ELDER OLSEN IS HOME !
I thought I would just write a little bit and tell everyone what a great example he has been to all of us. He has become a true disciple of Christ it is so great to see my brother and the change that the Atonement has brought into his life. we need to follow his example and use that gift daily. As I look back I have slowly fallen away from not sharing the gospel and thinking that I don't need to be as bold as I was on my mission but oh how I have let the devil deceive me we need to share the gospel it is our duty. My prayer we will all recommit to sharing the gospel. I tell you all that I have never been more in tune with the spirit and felt more life the Lord Jesus Christ then when I was sharing the gospel.
Steve Olsen
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
27 Sept 2010
Hey everyone
Well yesterday was an amazing day! I was able to baptize Diane, it was seriously one of the best baptisms of my mission. Diane is a really special lady. Her 2 daughters came Denique and Shanell, and she also brought 2 of her friends to the baptism. It was a really spiritual baptism. Denique and Shanell will be baptized soon as well. Diane is going to be such a big help to the ward here, I really think that she will be the Relief Society president soon. ha ha . . It was the perfect last Sunday of my mission yesterday, I feel really lucky and blessed to have had such an amazing mission. I have been thinking about that allot lately and I really feel like I didn't deserve any of the amazing experiences that i have had. I have been so blessed with so many amazing people that i have been able to help come into the church and be baptized. This last week I was able to go to the temple in Manhattan, that was really cool. President and Sister Nelson came as well and it was really nice to be able to talk with President. Well i have really loved my mission, believe me when i say that i really don't deserve any of the blessings and miracles that i have seen and been a part of on my mission. They have all been tender mercies of the Lord. I am not perfect, and i make many mistakes every day, but i guess the most important thing that i have learned from my mission is that about the Atonement of Christ. That even though i make mistakes, i can be forgiven. I cant accomplish anything on my own, especially when doing the lords work, but through the atonement i can do anything that the Lord needs me too. There have been so many times on my mission that I will walk out of a lesson with someone that was just incredible, there was a great out pouring of the spirit and i truly felt like I was an instrument for God, And the first thing that i always think is why me? I make so many mistakes and am so in perfect, but yet God will still use me as an instrument. I know that it is only because of the Atonement of Christ. I love all of you and i am so grateful for all of your prayers and support, i have really felt their power through out my mission. I love this gospel and i love Jesus Christ and i hope that i can serve him the rest of my life faithfully. The church is true and the God of Israel leads our lives, if we will let him.
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Michael Olsen
Well yesterday was an amazing day! I was able to baptize Diane, it was seriously one of the best baptisms of my mission. Diane is a really special lady. Her 2 daughters came Denique and Shanell, and she also brought 2 of her friends to the baptism. It was a really spiritual baptism. Denique and Shanell will be baptized soon as well. Diane is going to be such a big help to the ward here, I really think that she will be the Relief Society president soon. ha ha . . It was the perfect last Sunday of my mission yesterday, I feel really lucky and blessed to have had such an amazing mission. I have been thinking about that allot lately and I really feel like I didn't deserve any of the amazing experiences that i have had. I have been so blessed with so many amazing people that i have been able to help come into the church and be baptized. This last week I was able to go to the temple in Manhattan, that was really cool. President and Sister Nelson came as well and it was really nice to be able to talk with President. Well i have really loved my mission, believe me when i say that i really don't deserve any of the blessings and miracles that i have seen and been a part of on my mission. They have all been tender mercies of the Lord. I am not perfect, and i make many mistakes every day, but i guess the most important thing that i have learned from my mission is that about the Atonement of Christ. That even though i make mistakes, i can be forgiven. I cant accomplish anything on my own, especially when doing the lords work, but through the atonement i can do anything that the Lord needs me too. There have been so many times on my mission that I will walk out of a lesson with someone that was just incredible, there was a great out pouring of the spirit and i truly felt like I was an instrument for God, And the first thing that i always think is why me? I make so many mistakes and am so in perfect, but yet God will still use me as an instrument. I know that it is only because of the Atonement of Christ. I love all of you and i am so grateful for all of your prayers and support, i have really felt their power through out my mission. I love this gospel and i love Jesus Christ and i hope that i can serve him the rest of my life faithfully. The church is true and the God of Israel leads our lives, if we will let him.
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Michael Olsen
Friday, September 10, 2010
30 Aug 2010
Well it was a good week. This morning was cool we ran down to Coney Island beach! it took us a while but it felt good. We are going to do it every P-Day the rest of the transfer. Diane came to church again yesterday but her daughters did not, we are meeting with them tonight and hopefully we will be able to baptize all of them soon. Diane is doing great! she reads from the book of mormon every day and is really gaining a strong testimony, and the best part is that she is not even focused on baptism. She has her eyes on the temple! that is where she wants to go! So i am stoked, she is a great lady, mom and dad you will definitely meet her when you come here. We had a cool guy named marlen come yesterday too towards the end of church. He is from trinidad and is the fiance of a less active that we have been doing service for every week. Just helping her clean out her garage and stuff like that. Well he came with her for a little bit and this week we are going to start teaching him. I have a good feeling about him for this month. He is Rastafarian, so the beliefs are a little different but he is open to the lessons. We have another lady named ann marie that looks good too, but she is really struggling letting jesus in her life. she has had a really rough childhood with abuse and stuff and doesn't want to let those feelings go. But she is really nice and knows that she needs to change, she is just scared. She has a 18 year old son that is pretty ghetto and a 4 year old daughter named Tori who is really cute. Yesterday she could not come to church because it was Tori's birthday and she had to take her to the prison to visit her father. But she should be coming next week, she has accepted to be baptized but she needs to make a lot of changes. We have 2 months left of this "year of miracles" that we started last november. We set a goal to baptize 800 people about double of what we have averaged the last 5 to 6 years. Well to be completely honest our misssion has not changed that much. and we are basically doing the same thing that we were doing a year ago. We have about 400 baptisms left. Our district set a goal for September to have 8 baptisms. I think that we could really do it, we have 6 people in our district. So pray for our goal! I love you guys and hope you have a great week.
Love Elder Olsen
Love Elder Olsen
Monday, August 30, 2010
30 Aug 2010
Well it was a good week. This morning was cool we ran down to Coney Island beach! it took us a while but it felt good. We are going to do it every P-Day the rest of the transfer. Diane came to church again yesterday but her daughters did not, we are meeting with them tonight and hopefully we will be able to baptize all of them soon. Diane is doing great! she reads from the book of mormon every day and is really gaining a strong testimony, and the best part is that she is not even focused on baptism. She has her eyes on the temple! that is where she wants to go! So i am stoked, she is a great lady, mom and dad you will definitely meet her when you come here. We had a cool guy named marlen come yesterday too towards the end of church. He is from trinidad and is the fiance of a less active that we have been doing service for every week. Just helping her clean out her garage and stuff like that. Well he came with her for a little bit and this week we are going to start teaching him. I have a good feeling about him for this month. He is Rastafarian, so the beliefs are a little different but he is open to the lessons. We have another lady named ann marie that looks good too, but she is really struggling letting jesus in her life. she has had a really rough childhood with abuse and stuff and doesn't want to let those feelings go. But she is really nice and knows that she needs to change, she is just scared. She has a 18 year old son that is pretty ghetto and a 4 year old daughter named Tori who is really cute. Yesterday she could not come to church because it was Tori's birthday and she had to take her to the prison to visit her father. But she should be coming next week, she has accepted to be baptized but she needs to make a lot of changes. We have 2 months left of this "year of miracles" that we started last november. We set a goal to baptize 800 people about double of what we have averaged the last 5 to 6 years. Well to be completely honest our misssion has not changed that much. and we are basically doing the same thing that we were doing a year ago. We have about 400 baptisms left. Our district set a goal for September to have 8 baptisms. I think that we could really do it, we have 6 people in our district. So pray for our goal! I love you guys and hope you have a great week.
Love Elder Olse
Love Elder Olse
Monday, August 23, 2010
23 Aug 2010
HI
We had an okay week. Diane came to church and loved it, she will be baptized in the next 4 weeks and hopefully we can get her 2 daughters as well. Bro. Moliere got confirmed yesterday and will get the priesthood next week, he is progressing well. Pray for us. Sounds like tyler is doing great! i am really proud of the missionary that he has become. I hope that this week we will be able to find a lot more people to commit this week. we have a few good people that we found this last week that accepted to be baptized but didn't come to church yesterday. So hopefully we can get them to church this week. I love you and hope you all have a good week.
Elder Olsen
We had an okay week. Diane came to church and loved it, she will be baptized in the next 4 weeks and hopefully we can get her 2 daughters as well. Bro. Moliere got confirmed yesterday and will get the priesthood next week, he is progressing well. Pray for us. Sounds like tyler is doing great! i am really proud of the missionary that he has become. I hope that this week we will be able to find a lot more people to commit this week. we have a few good people that we found this last week that accepted to be baptized but didn't come to church yesterday. So hopefully we can get them to church this week. I love you and hope you all have a good week.
Elder Olsen
Saturday, August 21, 2010
16 Aug 2010
We had a great week. Moliere was able to be baptized yesterday by my companion. It was a really good service and almost the entire ward attended the baptism, that might have had something to do with the fact that there was a "linger longer" after with a lot of food. haha but hey they were there. Today is the first day of my last transfer in the mission field! Crazy huh. I really want to work hard this transfer and accomplish allot more than i ever have before. We have allot of good people that we are working with right now, so i am really hoping for allot of baptisms this transfer. Please continue to pray for us allot. Well i love you all!
Elder Olsen
Elder Olsen
9 Aug 2010
Hey Family!
