Elder Daniel Goold: “Helping with the 4th of July”

So it has been a slower week, missionary work wise, but a lot of stuff happened! Things are going well in the branch and a lot of the members are getting pumped up for a lot of the things going on, but on our side of finding and teaching it's been slower. But no matter what happens, the Lord is with us! It's His work after all!

Monday evening and all Tuesday was filled with helping with the 4th of July. We helped some city volunteer people set up for the parade Monday night. Tuesday we went and helped organize more stuff downtown before the parade, watched the parade and then spent, literally, the rest of the entire day cleaning up trash with two city volunteer people, Andrew and Gage. We estimate about 8 miles of walking all over town picking up trash, it was pretty fun though! Got to talk to a lot of people and many people saw us helping out the community and greatly appreciated it, so that was definitely a good thing! Also, there was a cool Elvis Presley impersonator and I bought some deep fried brownie bites. 10/10! Got a lot of pictures!

I promise the brownie bites were better than my expression shows, the sun was just bright

Wednesday we worked a lot on our WalMart booth and planned a lot for it. Then we had dinner with the Thompson's and went out to Ravenswood for a little bit. Didn't get to see any of the people planned. So nothing super exciting happened.

Thursday we were on exchanges in Spencer. Elder Webb and I got to visit with this one less active sister and had a good lesson. Then we had another lesson with an investigator family and we watched the Restoration video with them. Then we had another lesson with a less active family who's been going through some major trials, but they're coming back to church! It was a pretty good day over all, talked to some cool people and then there was a good rain storm out of now where that rained like CRAZY for about 5 mins, but then disappeared.

Friday we were at the food pantry like normal. We got to see Tim again! That was good. He's been doing some detox for a medicine he was taking, but some weird side effect is making him real sick, so he's been down and out for a while. Then we saw John again for a little bit and set up an appointment with him for next week. There was another DOWNPOUR on the drive home. It was bad, roads were flooding and we could barely see. So of course we took a video of it to remember the epicness.

Saturday we did a lot of planning since we didn't have that Thursday and then more work on the booth. We were able to see the Mullins Saturday night. They've been doing good. They've still be praying together. We also tried to see David, but he got some bacterial infection near his mouth, so he can't talk at all (his neighbor told us this), which is really too bad.

Sunday we had a really great church service. Sis. Christner talked about service and sharing the gospel and then a visitor Bro. Floyd spoke. They did a good job, and then we had a great Sunday school lesson talking all about pride and humility. Sadly nobody made it out to church, but they missed out! We did have about 27 people there this week though! We had a family visiting who used to live here so it was much more full than normal, which was cool. Then the rest of the day we were trying to find some less actives who lived pretty far out and had quite the off-roading adventure.

For a spiritual thought I wanted to challange everyone to try something out. In Preach My Gospel chapter 4 under the section "Pray with Faith" there is a personal study activity. It gives you a lot of different ways to evaluate your prayers. We did this for district meeting this last week and it really was awesome. Prayer is such a simple thing we often underestimate it's power and what it really is. I would recommend that all of you check out that activity and do the study!

Hope y'all have a great week! We'll have the mission tour this next Friday so we will get to meet President and Sister Lindhardt! It will be a good week!

Take Luck,

Elder Goold