hillsville Virginia, Pembroke Zone. Pretty lame to only be together for one transfer, but I'll have to get over it. Elder B. Webb is my new companion! He sounds really cool from what I have heard, he actually knew Elder Baggett back home! It will be fun! 

Skyping my family was awesome, but I won't bore you all with the details of that conversation - haha. We did spend Christmas with the Sebastiani's and ate a lot of good food, which was sweet. (A lot of which I actually helped prepare!)  We had a Christmas program and the song we sang in the choir was pretty sweet, it's called On a Still and Starry Night. 

So Elder Baggett is getting the boot to Lynchburg with Elder Kropushek and Elder Hepworth is going to Beckley with Elder Vai! It's going to be awesome. We are getting a lot of good missionaries in the Zone as well! 

People we are seeing: 

We are going to be seeing Kenny less now sadly. He's been reading a lot of the Book of Mormon but he's oddly opposed to the idea of coming to church:( We are going to keep him in our prayers! Kayla has still been sick, especially since she is pregnant but we are seeing her and her family tonight. 

Keelon is awesome!! Elder Baggett and I got to teach him last Friday while on exchanges. It was easily one of the most powerful lessons on my mission. It was amazing to see how all the questions he had were answered so simply by the Restoration and it brought the Spirit so powerfully. He's out of town a little longer for break, but he'll be getting back soon and we are really excited to see him. 

We had a lesson with Kennedy yesterday, first one in a while and it went really well. We taught about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it was great. He had read the chapter in the Book of Mormon we gave him and he had a lot of great questions about baptism and the plan of salvation. I really think as he keeps reading and praying, he'll know it's true! 

We started teaching Nathan's girlfriend Randy last week when we got to see them. She was in a very similar boat as him in terms of religion and we reviewed the Restoration. It went really well and Nathan had read the Restoration pamphlet a few times so he was able to tell Randy about it as she asked questions.

The last family we are really pumped about is Jim and Alicia! So Monday we went knocking doors on a new street and literally the second door was Jim and Alicia. They let us right in and it was super powerful and really short! They were about to leave and we caught them at the perfect time. Jim said at the end of the lesson he wanted us to give him a week to read the whole Book of Mormon!! So yeah, they are awesome. 

Anyways, it's been a great last week.5 and now this transfer is already over :( It's super weird to have to get a new companion, but I think it will be good. Pray that everything will be good for the Huntington Zone! Hope y'all had a good Christmas and don't do anything too crazy for New Years! 

Take Luck!!

Elder Goold

"Christmas Week!"

Hello everyone! This last week has totally flown by!!!!! I really don't know where it went. It's good that it went fast because it was a pretty hard week. Winter is just a hard time of year, but it's okay we've been working hard! I'll give a recap:

Kayla is doing okay. Her whole family got pretty sick over the whole week, so we only got to talk with her for a few moments. None of her family has a car, so normally we have to work to get her a ride, but her normal ride-giver was out of town. On the good side, she was working all on her own to get a ride from her friend (which is pretty rare in this mission, to have people without a car work that hard to get to church, haha)! She didn't end up coming, but we think one of the sisters in the ward will be an awesome friend for her. 

Kenny is doing great. I have never had someone we were teaching read so routinely and so much at the same time. He is in Alma now and the more and more he reads, we are seeing the light in his eyes change. He's hesitant to come to church still, but with this upcoming Sunday, we feel like he will come! He is gaining a testimony for sure.

We weren't able to get in contact with the “B” family sadly, other than just talking on the phone a little. But we are still excited for them, so please keeps them in your prayers! 

We went on 2 exchanges this last week... so much traveling:) I went to Gallipolis OH on Tuesday with Elder Hanson and then on Thursday I went with Elder Tunell to Logan WV. Both exchanges were pretty awesome. Elder Hanson is a newer missionary and he is serving with Elder Christensen from Morgantown. We had a really good day of teaching! It was relieving for them because they had someone who was about to be baptized drop off the face of the earth and then on exchanges we were able to see her again, so that was really good. Logan is a really, really, small place and it's a harder area, but they are good missionaries. 