Well we had a great week! we really saw a lot of miracles... aight here is the first one. Moliere is getting baptized this next sunday! We had a lesson with him after church yesterday and he had a few concerns about doctrine that we were able to clear up. And he wants to get baptized this sunday. It is a pretty big miracle, this area has not seen a baptism in over a year and we got blinded in to this area this transfer. So its pretty sweet that we are having a baptism the same transfer. But I'm not satisfied we need to have a lot more next transfer. We have 2 families now that are looking pretty good for next month to get baptized. Here is the other story... We were looking up people who are former investigators, we had planned to look up like 15 people in one day. We had a teaching record from a lady and her 2 daughters from 2007 that has had no contact since than. Basically what the record said was that 2 of her daughters got baptized in Florida and she was threre for the baptisms cause she was visiting them, she came back to new york and came to church 1 time. The missionaries never actually taught her, and they lost contact and never had any updates since than. I'm sure that missionaries have tried to look her up before but have never found her. So we wrote down to stop by her home at 8 o clock. The whole first part of the day all of our plans didn't really go as planned and we were not really able to look up the people at the times that we had planned but for this one we were literally rounding the corner to her house at exactly 8 o clock. Her name is Diane... So we come around the corner and there are a bunch of people outside and they all look at us. One lady started running toward us, she looked really excited too see us, which is really strange around here. So she tells us she is diane. We start talking with her and than another lady comes over, come to find out it is one of her daughters that was baptized in Florida in 2007. She was in the process of moving to Maryland, and she had her car and U-Haul trailer in front of the house, she had literally just pulled up from Texas where she was living 30 minutes before we got there. And than she tells us that her and her husband just got sealed in the temple last week with their 3 kids!!! So basically it was amazing and completely out of our hands, it was meant to happen. it was an answer to many prayers for sure! So Diane is in Maryland right now helping her daughter move and get settled in but we gave her a book of Mormon and her and her daughter are supposed to read it together. and hopefully she will go to church with her daughter in Maryland. she is coming back this week and i think that her and her 2 daughters will be baptized this month! thank you everyone for all of your prayers! Everything is going great! Elder Roderick is really excited to have his first baptism next week, but we need to have allot more! I really want to have like 10 to 15 baptisms next transfer my final one. Please continue to pray for us and our success. I love all of you!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Well we had a great week! we really saw a lot of miracles... aight here is the first one. Moliere is getting baptized this next sunday! We had a lesson with him after church yesterday and he had a few concerns about doctrine that we were able to clear up. And he wants to get baptized this sunday. It is a pretty big miracle, this area has not seen a baptism in over a year and we got blinded in to this area this transfer. So its pretty sweet that we are having a baptism the same transfer. But I'm not satisfied we need to have a lot more next transfer. We have 2 families now that are looking pretty good for next month to get baptized. Here is the other story... We were looking up people who are former investigators, we had planned to look up like 15 people in one day. We had a teaching record from a lady and her 2 daughters from 2007 that has had no contact since than. Basically what the record said was that 2 of her daughters got baptized in Florida and she was threre for the baptisms cause she was visiting them, she came back to new york and came to church 1 time. The missionaries never actually taught her, and they lost contact and never had any updates since than. I'm sure that missionaries have tried to look her up before but have never found her. So we wrote down to stop by her home at 8 o clock. The whole first part of the day all of our plans didn't really go as planned and we were not really able to look up the people at the times that we had planned but for this one we were literally rounding the corner to her house at exactly 8 o clock. Her name is Diane... So we come around the corner and there are a bunch of people outside and they all look at us. One lady started running toward us, she looked really excited too see us, which is really strange around here. So she tells us she is diane. We start talking with her and than another lady comes over, come to find out it is one of her daughters that was baptized in Florida in 2007. She was in the process of moving to Maryland, and she had her car and U-Haul trailer in front of the house, she had literally just pulled up from Texas where she was living 30 minutes before we got there. And than she tells us that her and her husband just got sealed in the temple last week with their 3 kids!!! So basically it was amazing and completely out of our hands, it was meant to happen. it was an answer to many prayers for sure! So Diane is in Maryland right now helping her daughter move and get settled in but we gave her a book of Mormon and her and her daughter are supposed to read it together. and hopefully she will go to church with her daughter in Maryland. she is coming back this week and i think that her and her 2 daughters will be baptized this month! thank you everyone for all of your prayers! Everything is going great! Elder Roderick is really excited to have his first baptism next week, but we need to have allot more! I really want to have like 10 to 15 baptisms next transfer my final one. Please continue to pray for us and our success. I love all of you!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
26 July 2010
Hey-
well i had a great week! it was good that we found allot of new investigators, we had a huge miracle happen yesterday. A man just showed up to church. A missionary talked to him on the bus about 2 months ago and gave him the address for the church and he just decided to come. After church we were talking with him and invited him to be baptized and he accepted. We have some really good potentials that we are trying to work with. It has been hard getting blinded into an area and getting a good teaching pool started. We have been doing some serious organizing! That is definitely one thing that i have become a little OCD about on my mission is organization. We are working on the ward list right now, there are over 550 people on the ward list and only 70 or 80 "active".... So there are obviously a ton of people who have moved or who do not want contact from the church. So we are going through all of the old ward lists that we can find from old missionaries and copying all of their notes onto one list. That way we dont waste allot of time looking people up who dont live there. We are also trying to identify all of the part member families. This month is all ready over, August is right around the corner. We really need to baptize allot of people in August. So please pray that people especially families will be placed in our path that are ready to be baptized. Everything is going great I am loving it here. I love you all
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
well i had a great week! it was good that we found allot of new investigators, we had a huge miracle happen yesterday. A man just showed up to church. A missionary talked to him on the bus about 2 months ago and gave him the address for the church and he just decided to come. After church we were talking with him and invited him to be baptized and he accepted. We have some really good potentials that we are trying to work with. It has been hard getting blinded into an area and getting a good teaching pool started. We have been doing some serious organizing! That is definitely one thing that i have become a little OCD about on my mission is organization. We are working on the ward list right now, there are over 550 people on the ward list and only 70 or 80 "active".... So there are obviously a ton of people who have moved or who do not want contact from the church. So we are going through all of the old ward lists that we can find from old missionaries and copying all of their notes onto one list. That way we dont waste allot of time looking people up who dont live there. We are also trying to identify all of the part member families. This month is all ready over, August is right around the corner. We really need to baptize allot of people in August. So please pray that people especially families will be placed in our path that are ready to be baptized. Everything is going great I am loving it here. I love you all
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
19 July 2010
Hey family!
Well this was one of the most rewarding weeks of my mission. So i don't know if you all remember Craig Lento? I baptized him about a year ago in South Shore Long Island, when i was serving with Elder Alder. Craig is 26 years old, He got his mission call to serve in the Las Vegas mission about a month ago. He will go into the MTC on August 4th i think. Well this week on Thursday I got to go to the Manhattan Temple with him, he asked me to be his escort. For him to receive his endowment. It was really special! He liked it allot and we got to talk with one of the counselors in the temple presidency. It seriously was one of the crowning moments of my mission. Craig is a completely different person now i cant believe it. Maybe Justin and him will be in the mtc at the same time? It is pretty cool to see a man that you baptize on your mission go on a mission before you finish your mission, it doesn't happen very often. Well the work is going... We are trying to find a family to teach and baptize. I love you all and i love the Lord Jesus Christ
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
Well this was one of the most rewarding weeks of my mission. So i don't know if you all remember Craig Lento? I baptized him about a year ago in South Shore Long Island, when i was serving with Elder Alder. Craig is 26 years old, He got his mission call to serve in the Las Vegas mission about a month ago. He will go into the MTC on August 4th i think. Well this week on Thursday I got to go to the Manhattan Temple with him, he asked me to be his escort. For him to receive his endowment. It was really special! He liked it allot and we got to talk with one of the counselors in the temple presidency. It seriously was one of the crowning moments of my mission. Craig is a completely different person now i cant believe it. Maybe Justin and him will be in the mtc at the same time? It is pretty cool to see a man that you baptize on your mission go on a mission before you finish your mission, it doesn't happen very often. Well the work is going... We are trying to find a family to teach and baptize. I love you all and i love the Lord Jesus Christ
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
Monday, June 14, 2010
14 June 2010
Hey everyone!
Well it was a great week! We had the baptism of Jorge Garcia on Wednesday night. I will send you pictures later cause i left the camera in the car. Margaret(the 77 year old lady) came to church and loved it. She called me a few hours after church just to thank me. It was really cool... She is doing well and should be getting baptized 2 weeks from now. Yury Cruz gave a talk yesterday that was really great, We baptized her my first transfer here. The talk was amazing, I was really blown away. She is leaving for Colombia tomorrow morning :( Her time here is up and she is going back to be with her family. We went to say goodbye to her this morning and she gave me a Colombian futbol jersey. She is going to go back and convert her entire family... We had a cool miracle happen yesterday, A man Daniel showed up at church. The sister missionaries fearlessed him on the train a few days ago. He used to investigate the church when he was like 15 years old. Well he was like an hour and a half late, So it was in the middle of Gospel Principles class, I took him in there. After the class was over I was talking with him and asking him why he came to the church and some soul searching questions. Well in about 1 minute i had him commited for baptism in 2 weeks. So on the 27th he is going to be baptized. It was really funny cause the next class was priesthood and when we stood up to intruduce him i told everyone that he was preparing to be baptized on the 27th. He was really happy and smiling, But everyone else was shocked. Especially the missionaries. . . Afterwards some of them came and talked to me asking how i was able to do it when i had just barely met him and we had never taught him a lesson. haha I said well i just bore my testimony and asked him to be baptized and he said yes. Its easy sometimes missionaries are just so scared of inviting people to be baptized, no one can ever be baptized if we dont ask them too. We had Steven B Allen visiting our mission from Monday to Thursday morning. He is the managing director or the missionary department over the whole church. Basically he is the man when it comes to missionary work. Monday afternoon we had a meeting with him discussing the mission and the culture and than he and Brother MItchell (He is in charge of training at the MTC, as well as training new mission presidents) They gave us a lesson on asking inspired questions... IT was increddible! really i think that i learned more in the 3 days that they were here than i have my entire mission. Than that night Brother Allen went out teaching with Elder Cascardi and I. Brother Allen said that he wanted us to throw our lesson plan out and just go into the lesson and do what they had just taught us to do, Ask inspired questions and than teach whatever the spirit guides you too. So first i will give you a little description of what an inspired question is.
Basically when you are talking to some one and you want to ask an inspired question you really have to focus and be in tune with the spirit. And you just wait.... You dont say anything until the spirit tells you exactly what to say. And than when the revelation does come you ask the question and listen to their response, than you dont ask another question or give a response until the revelation comes. So you just sit there and wait for it. It is really neat to completely rely on the spirit. Well Its not like i have never done this before or that this was completely foreign to me. But the way that they taught it and completely focusing on it was a big eye opener for me. And how much more i could be saying exactly what I need to be saying at exactly the right moment. So we went out teaching and we went to margaret and than to Jorge. Both of the lessons went really well. Brother Allen really liked margaret. He was really funny, we of course were talking to everyone on the streets as we were walking to and from our appointments. He thought it was so cool that there were so many people out on the streets. The next day we had a meeting at the mission home to prepare for our leaders meeting the following day. They did another training for us and showed us allot of the new training tools that they will be thorough out the world in this next month. They are changing allot of things in the way that missions run. we are only going to have zone conference once every quarter as well as interviews. There is just allot of stuff changing to make it possible for the mission presidents to be out with the missionaries teaching more and doing more hands on training. They also showed us allot of the new pmg dvds that are coming out in a few weeks. The leaders meeting the next day was really good, really like the best training i have ever recieved. I think that it really helped out our mission. They focused allot on baptism and our purpose as missionaries and the doctrine of Christ. We had 2 zone conferences the following 2 days. One in long island and the other here in queens. They were pretty good. We have 2 other zone conferences this week, one in brooklyn and the other in queens. As well as we start transfer planning, so it is going to be a long week but it will be good. I dont know if i am going to stay here or not yet but i will probably find out today or in the next few days. I dont care either way. I like serving here and working with president but it would be nice to be out all the time baptizing people and not having to worry about allot of other mission drama all the time. Seriously this mission is like One Tree Hill all over again. haha well i love you all and i hope that you have a great week! The church is true, what else matters...
Hurrah For Israel!!!!!!!!!
Elder Olsen
Well it was a great week! We had the baptism of Jorge Garcia on Wednesday night. I will send you pictures later cause i left the camera in the car. Margaret(the 77 year old lady) came to church and loved it. She called me a few hours after church just to thank me. It was really cool... She is doing well and should be getting baptized 2 weeks from now. Yury Cruz gave a talk yesterday that was really great, We baptized her my first transfer here. The talk was amazing, I was really blown away. She is leaving for Colombia tomorrow morning :( Her time here is up and she is going back to be with her family. We went to say goodbye to her this morning and she gave me a Colombian futbol jersey. She is going to go back and convert her entire family... We had a cool miracle happen yesterday, A man Daniel showed up at church. The sister missionaries fearlessed him on the train a few days ago. He used to investigate the church when he was like 15 years old. Well he was like an hour and a half late, So it was in the middle of Gospel Principles class, I took him in there. After the class was over I was talking with him and asking him why he came to the church and some soul searching questions. Well in about 1 minute i had him commited for baptism in 2 weeks. So on the 27th he is going to be baptized. It was really funny cause the next class was priesthood and when we stood up to intruduce him i told everyone that he was preparing to be baptized on the 27th. He was really happy and smiling, But everyone else was shocked. Especially the missionaries. . . Afterwards some of them came and talked to me asking how i was able to do it when i had just barely met him and we had never taught him a lesson. haha I said well i just bore my testimony and asked him to be baptized and he said yes. Its easy sometimes missionaries are just so scared of inviting people to be baptized, no one can ever be baptized if we dont ask them too. We had Steven B Allen visiting our mission from Monday to Thursday morning. He is the managing director or the missionary department over the whole church. Basically he is the man when it comes to missionary work. Monday afternoon we had a meeting with him discussing the mission and the culture and than he and Brother MItchell (He is in charge of training at the MTC, as well as training new mission presidents) They gave us a lesson on asking inspired questions... IT was increddible! really i think that i learned more in the 3 days that they were here than i have my entire mission. Than that night Brother Allen went out teaching with Elder Cascardi and I. Brother Allen said that he wanted us to throw our lesson plan out and just go into the lesson and do what they had just taught us to do, Ask inspired questions and than teach whatever the spirit guides you too. So first i will give you a little description of what an inspired question is.
Basically when you are talking to some one and you want to ask an inspired question you really have to focus and be in tune with the spirit. And you just wait.... You dont say anything until the spirit tells you exactly what to say. And than when the revelation does come you ask the question and listen to their response, than you dont ask another question or give a response until the revelation comes. So you just sit there and wait for it. It is really neat to completely rely on the spirit. Well Its not like i have never done this before or that this was completely foreign to me. But the way that they taught it and completely focusing on it was a big eye opener for me. And how much more i could be saying exactly what I need to be saying at exactly the right moment. So we went out teaching and we went to margaret and than to Jorge. Both of the lessons went really well. Brother Allen really liked margaret. He was really funny, we of course were talking to everyone on the streets as we were walking to and from our appointments. He thought it was so cool that there were so many people out on the streets. The next day we had a meeting at the mission home to prepare for our leaders meeting the following day. They did another training for us and showed us allot of the new training tools that they will be thorough out the world in this next month. They are changing allot of things in the way that missions run. we are only going to have zone conference once every quarter as well as interviews. There is just allot of stuff changing to make it possible for the mission presidents to be out with the missionaries teaching more and doing more hands on training. They also showed us allot of the new pmg dvds that are coming out in a few weeks. The leaders meeting the next day was really good, really like the best training i have ever recieved. I think that it really helped out our mission. They focused allot on baptism and our purpose as missionaries and the doctrine of Christ. We had 2 zone conferences the following 2 days. One in long island and the other here in queens. They were pretty good. We have 2 other zone conferences this week, one in brooklyn and the other in queens. As well as we start transfer planning, so it is going to be a long week but it will be good. I dont know if i am going to stay here or not yet but i will probably find out today or in the next few days. I dont care either way. I like serving here and working with president but it would be nice to be out all the time baptizing people and not having to worry about allot of other mission drama all the time. Seriously this mission is like One Tree Hill all over again. haha well i love you all and i hope that you have a great week! The church is true, what else matters...
Hurrah For Israel!!!!!!!!!
Elder Olsen
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
9 June 2010
I guess that i am getting old in the mission. No one e mails me more than 2 sentences anymore :( haha nah its okay. Welp i had a great week, we have Jorge getting baptized this wednesday. Today in about 15 minutes Brother Allen from the missionary department will be here and we will start our meetings. Its going to be a crazy week, 2 zone conferences, a zone leader council, and 3 full days with brother allen here with a ton of meetings. Alex got confirmed yesterday, it was great! he is really cool. I love you all have a good week
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Friday, June 4, 2010
This is one out of order because of my broken arm 17 May 2010
Hello Family!
Here are some pictures for you... The beach baptism was really cool. It was actually really hard to baptize her, the waves were huge! and the wind was blowing really hard. But its a good thing I'm a pro at baptizing ha ha. . We did the baptism in Long Beach, there is a member in the Long Beach area that owns a house on a private beach. so it was really nice, there was no one on the beach and no trash. We had planned on staring the baptism at 5:30 so we left the church here in Rego Park at 4:30. . . But because of traffic it took like an hour and a half to get there. I hate NY traffic. But i am getting pretty used to it, now that i have been in a car for almost a year. and my parallel parking skills just keep getting better and better. I think that i could enter into some kind of competition or something, I think i could take the whole thing. haha but really i am pretty good. And right now i am driving a mini van if i haven't all ready told you. I know that i have probably said it many times in My life that i hate mini vans... But let me tell ya.. I never have these things a fair shot. They are actually pretty sweet! ha i never thought i would be saying that. Ours is the Dodge Caravan, it has the "stow and go" seating. So basically if we need to transport anything we can in just a minute or two make all of our seats disappear under the floor and we have a large open space in the back of the van. Or as we call it our "living room" cause we spend allot of eating our lunch in the "living room" But anyways i have gotten allot of good practice parking this mini van into some pretty tight parking spots here in the heart of queens. Well enough about mini vans huh. Jorge committed to be baptized the 29th of this month. So we are really excited for him. He is really good. He will be the first person that i baptize that doesn't speak a lick of English. ha so pretty much Elder Cascardi and the members do all of the teaching and I bare my testimony. But i am trying to pick up on the Spanish. It is just hard with no extra time. We also have Alex whom is Luddy's friend committed for the 30th of this month. But we are still trying to get him to go to church in a different ward out in Long Island cause that is where he lives. We had quite a crazy week. and this week is not looking any less nuts, We were able to finish up our transfer planning with president about 30 minutes ago(that took up the entire morning) And everything looks pretty good for next transfer. We have Elder Michael Ringwood coming to visit our mission this week(of the Seventy) He spoke in Conference 2 conferences ago. So this Wednesday we have a Zone Leader Council that he is going to come too that we need to prepare for, And than on Thursday and Friday we have Zone Conference with the entire mission that we also need to get allot of stuff ready for, and than both Thursday and Friday night Elder Ringwood is going to do a fireside for the wards and branches, 1 of them will be in Long Island and another one here in Queens. So yeah it will be quite a crazy week. We are really being blessed, we have hardly any time to proselyte but the time that we do use the Lord is making it really effective. I feel like right now for the first time in my mission that we are only teaching people that i feel confident are ready to be baptized this month. It is really cool. Well i love you all and i pray for you everyday. Please pray for a woman named Deborah, last week we were coming out of a pizza shop and i saw this old lady and i could tell that she was looking at us so i waved to her and said hi! she walked over and asked if we could pray for her daughter who is very sick. We got talking to her and eventually led to us just walking over to her house right than to give her a priesthool blessing. We walked into this ladies home and her daughter was lying on the bed, I dont know that i have actually seen anyone closer to death than this woman. She is only in her 30's and she has 2 kids a boy and a girl 15 and 14 years old. The 14 year old daughter was there. We shared a message
Here are some pictures for you... The beach baptism was really cool. It was actually really hard to baptize her, the waves were huge! and the wind was blowing really hard. But its a good thing I'm a pro at baptizing ha ha. . We did the baptism in Long Beach, there is a member in the Long Beach area that owns a house on a private beach. so it was really nice, there was no one on the beach and no trash. We had planned on staring the baptism at 5:30 so we left the church here in Rego Park at 4:30. . . But because of traffic it took like an hour and a half to get there. I hate NY traffic. But i am getting pretty used to it, now that i have been in a car for almost a year. and my parallel parking skills just keep getting better and better. I think that i could enter into some kind of competition or something, I think i could take the whole thing. haha but really i am pretty good. And right now i am driving a mini van if i haven't all ready told you. I know that i have probably said it many times in My life that i hate mini vans... But let me tell ya.. I never have these things a fair shot. They are actually pretty sweet! ha i never thought i would be saying that. Ours is the Dodge Caravan, it has the "stow and go" seating. So basically if we need to transport anything we can in just a minute or two make all of our seats disappear under the floor and we have a large open space in the back of the van. Or as we call it our "living room" cause we spend allot of eating our lunch in the "living room" But anyways i have gotten allot of good practice parking this mini van into some pretty tight parking spots here in the heart of queens. Well enough about mini vans huh. Jorge committed to be baptized the 29th of this month. So we are really excited for him. He is really good. He will be the first person that i baptize that doesn't speak a lick of English. ha so pretty much Elder Cascardi and the members do all of the teaching and I bare my testimony. But i am trying to pick up on the Spanish. It is just hard with no extra time. We also have Alex whom is Luddy's friend committed for the 30th of this month. But we are still trying to get him to go to church in a different ward out in Long Island cause that is where he lives. We had quite a crazy week. and this week is not looking any less nuts, We were able to finish up our transfer planning with president about 30 minutes ago(that took up the entire morning) And everything looks pretty good for next transfer. We have Elder Michael Ringwood coming to visit our mission this week(of the Seventy) He spoke in Conference 2 conferences ago. So this Wednesday we have a Zone Leader Council that he is going to come too that we need to prepare for, And than on Thursday and Friday we have Zone Conference with the entire mission that we also need to get allot of stuff ready for, and than both Thursday and Friday night Elder Ringwood is going to do a fireside for the wards and branches, 1 of them will be in Long Island and another one here in Queens. So yeah it will be quite a crazy week. We are really being blessed, we have hardly any time to proselyte but the time that we do use the Lord is making it really effective. I feel like right now for the first time in my mission that we are only teaching people that i feel confident are ready to be baptized this month. It is really cool. Well i love you all and i pray for you everyday. Please pray for a woman named Deborah, last week we were coming out of a pizza shop and i saw this old lady and i could tell that she was looking at us so i waved to her and said hi! she walked over and asked if we could pray for her daughter who is very sick. We got talking to her and eventually led to us just walking over to her house right than to give her a priesthool blessing. We walked into this ladies home and her daughter was lying on the bed, I dont know that i have actually seen anyone closer to death than this woman. She is only in her 30's and she has 2 kids a boy and a girl 15 and 14 years old. The 14 year old daughter was there. We shared a message
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
31 May 2010
Hey Everyone.Well we had a great week! Alex got baptized on Saturday! it was really cool. We did it on the beach again, but this time we did it in a different location than Luddy's baptism. There was allot less waves. Elder Casacardi baptized him. Luddy gave a talk on baptism and that was really good, its really special when you have the opportunity to see people that you baptized talk and bare their testimony. We have Jorge who is getting baptized this next Sunday, he is doing really awesome! We are really being blessed with so many miracles. If you remember Debby and Margaret (i talked about them a few e mails ago) Debby is the one that was really sick, she has 2 kids boy and girl 14 and 15. Margaret is her mother. Well we finished a meeting a few nights ago and i was on exchanges with a Zone Leader in zone 7, and i had a new missionary with me. He came into the mission last Monday and got out into his first area which was Jamaica, and totally freaked out. He was having panic attacks and depression and all kind of problems. So he was staying with us for 3 days until he was going home, which was Saturday. And we had planned to stop by and visit Debby and Margaret earlier in the day, but because allot of stuff came up we didn't have time. We had tried to contact her a few times in the last week but hadn't had any luck. Well we got into the van and i really felt like we needed to go right than. So we drove over there (in our super cool mini-van ha ha) and knocked on the door. Margaret answered the door and just started to cry. She told us that Debby had passed away... We shared with her parts of the plan of salvation, it was really spiritual and helped me realize how blessed we are to have the knowledge of God's plan. It is a really weird feeling that she died, I was just visiting with her last week. But it was really neat that i was able to give her a blessing before she died. I really felt when i was giving her the blessing the love that God had for her and how strong of a lady that she really was. She had endured so many trials in life. I have no doubt that she will be in a happy place and will accept the Gospel on the other side. Now i just hope that we will be able to baptize her mom and her 2 kids. So please pray for them. Janine called me last night and told me that she doesn't want to meet with us anymore :( It was really sad for me... I'm not sure why this always happens but i'm sure that there is something that i am supposed to learn from this happening over and over again on my mission. I really do try to love all of those that i teach, and i think that i do. But for some reason through out my mission there have been a few people that i have taught that i felt different about. It was a stronger love, and i have really desired their salvation and acceptance of the gospel. And every single person that i have taught that i have felt that connection to have not gotten baptized and have stopped investigating. (Ebony Downy and her family, Miranda, a few others and now Janine and her family) I dont know i suppose Heavenly Father is trying to toughen up my heart. Or help me to learn to love people that way and than when they let you down not getting discouraged or down. It just occured to me that these experiences have really helped me understand the Atonement of Jesus Christ allot better. He was perfect, he had a perfect love for everyone! And we let him down all the time, I let him down all the time. I guess this is giving me a taste of what he must feel everytime that i or anyone does something wrong. Elder Holland said in a talk (Missionary work and the Atonement) Why would we ever expect it to be easy, when it was never easy for him! When we take the name of Christ upon ourselves and do his work, we need to expect to feel at least a fraction of what he felt.