We were working all day Saturday trying to meet people and it was going nowhere and then finally the last door we knocked on was Keelon. He is a sweet guy, he is a psychology Ph.D professor at Marshall. So he's smart. But he has a really open mind to different things and we told him all about the Restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon. We are going to go back on Tuesday and see him again! He also has some kids, so we are hoping to teach the family:) 

Then Nathan was someone we met last night. We were basically walking around in the dark trying to find people who looked friendly enough not to yell or shoot at us. Finally, the first person to open up was Nathan. He invited us in and we taught him all about the Restoration. He is super cool. Really a nice guy and he told us he wasn't very religious because for a while we was going to church but didn't enjoy the "hell-fire and brimstone" of the church he went to. So he decided to just read the Bible himself and figure out what was important to him, but he always felt like there was more, so now we are going to see him this week as well!

We've been talking a lot about creative finding for our Zone Conferences and other meetings as a mission, so that's something we planned a lot for this last week. We have a lot of awesome things on the way (January) and we are going to kick this place into gear. We have found a few people through our own efforts, but we are really tired of it being mainly fruitless, so we are really excited for all the things we are going to do: A fireside, church tours, a booth, some posters around town and more stuff revolving around the new year. It will be a good ol' time! 

Fun story: last night was pretty scary before we ran into Nathan, we were walking down 9th Avenue to try a referral and we saw some MASSIVE stray dogs eating out of the trash right in front of us. Luckily they found something yummy because they didn't come after us. Then, not a minute later, we saw 2 huge possums on someone’s front porch just eating some cat food. Nasty, but it was pretty entertaining. We also took pictures for our Christmas card which will be epic!

Thank you all for the birthday and Christmas cards!! It's been awesome getting to hear from so many of y'all, I really appreciate it. I hope all of you have a great Christmas week, it's a special time of year and I hope all of you share this special time with those who need it!

Love y'all so much!

Take Luck,

Elder Goold

Our District:  Sister Donahoo, Sister Miller, Elder Fitch, Elder Tunnell, me and Elder Palmer

"It's A Christmas Miracle!"

This last week was hard and kind of slow due to freezing coldness (I got a video of the first snow), but it was super fun with our booth and other cool things. Plus I have pictures!

Zone Conference was awesome. It went for almost the whole day Tuesday. President Salisbury is great. We did the Iron Rod teaching again and talked about "clinging" vs. "holding fast" just like last Christmas. It is still a really good example to learn from. I'll have to show everyone once I get home. 

So we did a booth at the Student Center for Marshall University and it was pretty awesome. We did it all around the Light the World theme. We had people come up and write on a paper table cover what they could do to "Light the World" during the Christmas season. It was cool to see what some people wrote up and it was awesome to see how that thought process helped a lot of people feel the Spirit and then they would ask more questions. It went pretty well. Pictures attached! 

We got to teach a really cool guy, Brother S. He was a referral we got for a Bible and Book of Mormon. It was awesome, we got to teach him about the Restoration and he really accepted the Book of Mormon. We will be giving him a call today to see him later this week. It was a really good lesson though and we are excited for him! 

We had an awesome miracle this week. It strengthened my testimony of Heavenly Father's knowledge of all and being in the right place at the right time. We were working in Proctorville, Ohio Friday night. It’s in our area just across the Ohio River.  It was really cold and we were walking between places to save miles. We tried some less-active members in the area and did some finding and then we were going to walk back to the car to head home when we decided to just spend a few more minutes knocking on these town homes we found. We only knocked on 3 or 4 doors and then we left. One of the doors was opened by a young girl, who's parents were busy, so we just gave her a Light the World card. Then Sunday, Bishop Kirby pulled us aside and said he needed to give us something. He said there was a part-member family that lived in our area who moved there within the last year. The wife is a less-active member and her husband and daughter aren't members. The less-active wife's mother is active in 2nd ward, so they went with her to 2nd ward earlier that morning for the first time in a good while. They came up and told the Bishop that missionaries had come by the other night and they wanted us to come back and that he would be interested in learning about the Gospel. We were pretty confused since we never talked to any family with that name. Long story short, their daughter was the little girl we knocked into Friday night!! We had no idea that they lived there and we just happened to knock on their door! The parents took it as a sign to go to church and we had no idea anything had happened!  Since the husband has had exposure to the church through his wife and in-laws and he told the bishop that he wanted to be baptized along with his daughter!!! It was totally amazing. We are going to be seeing them this week and we are excited. It's basically every missionary’s dream come true. 