That is not quoted exactly, but it basically says that, you can find a version of the talk on lds . org. but the original was given at the mtc and you cant get that copy anywhere. I got a copy from my mission president that he got somewhere. Well I love being a missionary. And i love doing this work. Next week Steven Allen is coming to visit our mission, he is going to come teaching with us for an entire evening. I am really nervous, so please pray for me. If i mess up on something they are probably going to use me as a bad example in the next version of PMG haha. I love you all have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Michael Melvin Olsen
That is not quoted exactly, but it basically says that, you can find a version of the talk on lds . org. but the original was given at the mtc and you cant get that copy anywhere. I got a copy from my mission president that he got somewhere. Well I love being a missionary. And i love doing this work. Next week Steven Allen is coming to visit our mission, he is going to come teaching with us for an entire evening. I am really nervous, so please pray for me. If i mess up on something they are probably going to use me as a bad example in the next version of PMG haha. I love you all have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Michael Melvin Olsen
29 May 2010
well we had a really busy week. Transfers was a headache. and we ended up making our last change Tuesday morning the day of transfers ha ha. But everything turned out okay. Alex is getting baptized this Sunday! It is going to be another beach baptism ha. All of our investigators want to get baptized in the ocean or a river, ha it is pretty funny. We are doing it in a different spot than Luddy's baptism. Hopefullly the waves will not be as big. And than we have Jorge who is supposed to get baptized this sunday. But he will probably get baptized next week. This last week we had Elder Michael T. Ringwood(1st quorum of the Seventy) do a mission tour. I was able to spend allot of time with him, it was really neat. We did 2 different zone conferences for the whole mission. They were really great! and i really learned allot. He gave a talk 2 General Conferences ago, I think his talk was called an easiness and willingness to believe. He was a great speaker and i think really helped our mission. We also had a Zone Leader Council with him that was great. In two weeks we have Steven Allen (the director of the missionary department) coming to visit the mission as well. I am really scared. He is going to come teaching with us for an entire night and we have allot of meetings with him and president that we have to go to. he is basically going to be judging the mission based upon our performance. This is the man that basically trains all of the mission presidents. He is really legit. So it should be really exciting. Please pray for me and my companion. We are trying to do everything exactly the way that PMG says to do it. I do have one thing however to talk to him about, The PMG dvd's are wrong, and some parts dont go along with what PMG manual actually says to do. haha I think that it is pretty funny. the missionaries that they show in the dvd's doing their daily planning do it wrong. So we are planning on talking with him about that. Well everything is going great. we have way too much to do and not enough time to do any of it. But the Lord is really blessing us with plenty of miracles, I have never done so little missionary work in my life and seen so great fruits from my little efforts. We only teach people that get baptized. haha that is the way that it should always be. Our ward council got really mad at us last week, (well actually i wasnt there i was on exchanges with someone else to pick up and investigator) BUt they got really mad at my companion. Because they said that we cant just baptize people so fast that no one in the ward has time to even know who they are. Ha they are just used to people investigating for months! That is not how i do it. No more than 4 weeks. that is the max. So they are just going to have to get used to it. But I love you all and i love doing this amazing work. Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Elder Olsen
1 May 2010
I do not have a lot of time today. You really need to start preparing for your mission now! Make up your mind today, right now that you are going to be a great missionary. Do not ever settle for less. Once you have made that decision it will guide your actions, attitude and eventually the results of your whole mission. Do not settle for mediocrity. You will find that you will go into the mission field and there will be all kinds of missionaries, some will be good, some will be average, some will be poor... But only a few in any will be great. A lot of missionaries when they first come into the mission field get discouraged and they lose a lot of faith and desire and vision of missionary work because of the poor examples around them. They lose the original vision of what they originally thought missionary work is like, and what a missionary is supposed to be. All of us have this "idea" of what a missionary is and what he does, when we are in primary we learn about them and they are heroes to us. Well Justin this is the right "idea" and that is what missionaries are supposed to be. Don't let other peoples ideas and actions and examples influence you for the negative. No matter where you are called there will be Elders that will justify breaking mission rules, they will say that it is only in this mission that "that" happens.. They will say we don't and cant baptize like that in this mission or in this area. Don't listen to this garbage, Be the missionary that God wants you to be. I want you right after you open your call to go to a quiet place and ponder about how you feel, Pray out loud and tell God that you are thankful for the opportunity that you have to serve. Than i want you to think of what you want to accomplish on your mission, make sure that you write down the things that come to your mind. Think of how many people that you want to baptize. Write them down. And than pray and ask Heavenly Father if this is his will, Promise him that you will do everything in your power to help these people to be baptized, promise him that you are going to be exactly obedient your entire mission. That you are going to work your absolute hardest! After praying wait and ponder and wait for the conformation of the spirit. You will feel the spirit testify to you that you can do it. And you will know that God wants you to do it and that he is going to help you to do it. Justin you are a child of God, I know that. I have felt the love that he has for you. Never forget that. And never forget that every single person that you meet and see every single day is also a child of God and that he loves them just as much as he loves you. Try to imagine the way that God really feels about all the people around you. Start studying the Atonement of Jesus Christ and applying it into your life everyday. If you don't know how or what to study refer to PMG and dad and Steve. But please study the Atonement. I promise that it will help more than anything else to prepare you for a mission. for with God nothing shall be impossible" Luke 1:37...
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder M. Olsen
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder M. Olsen
1 May 2010
Hey Mom and Dad
Hey I'm writing you cause i need to ask you a favor. Mom dad and janessa and well anyone else that would like to write their testimony to this family can read this below and send me their testimony. Actually i think that it would be really good for Justin to send his to Julia as well. So Justin you better do this or I'm gonna beat you up. haha
So I think that i have told you about Jennine and her family at least a few times. They are the ones from Brazil. We have been teaching them for a while now. Jennine is awesome! She has come to church a few times and wants to get baptized. She all ready considers this her church. She does pretty well at keeping her commitments but she has been struggling a lot lately because life has gotten a lot more crazy. This always happens anytime anyone makes any decision or progress for good, Satan will try even harder to keep us from our potential. So this has really been happening to her. Her husband Edison is really cool, but has been really cold lately. He will not come down and sit in the lessons, Well I'll talk more about him in a second. So Julia is there 16 year old daughter, She is really nice. But is going through a tough time right now. she is really rebelling. she stays out sometimes late at night or just doesn't come home at all. She is not going to school every day, she is smoking cigarettes. But yet she is still a nice girl. she is just lost. Like last Sunday night we went over and we were teaching Jennine and Julia just came in and sat in the lesson and wanted to learn, her and her mom got along great. we asked her what was it throughout her life that has made her truly happy, or like the moments in her life when she felt the most joy and happiness. She said that the times when she felt like that were when she was bonding with her mom. So we committed them to read and pray together every night and they said that they were going to do it. But than next thing we hear from Jennine is that Julia was out way late and didn't tell anyone where she was. and just the same old stuff. I know that she is a good person and has a desire to choose the right. She is just wounded by sin right now and doesn't know the way out. Last week she stole 300 dollars from her mom and the car and crashed the car. that same week she also got caught shoplifting and spent the night in Juvenile jail. ha ha i know this sounds a lot like my teenage years. So as a result of this Edison(the father) has started to drink. and went to pick up Jennine last week with there other son Nicholas(who is 6) and Edison was drunk. so Jennine got really mad at him and he has basically lost a lot of trust with her. and Jennine pretty much treats him like a child. So Edison cause of all of this is of course feeling really bad. and awkward because he knows that Jennine tells us everything. so this is probably why he is not coming into the lessons anymore and he is avoiding us. So yeah this is all a big mess... I hope that any of that made sense. I really love this family a lot! and i know that the Gospel could really help them right now. Jennine would do it if she just had a little more support. and i think Edison and Julia would come along as well. if only they could be softened a little. So mom i was wondering if you could write Jennine a letter, well actually just e mail it to me and i will print it off and give it to her. cause that will be faster. But i think that you would be able to help her, you having been a mom of a few wayward children. Just bare your testimony to her and tell her that you know that she leading her family in the gospel will solve all of the family problems and they will eventually be a "happy family" Just pray about it and follow the spirit as you write the letter. I really know that your testimony will be able to help her mom. Dad i would love for you to write a letter to Edison, Just whatever you want to say, Bare your testimony to him of the atonement(but don't use that word cause he doesn't know what that means) tell him that you know that there is a way to find peace of conscience and happiness in life. Tell him of your testimony and experience of how our family was blessed and saved by the gospel. And finally I would like to ask Janessa if she would be willing to write a letter to Julia, and since Becca is always over at our house maybe Becca would like to write her as well. that would be awesome! Tell them to write their testimony about the atonement as well. and how having the gospel and the church and faith in Jesus Christ has helped them find true happiness. not the fake temporary happiness that comes from doing the "cool" thing in high school (drugs, alcohol, smoking, sex etc...) Tell her about how it has blessed your life knowing that you are a daughter of a Heavenly Father who loves you, and tell her that you know that she is such as well. Just seek and follow the spirit and i know that you will know what to write. I really love this family, I can imagine them as a family 1 year from now all dressed in white in the Manhattan Temple! They are a awesome family. I would really appreciate it if you guys could do this for me. i know that it will help.
So if everyone can write these and e mail it to me that would be great, than i will print them off and give them to her this Sunday night, this is when our next appointment with her. Let me know if you have any questions. I love you all so much! I know that this gospel is true and i know that Jesus is the Christ. We all can find comfort and true joy by experiencing the blessings of his Atonement. I love sharing this with people and helping them to find that peace and comfort.
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Hey I'm writing you cause i need to ask you a favor. Mom dad and janessa and well anyone else that would like to write their testimony to this family can read this below and send me their testimony. Actually i think that it would be really good for Justin to send his to Julia as well. So Justin you better do this or I'm gonna beat you up. haha
So I think that i have told you about Jennine and her family at least a few times. They are the ones from Brazil. We have been teaching them for a while now. Jennine is awesome! She has come to church a few times and wants to get baptized. She all ready considers this her church. She does pretty well at keeping her commitments but she has been struggling a lot lately because life has gotten a lot more crazy. This always happens anytime anyone makes any decision or progress for good, Satan will try even harder to keep us from our potential. So this has really been happening to her. Her husband Edison is really cool, but has been really cold lately. He will not come down and sit in the lessons, Well I'll talk more about him in a second. So Julia is there 16 year old daughter, She is really nice. But is going through a tough time right now. she is really rebelling. she stays out sometimes late at night or just doesn't come home at all. She is not going to school every day, she is smoking cigarettes. But yet she is still a nice girl. she is just lost. Like last Sunday night we went over and we were teaching Jennine and Julia just came in and sat in the lesson and wanted to learn, her and her mom got along great. we asked her what was it throughout her life that has made her truly happy, or like the moments in her life when she felt the most joy and happiness. She said that the times when she felt like that were when she was bonding with her mom. So we committed them to read and pray together every night and they said that they were going to do it. But than next thing we hear from Jennine is that Julia was out way late and didn't tell anyone where she was. and just the same old stuff. I know that she is a good person and has a desire to choose the right. She is just wounded by sin right now and doesn't know the way out. Last week she stole 300 dollars from her mom and the car and crashed the car. that same week she also got caught shoplifting and spent the night in Juvenile jail. ha ha i know this sounds a lot like my teenage years. So as a result of this Edison(the father) has started to drink. and went to pick up Jennine last week with there other son Nicholas(who is 6) and Edison was drunk. so Jennine got really mad at him and he has basically lost a lot of trust with her. and Jennine pretty much treats him like a child. So Edison cause of all of this is of course feeling really bad. and awkward because he knows that Jennine tells us everything. so this is probably why he is not coming into the lessons anymore and he is avoiding us. So yeah this is all a big mess... I hope that any of that made sense. I really love this family a lot! and i know that the Gospel could really help them right now. Jennine would do it if she just had a little more support. and i think Edison and Julia would come along as well. if only they could be softened a little. So mom i was wondering if you could write Jennine a letter, well actually just e mail it to me and i will print it off and give it to her. cause that will be faster. But i think that you would be able to help her, you having been a mom of a few wayward children. Just bare your testimony to her and tell her that you know that she leading her family in the gospel will solve all of the family problems and they will eventually be a "happy family" Just pray about it and follow the spirit as you write the letter. I really know that your testimony will be able to help her mom. Dad i would love for you to write a letter to Edison, Just whatever you want to say, Bare your testimony to him of the atonement(but don't use that word cause he doesn't know what that means) tell him that you know that there is a way to find peace of conscience and happiness in life. Tell him of your testimony and experience of how our family was blessed and saved by the gospel. And finally I would like to ask Janessa if she would be willing to write a letter to Julia, and since Becca is always over at our house maybe Becca would like to write her as well. that would be awesome! Tell them to write their testimony about the atonement as well. and how having the gospel and the church and faith in Jesus Christ has helped them find true happiness. not the fake temporary happiness that comes from doing the "cool" thing in high school (drugs, alcohol, smoking, sex etc...) Tell her about how it has blessed your life knowing that you are a daughter of a Heavenly Father who loves you, and tell her that you know that she is such as well. Just seek and follow the spirit and i know that you will know what to write. I really love this family, I can imagine them as a family 1 year from now all dressed in white in the Manhattan Temple! They are a awesome family. I would really appreciate it if you guys could do this for me. i know that it will help.
So if everyone can write these and e mail it to me that would be great, than i will print them off and give them to her this Sunday night, this is when our next appointment with her. Let me know if you have any questions. I love you all so much! I know that this gospel is true and i know that Jesus is the Christ. We all can find comfort and true joy by experiencing the blessings of his Atonement. I love sharing this with people and helping them to find that peace and comfort.
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
10 Apr 2010
Hey dont have a lot of time right now. but had a great week. Jennine came to church but not the rest of the family :( That is the Brazilian family, everyone please pray for them. i really want to help this family come into the church! I am really excited for General Conference! It is funny last night we were talking right before we were going to bed with the other elders in our pad, and we were all talking about our favorite speakers and previous address' etc... And i was thinking how funny it was that we were all talking about general conference the same way that i would talk about the super bowl or the NBA finals. haha. And we talk about Elder Holland and Eyring and all the others like i used to talk about Kobe and Shaq or Michael Jordan. i just kind of realized that as we were talking that i would have never seen myself having that kind of conversation a few years ago. Well i love you all! have a great week. everyone take notes during the conferences, and tell me which ones were your favorites. thanks i love you!
Elder Olsen
Elder Olsen
20 Apr 2010
Well i had a great week! Sorry i was not able to e mail very much last week, we had kind of a crazy day that day. But yes we survived transfers and everything worked out fine without any major problems. I got all of the Cards, thank you so much! that was really awesome! You guys are the best, My companion was laughing at dads remarks on the card. My new Companion is Elder Cascardi, he is from Sao Paulo Brazil. ha so i have my first foreign companion. He is really great! We are going to have a great time together. we have all ready lived together for 3 months in Jamaica. So we are all ready great friends. He is also my first companion that actually speaks Spanish(and Portuguese) And we are working both the English and Spanish Wards now, So i am really working on my Spanish.. Hopefully i will be able to pick up on it really fast, pray that i will be able to! We have some good people that will be coming to the Spanish ward. We have a lady named Maria ( i don't know if i have talked about her before) But she is really awesome! Her husband is from Haiti and she if from Dominican Republic. Well basically we fearlessed Harry(her husband) about 2 weeks ago and made an appointment with him. we met with them both a few times and to make a long story short it turned out that Harry was not really interested and was lying to us about a lot of things, But Maria really is. So she called us and we met with her and she told us that she had been reading from the Book of Mormon, she read from the beginning all the way to 2 Nephi 16 in like 2 days! So that was really awesome! We are really excited for her, she wants to be baptized soon. The work is going well, we are just trying to build up a good teaching pool, we are trying to work with the members a lot. I love being a missionary! and i love this Gospel and my Saviour. I hope that everything is going great!
Love you guys
Elder Olsen
Love you guys
Elder Olsen
Thursday, April 8, 2010
8 Apr 2010
Mom
I don't need anything really. I guess that i could use a few short sleeve shirts, and 1 long sleeve shirt. but no rush or anything. i don't need them that bad, just some of my shirts are pretty old. Sounds like you are having fun in Colorado, Dad sent me a picture and Adam had his arm in a cast, how did he break his arm? anything else new? when are Christina and Liji coming home from Korea? or are they all ready home? ha ha i don't know. What are Nannie and Papa up too? are they going on a mission anytime soon? How are all of dad's houses all going? have you guys been able to sell or rent any of them? Well everything is going great! I am loving my mission, i only have about 6 months left, so i am getting pretty worried. I will be getting a new companion next week. we have a really busy week ahead of us, Conference was great! i really enjoyed it. We had a missionary come in from Italy on Saturday afternoon, he has been on his mission for about a year but because of Visa problems he had to leave the country, so they sent him here. so we had to pick him up and find a place to put him. He stayed in our apartment for one night and watched conference with us. We are going to the Temple this week with Yury Cruz the lady that we baptized about 4 weeks ago. I am pretty excited. Well i love you and i hope that you have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
I don't need anything really. I guess that i could use a few short sleeve shirts, and 1 long sleeve shirt. but no rush or anything. i don't need them that bad, just some of my shirts are pretty old. Sounds like you are having fun in Colorado, Dad sent me a picture and Adam had his arm in a cast, how did he break his arm? anything else new? when are Christina and Liji coming home from Korea? or are they all ready home? ha ha i don't know. What are Nannie and Papa up too? are they going on a mission anytime soon? How are all of dad's houses all going? have you guys been able to sell or rent any of them? Well everything is going great! I am loving my mission, i only have about 6 months left, so i am getting pretty worried. I will be getting a new companion next week. we have a really busy week ahead of us, Conference was great! i really enjoyed it. We had a missionary come in from Italy on Saturday afternoon, he has been on his mission for about a year but because of Visa problems he had to leave the country, so they sent him here. so we had to pick him up and find a place to put him. He stayed in our apartment for one night and watched conference with us. We are going to the Temple this week with Yury Cruz the lady that we baptized about 4 weeks ago. I am pretty excited. Well i love you and i hope that you have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Monday, March 29, 2010
3 March 2010
Hey dont have a lot of time right now. but had a great week. Jennine came to church but not the rest of the family :( That is the Brazilian family, everyone please pray for them. i really want to help this family come into the church! I am really excited for General Conference! It is funny last night we were talking right before we were going to bed with the other elders in our pad, and we were all talking about our favorite speakers and previous address' etc... And i was thinking how funny it was that we were all talking about general conference the same way that i would talk about the super bowl or the NBA finals. haha. And we talk about Elder Holland and Eyring and all the others like i used to talk about Kobe and Shaq or Michael Jordan. i just kind of realized that as we were talking that i would have never seen myself having that kind of conversation a few years ago. Well i love you all! have a great week. everyone take notes during the conferences, and tell me which ones were your favorites. thanks i love you!
Elder Olsen
Elder Olsen
Thursday, March 25, 2010
22 March 2010
Hey mom and dad...
well i will answer some of your questions to start off.. Well for missionary month, Really everything is from New York. so it doesn't matter what you cook. But some things that new york is famous for is hot dogs, pizza, pretzels, cheese cake, yeah that's pretty much it. but there are literally food from everywhere here. I have tried foods from so many different places. But if you do get pizza you need to get new york style pizza. I live right next to the mission office, literally right next to it. its a tiny little house next to the church. we live on the top floor and a senior office couple lives on the bottom floor. I don't even know the address. but i think its 86-08 60th rd. Elmhurst, NY. 11373. but don't send anything to that address. We are in the mission office every single day usually, so i can just get my mail there, they actually put it on my desk. I do actually need some new shoes. :) i am really hard on shoes and the ones that i am wearing right now are getting pretty bad, it doesn't look to good. so if you can that would be awesome if you have some extra money to send so that i could buy some shoes. but if you don't, than don't worry about it. i will be fine and will figure something out.
Dad to answer some of your questions..
Well i don't really know what a typical p day is yet cause this is only my 4th one. but to give you an idea, last week i didn't have time to do my laundry, luckily i have enough garments and white shirts to last me exactly 2 weeks, so right now i am wearing my last pair. ha ha Well this morning we got up and did the morning routine. than we came into the office at 10 am. we are doing e mail right now, after this we are going to go to the grocery store and than my companion has to go to the post office. than we will head back here and we have allot of stuff that we have to get ready for the week. We have 2 more zone conferences this week. so we have to print off all of the papers that we will need for those. (programs, talks, newsletter, etc...) we have to update the baptismal commits for the upcoming week, and find out about all of the baptisms for last week. We have a lot of planning and things to get ready for this week, we will be here in the office doing this stuff until about 3 than we have planned to go see a man named Salvador, he came to church yesterday. he got baptized about 2 years ago in Florida and than moved here and has been in active ever since. well i guess that he googled to find out where the church was and showed up. he is living with his aunt and uncle whom are not members. I think that he will be a really good source to help allot of his friends and family come into the church. so we have an appointment with him at 4, than we will head back here to the office. cause we have a meeting with President Nelson every Monday at 5 o clock. that will most likely last for the remainder of the evening, but if we get let out before 9 than we have planned to look up a part member family and do allot of fear-lessing! so yeah a pretty busy day. I am really excited. Dad thanks for all the cool stats.
well we had an okay week. it was super busy. we had 2 zone conferences, those were really hectic, plus we had 2 exchanges with zone leaders. We didn't have allot of time to work in our own area. but we have got some big potential right now. especially with this Brazilian family. The mom Jennine is making great progress. she is really awesome! its just the dad Edison. everyone please pray for him. he really needs it allot. I think that he is just scared to change and to do something different. please pray that he and his daughter will come to church with Jennine. This family is awesome. i really love them so much and want them to be sealed in the temple. I love doing this work and being able to be an instrument in Gods hands. I think that as missionaries we get a special gift from God to every once and a while, even if it is just for a second to see people the way that God See's them. last night we had a lesson with Jennine, and she was just talking as the lesson began and this feeling came over me, I really felt a pure love for her and her family. it brought tears to my eyes, as i imagined them getting baptized and being sealed in the temple. I know that this is the love of Christ that God was allowing me to feel for a short time. I know that days when i am in tune with the spirit and when i am really fulfilling my purpose is when i am able to look at people, complete strangers and feel this way about them, just an overwhelming feeling and desire for their salvation. Well i love you all so much thank you for all of your prayers and support. take care and have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
well i will answer some of your questions to start off.. Well for missionary month, Really everything is from New York. so it doesn't matter what you cook. But some things that new york is famous for is hot dogs, pizza, pretzels, cheese cake, yeah that's pretty much it. but there are literally food from everywhere here. I have tried foods from so many different places. But if you do get pizza you need to get new york style pizza. I live right next to the mission office, literally right next to it. its a tiny little house next to the church. we live on the top floor and a senior office couple lives on the bottom floor. I don't even know the address. but i think its 86-08 60th rd. Elmhurst, NY. 11373. but don't send anything to that address. We are in the mission office every single day usually, so i can just get my mail there, they actually put it on my desk. I do actually need some new shoes. :) i am really hard on shoes and the ones that i am wearing right now are getting pretty bad, it doesn't look to good. so if you can that would be awesome if you have some extra money to send so that i could buy some shoes. but if you don't, than don't worry about it. i will be fine and will figure something out.
Dad to answer some of your questions..
Well i don't really know what a typical p day is yet cause this is only my 4th one. but to give you an idea, last week i didn't have time to do my laundry, luckily i have enough garments and white shirts to last me exactly 2 weeks, so right now i am wearing my last pair. ha ha Well this morning we got up and did the morning routine. than we came into the office at 10 am. we are doing e mail right now, after this we are going to go to the grocery store and than my companion has to go to the post office. than we will head back here and we have allot of stuff that we have to get ready for the week. We have 2 more zone conferences this week. so we have to print off all of the papers that we will need for those. (programs, talks, newsletter, etc...) we have to update the baptismal commits for the upcoming week, and find out about all of the baptisms for last week. We have a lot of planning and things to get ready for this week, we will be here in the office doing this stuff until about 3 than we have planned to go see a man named Salvador, he came to church yesterday. he got baptized about 2 years ago in Florida and than moved here and has been in active ever since. well i guess that he googled to find out where the church was and showed up. he is living with his aunt and uncle whom are not members. I think that he will be a really good source to help allot of his friends and family come into the church. so we have an appointment with him at 4, than we will head back here to the office. cause we have a meeting with President Nelson every Monday at 5 o clock. that will most likely last for the remainder of the evening, but if we get let out before 9 than we have planned to look up a part member family and do allot of fear-lessing! so yeah a pretty busy day. I am really excited. Dad thanks for all the cool stats.