We are going to have 2 exchanges this upcoming week so it will be a lot of fun driving and traveling! Martin is doing well with Elder Baggett and Elder Scott. It's cool to be in the same zone because now I get to see how my last area is doing, so it's pretty exciting. Other than that, everything is good! Christmas is definitely upon us, so keep sharing #lighttheworld with everyone on Social Media! 

Hope y'all have a good week and I hope you stay warmer than I'll be:) 

Take Luck,

Elder Goold

Our booth at Marshall University!

Our Apartment in Huntington

Elder Baggett, Elder Curtis and I

"Welp, where did November go?"

I can't believe it's already December, I'm pretty confused about that. Oh well, it's looking out to be a good month! We are looking out to have a lot of baptisms for our Zone this month, so that's really exciting. A little recap of this past week:

Tuesday we had exchanges with the Portsmouth Elders and I got to go with Elder MacDonald to Portsmouth. It was a good exchange and I met a lot of awesome people. One thing that was really funny is that we were teaching one of their investigators, only the 2nd time and he asked us some questions at the end of the lesson. He asked us if we were the same Mormons with lots of wives on TV, to which we replied no. Then I clarified that our full name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Then, looking dumbfounded at Elder MacDonald, he says "Well I've already been baptized in that church!". What?!?! It caught us off guard that's for sure. He claims that he was baptized as a teenager, but apparently the Book of Mormon or the missionaries didn't trigger any memories of the ward he was baptized into. We still aren't sure if that story was true, but it was pretty funny.

We did a lot of planning for Zone Meeting on Friday, which was awesome. We talked all about being a consecrated missionary and member of the church, uniting families and creative finding. Then I got to go on exchanges with the assistants. I went with Elder Kidd to Charleston for the exchange. It was super fun.  Most of our things fell through so we ended up knocking doors for a while, but it was fun nonetheless. Elder Kidd is awesome, such a happy guy!! 

Some people we are teaching:

We got to teach this guy named Kennedy. He is a middle-aged student and he's from Kenya. He is such an awesome guy and has the strongest testimony of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ! We taught him a review of the Restoration of the Gospel and it went really well. He was a little concerned last time because in the past he had talked to Jehovah's witnesses and they really confused him, but this time he was really open to taking a Book of Mormon and reading it!

Kayla is another person we are teaching. She is doing awesome. She's been taught for about a month before I got here. She's really sincere and has a great testimony of the church. She's even told tons of random strangers about Joseph Smith's experience with the First vision! She really just needs to quit smoking before baptism. We'll start teaching her boyfriend this week once he recovers from his concussion. They are both really nice people though. 

We’ve gotten to teach a lot of the college students here at Marshall University recently, so that's been pretty fun! We even got to teach some Muslim people, so that was a fun flashback to Morgantown. It's been good though and we are trying really hard to find people to teach. It's hard here, but we are trying a lot of different things, so hoping for the best! 

Anyways, something I wanted to talk about was gratitude and remembrance. Remembering where our blessings in life stem from and being grateful for them is hard, but it keeps us closer to God! A quote from Jesus the Christ book I really like is: 

"The man with much finds it easier to forget his dependence than he who must ask with each succeeding day of need."

I love that, because it is true. We shouldn't just be grateful or ask for help when we need it, but we should seek for heavenly guidance and strength daily or even more often! 

Well, we have a Zone Conference tomorrow and it will be awesome. We also just finished reading the Book of Mormon as a mission! It is easily the best book I have ever read and I know by the power of the Spirit that it is true. I know that it testifies of Christ as the source for remission of sins and I know that Christ really is that source. He did everything for us. 

Anyways, hope y'all have a great week and don't go too crazy on the Christmas shopping! :)

Take Luck and don't get ran over by a Reindeer!

Elder Goold

Elder Kidd and I on exchanges