well we had an okay week. it was super busy. we had 2 zone conferences, those were really hectic, plus we had 2 exchanges with zone leaders. We didn't have allot of time to work in our own area. but we have got some big potential right now. especially with this Brazilian family. The mom Jennine is making great progress. she is really awesome! its just the dad Edison. everyone please pray for him. he really needs it allot. I think that he is just scared to change and to do something different. please pray that he and his daughter will come to church with Jennine. This family is awesome. i really love them so much and want them to be sealed in the temple. I love doing this work and being able to be an instrument in Gods hands. I think that as missionaries we get a special gift from God to every once and a while, even if it is just for a second to see people the way that God See's them. last night we had a lesson with Jennine, and she was just talking as the lesson began and this feeling came over me, I really felt a pure love for her and her family. it brought tears to my eyes, as i imagined them getting baptized and being sealed in the temple. I know that this is the love of Christ that God was allowing me to feel for a short time. I know that days when i am in tune with the spirit and when i am really fulfilling my purpose is when i am able to look at people, complete strangers and feel this way about them, just an overwhelming feeling and desire for their salvation. Well i love you all so much thank you for all of your prayers and support. take care and have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Monday, March 15, 2010
15 March 2010
We had a wonderful week here. we had a big time miracle! The Lord is really blessing us here. We have an investigator named Yury (pronounced Judy) she is from Colombia she had been investigating for over 2 months. But she would just never accept a date to get baptized. last week we set up a day that we would fast together about her getting baptized and picking a specific date. . . so she started praying about it. we stopped by Tuesday morning to start the fast together and she told us that she wanted to get baptized this Sunday! ha ha we hadn't even started the fast yet. so we still went through with the fast and the following morning we made her a big American breakfast, finished teaching her everything and than she got interviewed. yesterday she was baptized! it was an awesome experience... Oh and i forgot to even tell you guys but last Sunday David Watson got baptized as well. I was working with him for 2 transfers, and we committed him for baptism 2 weeks before the end of last transfer. so he got baptized my first week here in Rego Park. sadly i was not able to go to the service, we were way too busy. But they took a picture with just David and said that they were going to photo shop me in ha-ha. We have a really busy week ahead of us. we have zone leader council tomorrow and than we have 2 zone conferences that we have to do. as well as 2 zone leader exchanges. so it is going to be kind of a crazy week. We are not going to have a lot of time in our own area. so we are going to be praying like crazy for miracles. we have some really good people that we are working with that could very likely be baptized this transfer. We are teaching a family from Brazil actually. There names are Jennine and Edison, they have 2 kids, a 15 year old girl and a 6 year old son. Jennine is really awesome and she basically all ready has a testimony. Edison is really awesome as well he is just scared of the change He has never been very religious and going to church and reading and praying are all very new to him. but he is making progress. they are a really nice family though. well everything is great. I am loving my mission. I honestly hope that i don't have to spend very much time in this assignment, we don't have allot of time do just do regular missionary work. we have to do allot of office type stuff and a ton of planning and meetings. ah I hate meetings. But i am getting used to it, its just a lot different than what i have been doing the last year and a half. but it will be nice to go back to just being a regular missionary. I am learning a lot though, President Nelson is amazing! Well i love you all. I have been studying the Doctrine and Covenants on my free time lately. It has been pretty awesome. Section 130 has got some really deep stuff in it, if you have a D and C study manual it will help you understand it a lot more. you should share with me what you all have been studying... well i love you all! the church is true. i love doing this work
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
Hurrah For Israel
Elder Olsen
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
9 March 2010
Hello family!
hey well it was a good week. we were really busy with a lot of stuff. President Nelson has been in Bermuda for the last 3 days and today we are going to go and pick him up at the airport, than we are going to have a meeting with him at the mission home for the whole night. that is one thing about this assignment we have alot of meetings< really a lot. On average we have about 3 to 4 hours of regular proselyting each day. so we are going to have to work really smart, so that the time that we do have is as effective as it can be. we found a few families this week. that are looking really good. we set a goal to have 3 baptisms this month. so we really have to get to work and see some miracles. I am still trying to get settled in here, i am definitely not used to it yet. i am going to have to learn fast cause my companion is going home this transfer. all right these are the people that i want everyone to pray for this week. Yury Cruz but you say it Judy Cruz, she has been to church 5 times now and is praying about a baptism date. she is really awesome but is just scared of commitment. The miranda family, they are awesome they are a family of 5, they are really catholic. But they are humble and i think that they will accept everything but the only thing that i could see them struggling with is the fact that they are catholic, and in the spanish culture that is a big deal, even though they never go to chutch.. haha alright and than jennine and eddison and their family, they are brazillian! they are a great family wtih 2 kids. they really need to come to church next sunday, but jenninne needs to get work off. so please pray for all of those people. i love you all and i love my mission. i am having the time of my life! Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
hey well it was a good week. we were really busy with a lot of stuff. President Nelson has been in Bermuda for the last 3 days and today we are going to go and pick him up at the airport, than we are going to have a meeting with him at the mission home for the whole night. that is one thing about this assignment we have alot of meetings< really a lot. On average we have about 3 to 4 hours of regular proselyting each day. so we are going to have to work really smart, so that the time that we do have is as effective as it can be. we found a few families this week. that are looking really good. we set a goal to have 3 baptisms this month. so we really have to get to work and see some miracles. I am still trying to get settled in here, i am definitely not used to it yet. i am going to have to learn fast cause my companion is going home this transfer. all right these are the people that i want everyone to pray for this week. Yury Cruz but you say it Judy Cruz, she has been to church 5 times now and is praying about a baptism date. she is really awesome but is just scared of commitment. The miranda family, they are awesome they are a family of 5, they are really catholic. But they are humble and i think that they will accept everything but the only thing that i could see them struggling with is the fact that they are catholic, and in the spanish culture that is a big deal, even though they never go to chutch.. haha alright and than jennine and eddison and their family, they are brazillian! they are a great family wtih 2 kids. they really need to come to church next sunday, but jenninne needs to get work off. so please pray for all of those people. i love you all and i love my mission. i am having the time of my life! Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen
Monday, March 1, 2010
1 March 2010
Hello
Well what a week of miracles! seriously probably one of the coolest weeks of my mission. So tuesday we had a huge snow storm and my comp and I were doing some planning in the church. We were looking at our transfer baptismal goal (it was 5 baptisms) and well we had only had 1 so far. I really wanted to hit this goal. so we made a plan for each one of our investigators that could be baptized that next sunday(yesterday)... so you guys remember the frazier family right..? Troy the father joined the church when he was 17 years old in the bronx. he has never been active, didnt recieve the priesthood or anything. Well last transfer after the hardest day of the transfer when elder goodman and i had to drop 6 baptismal commits cause they just were not progressing, we were both just having a bad day. it was sunday night gettting close to 9 o clock. all of our appointments juked us and our back up plan was to look up less actives on the ward list that no one knows who they are. well we had been doing this all night and the very last name that we looked up was troy frazier, when he answered the door the first thing that he said was how did you find me? haha we talked to him on the porch for only 2 minutes left him with a book of mormon and a chapter to read, when we left he said man this feels good! we went back a few days later and met his family, he has a wife (Nakisa) 3 sons and 1 daughter.. L.J, Troy Jr, Javon, and Aquila..
we taught the whole family for like 2 weeks and they were progressing great but than we hit a major road block. Troy called me crying saying that Nakisa's father is a preacher and that he doesnt want us coming over any more(they live in the basement of his house) so we tried to meet at other locations but it never worked out. Troy lost interest and hope for a while. well i kept on calling him frequently and would never get an answer, we would stop by whenever we were in the neighborhood but would never get an answer to the door. My new companion was always wondering why we kept stopping by someone who never even opened the door. but I just always felt like there was something special about this family, and that i sould not give up on them. and than one day they answered and it was like the light switch was turned back on. they were full board on everything. we met with them that day and than later that night Nakisa told her father that the Book of Mormon testifies and teaches about christ and that it makes her feel good, and that she is a grown woman and should be able to make her own decision. so from that day forth we started teaching them again. a little more than 2 weeks ago i guess. Well they all came to church last week for the first time, and loved it. and than came tuesday when we were doing our planning. that night we went to their house and watched the Testaments movie, it was awesome! the spirit was there so strong. after the movie i asked them all what they would have done if they had been there when jesus christ appeared to the people, i asked them if they would have been Baptized right than, they all answered yes.. the spirit was truly guiding me in the words that i was saying and than i commited them all to be baptized that sunday. they all gladly accepted. we met with them every day. we had not yet taught any of the commmandments, the next day we taught the word of wisdom and Nakisa drinks 5 cups of coffee and also alot of iced tea and she smokes occasionally. she commited right than to live the word of wisdom. they progressed so fast it was such a miracle. and yesterday they got baptized! God truly answers prayers. This was such a cool experience, Its awesome to see how the lord can use us in his hands. the frazier family is amazing! they are so excited to be in the church. the rest of the family is actually getting interested now too, so that is awesome! I am sad that i am leaving this area... but it has been amazing serving here. this transfer we broke records for the mission. we had 18 baptisms, this zone usually averages 6 to 7 a transfer. so we completely blew that out of the water. I have a really busy day ahead of me. i still have to pack all of my things and drive them over to the mission office and than i have to be to the airport with president by 2 to pick up the new missionaires. we are doing a street sweep with all of the greenies its gonna be sweet! I am going to go crazy, and were bringing a box to stand on haha. well i love you all. i know this gospel changes lives and that nothing is impossible with the lord! I love you!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen(michael)
Well what a week of miracles! seriously probably one of the coolest weeks of my mission. So tuesday we had a huge snow storm and my comp and I were doing some planning in the church. We were looking at our transfer baptismal goal (it was 5 baptisms) and well we had only had 1 so far. I really wanted to hit this goal. so we made a plan for each one of our investigators that could be baptized that next sunday(yesterday)... so you guys remember the frazier family right..? Troy the father joined the church when he was 17 years old in the bronx. he has never been active, didnt recieve the priesthood or anything. Well last transfer after the hardest day of the transfer when elder goodman and i had to drop 6 baptismal commits cause they just were not progressing, we were both just having a bad day. it was sunday night gettting close to 9 o clock. all of our appointments juked us and our back up plan was to look up less actives on the ward list that no one knows who they are. well we had been doing this all night and the very last name that we looked up was troy frazier, when he answered the door the first thing that he said was how did you find me? haha we talked to him on the porch for only 2 minutes left him with a book of mormon and a chapter to read, when we left he said man this feels good! we went back a few days later and met his family, he has a wife (Nakisa) 3 sons and 1 daughter.. L.J, Troy Jr, Javon, and Aquila..
we taught the whole family for like 2 weeks and they were progressing great but than we hit a major road block. Troy called me crying saying that Nakisa's father is a preacher and that he doesnt want us coming over any more(they live in the basement of his house) so we tried to meet at other locations but it never worked out. Troy lost interest and hope for a while. well i kept on calling him frequently and would never get an answer, we would stop by whenever we were in the neighborhood but would never get an answer to the door. My new companion was always wondering why we kept stopping by someone who never even opened the door. but I just always felt like there was something special about this family, and that i sould not give up on them. and than one day they answered and it was like the light switch was turned back on. they were full board on everything. we met with them that day and than later that night Nakisa told her father that the Book of Mormon testifies and teaches about christ and that it makes her feel good, and that she is a grown woman and should be able to make her own decision. so from that day forth we started teaching them again. a little more than 2 weeks ago i guess. Well they all came to church last week for the first time, and loved it. and than came tuesday when we were doing our planning. that night we went to their house and watched the Testaments movie, it was awesome! the spirit was there so strong. after the movie i asked them all what they would have done if they had been there when jesus christ appeared to the people, i asked them if they would have been Baptized right than, they all answered yes.. the spirit was truly guiding me in the words that i was saying and than i commited them all to be baptized that sunday. they all gladly accepted. we met with them every day. we had not yet taught any of the commmandments, the next day we taught the word of wisdom and Nakisa drinks 5 cups of coffee and also alot of iced tea and she smokes occasionally. she commited right than to live the word of wisdom. they progressed so fast it was such a miracle. and yesterday they got baptized! God truly answers prayers. This was such a cool experience, Its awesome to see how the lord can use us in his hands. the frazier family is amazing! they are so excited to be in the church. the rest of the family is actually getting interested now too, so that is awesome! I am sad that i am leaving this area... but it has been amazing serving here. this transfer we broke records for the mission. we had 18 baptisms, this zone usually averages 6 to 7 a transfer. so we completely blew that out of the water. I have a really busy day ahead of me. i still have to pack all of my things and drive them over to the mission office and than i have to be to the airport with president by 2 to pick up the new missionaires. we are doing a street sweep with all of the greenies its gonna be sweet! I am going to go crazy, and were bringing a box to stand on haha. well i love you all. i know this gospel changes lives and that nothing is impossible with the lord! I love you!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen(michael)
Monday, February 22, 2010
22 Feb 2010
Hello!
Hey everyone, well this was an interesting week. we had a lot of meeting and stuff that took up a lot of our proselyting time :( Like Zone Leader Council which takes up a whole morning and afternoon, Stake Correlation meeting which takes up half of our night and is usually completely worthless.. a few baptismal interviews and a lot of other stuff plus our regular meetings. but the good news is we were still able to hit most of our goals that we set for the week. We had 6 people at church yesterday, it was a pretty stressful Sunday. but the whole Frazier family came. They are progressing really well and will be baptized soon. i got permission from president nelson to baptize them next week even though they have not been to church 3 times... but we will see if we can make it happen. the mom and 2 of the kids will definitely be ready by next Sunday, but the only thing that is making me lean towards waiting a little longer is their oldest son whom is 19. he is really awesome he is just never there when we are teaching them cause he is usually at work. so i cant decide if we should wait till he is ready as well and baptize them all together or just baptize the mom and 2 of the kids now and the other son later. i just fear that if he doesn't get baptized with the rest of the family that he might get discouraged. so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know. I hope that i will be staying here in jamaica, but i really have no idea yet. but just in case dont send anything to this address here. this is week 6 of this transfer. We are also really excited for the Jones family, I dont remember if i told you this story but Mrs. Jones is the one that had a dream the night before we came over and someone in her dream told her that 2 young men were going to come to her house and teach her, and that she should receive and accept them. so that is really cool. well total it is a family of 8 people. but 3 of them dont live at home anymore. they are grown and have their own families now. But yesterday the mom and one of the daughters came to church. We are hoping to get the whole family there next week. I guess the marriage is kind of on the rocks right now, and Yolanda is really looking for something to bring her family back together. I got kind of discouraged yesterday at church, I called all of the quorum and auxillary leaders to inform them of all the people that we were expecting to have at church, well i got a hold of a few of them but alot never called me back. Total in the ward we had over 15 investigators at church, and everything was just terribly unorganized! it was seriously a mad house. I dont even know what happened. for some reason they didnt have a young mens sunday school class at all yesterday, so Troy jr. had to go to gospel principles with his mom and dad, The nursery was no where to be found and Aquila there 2 year old daughter was kind of on a rampage, and i really wanted troy and nakisa to be able to go to class. so i went and tracked down the nursery lady and dragged her out of class, i gave her aquila and she just took her into the room and wasnt even playing with her or anything, but i figured that she had it. so i left and went into primary to check on the kids that we had in there and primary was just crazy, they have like 30 kids piled into one long narrow room and the teachers are just yelling at all the kids to try and get them to be quiet. when they teach they dont use any pictures or anything so you know the kids are not paying any attention or learning anything. One of the ladies who helps in the primary who was kinda frustrated leaned over to me and said man these kids just dont listen, i dont know what there problem is. Ah i just wanted to yell at her, ha of course they dont listen this is the most boring primary i have ever seen. there is no organization or anything. but i didnt cause that would be really mean. I than made my way over to Gospel Principles to see our investigators there, everything was good in that class except the fact that the lady teaching has a seriously thick accent and im not sure if many people were understanding everything that she was saying. So than i was going back over to primary and one of the councelors in the bishopric stopped me and said "hey that lady doing the nursery just let that little girl walk out and into primary, she didnt even follow her. and now she is just sitting in there by herself. You should go tell her that she cant do that, she needs to watch the children" I said that it is not my responsibility or right to tell a grown woman how to do her calling, I said that is your responsibility and duty. he just gave me a funny look. . . So yeah it was just a bad sunday. this ward needs some real leadership and organization! but i have learned that we cant try and take over a ward as missionaires, it will never work because we leave. and we are just the Elders. but its really frustrating sometimes when you know that you could do a better job running the whole ward by yourself. But i know that the best thing that i can do to help the ward is to magnify my office and my responsibilities to the best of my ability. So that is what i am doing. But i just fear that this ward doesnt have the leadership or organization to retain these people that we are bringing into the church. between the years 2007 and 2009 there were 26 baptisms in jamaica 1st ward, there are only a handfull of those people who are still active, the 2 years before that they baptized almost double that, close to 50 people. and there are only 3 or 4 of those who are still active. They just gotta get it together and start doing the things that make a ward run the way that it is supposed to. the first would be to study and follow the church handbook of instructions! well this week should be a great week! despite all of my complaints about this ward i do love it here, and i know that they are all trying to be better. I just think alot of times they dont know how to be better. Shantel is getting her Patriarchal Blessing next sunday, she is doing really well, she is moving to Japan for a year to teach english. she will be leaving in may. We are talking about me going to japan to visit her when i get home and when she recieves her Endownment. cause she will be at her 1 year mark there in japan. well i love you all! keep being awesome!
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder Olsen
Hey everyone, well this was an interesting week. we had a lot of meeting and stuff that took up a lot of our proselyting time :( Like Zone Leader Council which takes up a whole morning and afternoon, Stake Correlation meeting which takes up half of our night and is usually completely worthless.. a few baptismal interviews and a lot of other stuff plus our regular meetings. but the good news is we were still able to hit most of our goals that we set for the week. We had 6 people at church yesterday, it was a pretty stressful Sunday. but the whole Frazier family came. They are progressing really well and will be baptized soon. i got permission from president nelson to baptize them next week even though they have not been to church 3 times... but we will see if we can make it happen. the mom and 2 of the kids will definitely be ready by next Sunday, but the only thing that is making me lean towards waiting a little longer is their oldest son whom is 19. he is really awesome he is just never there when we are teaching them cause he is usually at work. so i cant decide if we should wait till he is ready as well and baptize them all together or just baptize the mom and 2 of the kids now and the other son later. i just fear that if he doesn't get baptized with the rest of the family that he might get discouraged. so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know. I hope that i will be staying here in jamaica, but i really have no idea yet. but just in case dont send anything to this address here. this is week 6 of this transfer. We are also really excited for the Jones family, I dont remember if i told you this story but Mrs. Jones is the one that had a dream the night before we came over and someone in her dream told her that 2 young men were going to come to her house and teach her, and that she should receive and accept them. so that is really cool. well total it is a family of 8 people. but 3 of them dont live at home anymore. they are grown and have their own families now. But yesterday the mom and one of the daughters came to church. We are hoping to get the whole family there next week. I guess the marriage is kind of on the rocks right now, and Yolanda is really looking for something to bring her family back together. I got kind of discouraged yesterday at church, I called all of the quorum and auxillary leaders to inform them of all the people that we were expecting to have at church, well i got a hold of a few of them but alot never called me back. Total in the ward we had over 15 investigators at church, and everything was just terribly unorganized! it was seriously a mad house. I dont even know what happened. for some reason they didnt have a young mens sunday school class at all yesterday, so Troy jr. had to go to gospel principles with his mom and dad, The nursery was no where to be found and Aquila there 2 year old daughter was kind of on a rampage, and i really wanted troy and nakisa to be able to go to class. so i went and tracked down the nursery lady and dragged her out of class, i gave her aquila and she just took her into the room and wasnt even playing with her or anything, but i figured that she had it. so i left and went into primary to check on the kids that we had in there and primary was just crazy, they have like 30 kids piled into one long narrow room and the teachers are just yelling at all the kids to try and get them to be quiet. when they teach they dont use any pictures or anything so you know the kids are not paying any attention or learning anything. One of the ladies who helps in the primary who was kinda frustrated leaned over to me and said man these kids just dont listen, i dont know what there problem is. Ah i just wanted to yell at her, ha of course they dont listen this is the most boring primary i have ever seen. there is no organization or anything. but i didnt cause that would be really mean. I than made my way over to Gospel Principles to see our investigators there, everything was good in that class except the fact that the lady teaching has a seriously thick accent and im not sure if many people were understanding everything that she was saying. So than i was going back over to primary and one of the councelors in the bishopric stopped me and said "hey that lady doing the nursery just let that little girl walk out and into primary, she didnt even follow her. and now she is just sitting in there by herself. You should go tell her that she cant do that, she needs to watch the children" I said that it is not my responsibility or right to tell a grown woman how to do her calling, I said that is your responsibility and duty. he just gave me a funny look. . . So yeah it was just a bad sunday. this ward needs some real leadership and organization! but i have learned that we cant try and take over a ward as missionaires, it will never work because we leave. and we are just the Elders. but its really frustrating sometimes when you know that you could do a better job running the whole ward by yourself. But i know that the best thing that i can do to help the ward is to magnify my office and my responsibilities to the best of my ability. So that is what i am doing. But i just fear that this ward doesnt have the leadership or organization to retain these people that we are bringing into the church. between the years 2007 and 2009 there were 26 baptisms in jamaica 1st ward, there are only a handfull of those people who are still active, the 2 years before that they baptized almost double that, close to 50 people. and there are only 3 or 4 of those who are still active. They just gotta get it together and start doing the things that make a ward run the way that it is supposed to. the first would be to study and follow the church handbook of instructions! well this week should be a great week! despite all of my complaints about this ward i do love it here, and i know that they are all trying to be better. I just think alot of times they dont know how to be better. Shantel is getting her Patriarchal Blessing next sunday, she is doing really well, she is moving to Japan for a year to teach english. she will be leaving in may. We are talking about me going to japan to visit her when i get home and when she recieves her Endownment. cause she will be at her 1 year mark there in japan. well i love you all! keep being awesome!
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder Olsen
Thursday, February 18, 2010
18 Feb 2010
Well it was another great week here in Jamaica! we are being extremely blessed. Anthony was confirmed yesterday, it was great and next week he will recieve the priesthood. He is doing awesome and is loving the book of mormon. Our ward had 6 baptisms yesterday! it was really awesome, we are blessed to have a senior couple working here in jamaica, they have been here about six months, they got here a little while after i did. well they are doing a lot of work for the ward, and making a big difference. they have been teaching a part member family and yesterday they all got baptized. 5 of them total. and than another companionship in the ward got a baptism of a lady. we are looking to break records this transfer in this zone. we have 9 baptisms so far, and alot of people commited for the next few weeks. everyone is working pretty hard and we are being blessed for it. Seeing this senior couple here in jamaica has definitely made me decide that me and my wife are definitely going to be serving missions. mom and dad you would be great missionaires! i am really excited for you someday. well if you remember the frazier family?? well yesterday troy the father came to church! so that was amazing and really good. the only bad thing is that the rest of the family didnt :( he said that they didnt do there laundry and none of them had any clothes to wear. i was really upset yesterday. cause they are all awesome and they want to be baptized. but now it is going to be hard cause they have not been to church at all. I am certain that my Pres. would let me do it, but its going to be hard to help them feel like they will be ready for that day. we are making a plan for them to do homework assignments every day and we'll have daily follow up on their progress. all of the assignments will be centered on the atonement and why we get baptized. i think that it will work and will help them feel ready and have that change of heart. But its going to take alot of prayers and faith. so please pray for the Frazier family. this is the family that i have been praying to find for 3 transfers! and i really want to be here when they get baptized! i have been here for 6 months total now so it is likely that i will be leaving. but you never know. We also have rebecca and julia that we are trying to prepare for the 28th as well as david watson and antoinette and rameeka. so please pray for each of them. they really need the help. Well i am doing great! i am just loving my mission. i cant believe that time has gone by so fast. I only have 5 full transfers left or 7 and a half months. I want this last part of my mission to be the best. i am going to work and study harder than ever. so many missionaires die at the end of their misison. i dont want that to happent to me. it is so stupid, why would you get lazy and un motivated when you have learned so much and are able to be so much of a better instrument for the lord. but if you lose motivation and faith than the lord will not use you to bless the lives of others. We have a really busy day planned today. a very short P day. but it will be a great srart to a great week. we have 5 member lessons set up this afternoon. I am really glad that my companion has a good attitude. most companions would be really mad if they had alot of appointments on p day. Well i love you all and pray for you everyday. I know that this church is true. i know that we can only find happiness in this life by keeping the commandments and living the gospel of jesus christ.
Hurrah for Israel!!
Elder M. Olsen
Hurrah for Israel!!
Elder M. Olsen
8 Feb 2010
Hey Everyone!
well i had a great week! I had the priveldge to see the miracle of anthony getting baptized. it was a really great service, his wife whom is a member of 16 years was really happy and bore her testimony after the baptism. He is an amazing man! his 2 sons are also members of the church but they are in active so now he has gotta try and get them back into the fold, so that a year from now they can all go to the temple together and get sealed! that will be awesome and we will definitely be coming back for that one. Speaking of that i talked to Craig Lento last week ( the man that i baptized in South Shore last may) he is doing great! he is filling out his mission papers right now, he only has the dental left to do and than he will be set to go. and soon he will be able to turn in his papers and than recieve his endownments. i am really excited, and i wil be able to go to the temple with him for that. Today is the start of week 4 of the transfer, its going to be a really hard week, and when i say hard i mean that we need to work really hard! we have alot of people that could be baptized this transfer we just need to work really hard to do everything that we cant to help them come to church next week. We finally were able to talk to the Frazier family again. we stopped by yesterday morning before church and talked to Nakeesa (his wife) and she is still awesome.. and wants to continue learning and come to church, but its troy that is holding the family back. I think that he is just scared. so please pray for him! and for his family. We also have the Deosaran family, the Hamilton family, The Ennis family, The Finley family, The Kumar family, Matheson family, Edwards family, and David Watson and Imran, we are working with alot of families right now it is awesome! Pray that we can find Imran! he is homeless right now, well he stays at friends houses but he doesnt have a phone and we lost contact with him. but he has come to church 3 times and he was supposed to get baptized a few weeks ago but we lost him. he was really close and was doing really well. so pray for him.... well we are working harder than ever. i told my companion that this is going to be the hardest working week ever. we are seriously going to crush it! so pray that we wil both have the strength and energy that we will need. and most importantly the spirit with us. I love you all so much! Strive for perfection..
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder Michael Olsen
well i had a great week! I had the priveldge to see the miracle of anthony getting baptized. it was a really great service, his wife whom is a member of 16 years was really happy and bore her testimony after the baptism. He is an amazing man! his 2 sons are also members of the church but they are in active so now he has gotta try and get them back into the fold, so that a year from now they can all go to the temple together and get sealed! that will be awesome and we will definitely be coming back for that one. Speaking of that i talked to Craig Lento last week ( the man that i baptized in South Shore last may) he is doing great! he is filling out his mission papers right now, he only has the dental left to do and than he will be set to go. and soon he will be able to turn in his papers and than recieve his endownments. i am really excited, and i wil be able to go to the temple with him for that. Today is the start of week 4 of the transfer, its going to be a really hard week, and when i say hard i mean that we need to work really hard! we have alot of people that could be baptized this transfer we just need to work really hard to do everything that we cant to help them come to church next week. We finally were able to talk to the Frazier family again. we stopped by yesterday morning before church and talked to Nakeesa (his wife) and she is still awesome.. and wants to continue learning and come to church, but its troy that is holding the family back. I think that he is just scared. so please pray for him! and for his family. We also have the Deosaran family, the Hamilton family, The Ennis family, The Finley family, The Kumar family, Matheson family, Edwards family, and David Watson and Imran, we are working with alot of families right now it is awesome! Pray that we can find Imran! he is homeless right now, well he stays at friends houses but he doesnt have a phone and we lost contact with him. but he has come to church 3 times and he was supposed to get baptized a few weeks ago but we lost him. he was really close and was doing really well. so pray for him.... well we are working harder than ever. i told my companion that this is going to be the hardest working week ever. we are seriously going to crush it! so pray that we wil both have the strength and energy that we will need. and most importantly the spirit with us. I love you all so much! Strive for perfection..
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder Michael Olsen
Monday, February 1, 2010
1 Feb 2010
well we had a great week! We hit the new mission standards of excellence or mission goals. they are the goals that we set that each companionship needs to shoot for if we are going to get the 800 baptisms before november. They are pretty tough to acheive and i think we are the first companionship to reach them( they were made official just 2 weeks ago) We are working really hard! We never take a break from working and we are being blessed for it. Every night we come home just exhausted, we actually go to bed early most nights because we are too tired. Every night i just feel weary and spiritually drained, but every morning its like a renewal of my body and spirit. about a week and a half ago we got a media referral for a lady named yolanda jones. she ordered a dvd from a tv ad. we went and delivered it and just shared a quick message and set up a return apt. we went back just this last saturday afternoon. and met some of her family, she has 6 kids(all girls) but only 3 still live at home, the others are all older. well we taught her about the book of mormon and joseph smith. At the end after we commited her to read and pray, she told us that she had a dream last night, and that in her dream someone came to her and said that 2 young men were going to come and teach her and that she should recieve them and accept what they teach, she had this dream friday night and we came on saturday! how awesome is that! and the cool thing is that i have been praying that heavenly father would give people visions and dreams to prepare them to recieve the gospel. God truly does answer prayers. She came to church yesterday as well. total we had 6 people at church yesterday. Anthony is doing awesome! and he is going to be baptized next sunday. our zone is on fire right now, total there are 11 solid commits for the next few weeks. so it is going to be awesome. Well we still need alot of prayers! i really want to just blow it up this transfer. we have 4 weeks left, and alot of people that we have that need to be baptized plus plenty others that the lord has prepared that we just need to find. I really think that we could get 10 baptisms this transfer, but its gonna take alot of faith and miracles. My comp is awesome! i can tell that working this hard is taking a toll on him, but he is trucking right along. he is really excited to be "tearing it up" as he says haha. . well i love you all and i love sharing this gospel. Have a great week!
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen(michael)
Hurrah For Israel!!
Elder Olsen(michael)
18 Jan 2010
I want to really focus on this transfer is just finding a ton of people. Especially cause I am now officially the mission “finding trainer” I will be starting with the Aps and training them and than the other zone leaders. So that will be really fun. I have been studying ch. 9 of pmg a lot lately. I am really excited for this next transfer, I think this is the companion that I have been waiting for my whole mission. We are literally going to exhaust ourselves in the work. He is a really hard worker! He is a bull rider from spanish fork, grew up on a farm and everything im pretty sure. But he is good and really obedient. And this is his 1st as a Zl so he will do whatever I say. I will give you some reports on how I am doing on finding those 30 new gators a week. I think we can definitely do it. I wanted to know if you ever faced this problem on your mission….
So there is just this attitude in the mission that has really been driving me crazy lately. I seriously have been thinking about it a lot. Last week I went on AP exchanges and even the AP had this attitude, I was shocked. This is the attitude: it doesn’t matter if you are obedient or not; it doesn’t effect how many baptisms you have.. The P-Dub(piece of work or disobedient) missionaires baptize more than the obedient ones. AHHHHH it is driving me crazy and its frankly a bunch of crap! I am seriously so sick of this attitude. Missionaires think that if they don’t baptize its okay, or its not their fault. There is nothing that they could have done to change the outcome. It just goes against everything that pmg and the scriptures say. “open your mouths and you shall be laden with many sheaves!” sheaves are convert baptisms. It doesn’t say open your mouths and maybe you will be laden with sheaves. It says you will! I just wish everyone could see how much of their success they control. Well after the exchange with the Ap I had finally convinced him that he was wrong. And his attitude is now changed. He says that this next transfer is going to be a blow out one for him. Its his last transfer. So did you see this in your mission at all? How did you deal with it? Its all whats in our minds. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive it can achieve” If we think we are going to baptize than we will, and if we think that oh I cant baptize,… well you probably wont. It is true that there are some disobedient missionaires that baptize a lot but that’s because they know that they can. They have faith in the converting power of the spirit and they have faith in themselves being able to teach and committ by that spirit. Thus they baptize. And than there are some obedient missionaires who have exactly the opposite mind set. They love the lord and they want to keep his commandments and the misison rules but they do not have real faith! We have all heard you cant convert someone past your own conversion. I believe that is directly related to our own faith in the power of the holy ghost. If we approach every single person that we talk to with the right attitude and optimism and confidence in the spirit, like every person that we talk to we know that the holy ghost is going to be there testifying to them, its just a matter if they are able to recognize the promptings. But if we approach every one like this than I think that we are allowing the spirit to work through us. At full capacity! But if we approach someone and we think oh they will probably not accept the gospel, than they wont! We personally are restricting the spirit to work through us. We don’t have faith that it will really touch someones heart and they will have the desire to change and to repent. This is so plain and simple to me. I just wish that everyone would understand this. Well please let me know if you have any thoughts on this or remarks. Or maybe you want to do some study on this. But I just believe that the power and capacity of the spirit is directly connected to our own faith and confidence in the spirit and ourselves to deliver the message it will put into our minds and hearts.
well sorry that was kind of long. but i am just really frustrated about it. i think that best way to fix this problem is to do 2 things. baptize alot of people and i mean alot. like shatter all mission culture or generalizations of how many baptisms the average missionary or even the great missionaries have. I seriously want to just have an explosive transfer. everytime i think about it my chest just starts pumping, I love this work! and 2nd i am going to be exactly obedient. i have been praying over this alot, and telling god all about this and my idea to fix this missions culture. I fully believe that he is backing me on this one. And that he will provide us with specific miracles that we are in need of to accomplish what we need to make a big change in everyones attitude in the mission. but i am going to need alot of prayers and so is my companion. and the people that we are working with. so please pray for us! specifically pray that people in our proselyting area will recieve visions and dreams that will prepare them to recieve the gospel. all right i have time for 1 cool story from this last week. so we have been teaching this man named david watson. he is 42 years old and had a stroke and a heart attack 3 years ago. he is not doing too great health wise. but he is a great guy. so last week we found him a ride to church but we couldnt get a hold of him sunday moring. . so we met with him this last week, we were with a member named bro. craig. we knocked on his door and he said that he didnt have time because he was going to bible study. well i convinced him to let us in until his ride came to pick him up. i asked him why he didnt come to church and he said that he wanted to go to the church that is right by his house cause it is easier and that is where he was last week. well i felt that i probably had about 5 minutes to teach this man. I taught the apostasy, if i have learned anything here in jamaica it is the apostasy . my testimony has grown so much of the great apostasy. I am right in the middle of it everyday here it is really crazy. so i feel that i have gotten really good at teaching it. so i taught the apostsy for a few minutes and just tore up any faith or belief that he had in any other church and than i built him back up with the restoration. It was really powerfull and at the end i said so david you cant go to any other church! you need to come to gods church and be baptized. He accepted to be baptized on the 31st and came to church yesterday. he really liked it. I love the spirit and the power that it has. I know that with god all things are possible. I love you all and i am gratefull for your support and prayers. Vive Israel!!!
Elder Olsen
So there is just this attitude in the mission that has really been driving me crazy lately. I seriously have been thinking about it a lot. Last week I went on AP exchanges and even the AP had this attitude, I was shocked. This is the attitude: it doesn’t matter if you are obedient or not; it doesn’t effect how many baptisms you have.. The P-Dub(piece of work or disobedient) missionaires baptize more than the obedient ones. AHHHHH it is driving me crazy and its frankly a bunch of crap! I am seriously so sick of this attitude. Missionaires think that if they don’t baptize its okay, or its not their fault. There is nothing that they could have done to change the outcome. It just goes against everything that pmg and the scriptures say. “open your mouths and you shall be laden with many sheaves!” sheaves are convert baptisms. It doesn’t say open your mouths and maybe you will be laden with sheaves. It says you will! I just wish everyone could see how much of their success they control. Well after the exchange with the Ap I had finally convinced him that he was wrong. And his attitude is now changed. He says that this next transfer is going to be a blow out one for him. Its his last transfer. So did you see this in your mission at all? How did you deal with it? Its all whats in our minds. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive it can achieve” If we think we are going to baptize than we will, and if we think that oh I cant baptize,… well you probably wont. It is true that there are some disobedient missionaires that baptize a lot but that’s because they know that they can. They have faith in the converting power of the spirit and they have faith in themselves being able to teach and committ by that spirit. Thus they baptize. And than there are some obedient missionaires who have exactly the opposite mind set. They love the lord and they want to keep his commandments and the misison rules but they do not have real faith! We have all heard you cant convert someone past your own conversion. I believe that is directly related to our own faith in the power of the holy ghost. If we approach every single person that we talk to with the right attitude and optimism and confidence in the spirit, like every person that we talk to we know that the holy ghost is going to be there testifying to them, its just a matter if they are able to recognize the promptings. But if we approach every one like this than I think that we are allowing the spirit to work through us. At full capacity! But if we approach someone and we think oh they will probably not accept the gospel, than they wont! We personally are restricting the spirit to work through us. We don’t have faith that it will really touch someones heart and they will have the desire to change and to repent. This is so plain and simple to me. I just wish that everyone would understand this. Well please let me know if you have any thoughts on this or remarks. Or maybe you want to do some study on this. But I just believe that the power and capacity of the spirit is directly connected to our own faith and confidence in the spirit and ourselves to deliver the message it will put into our minds and hearts.
well sorry that was kind of long. but i am just really frustrated about it. i think that best way to fix this problem is to do 2 things. baptize alot of people and i mean alot. like shatter all mission culture or generalizations of how many baptisms the average missionary or even the great missionaries have. I seriously want to just have an explosive transfer. everytime i think about it my chest just starts pumping, I love this work! and 2nd i am going to be exactly obedient. i have been praying over this alot, and telling god all about this and my idea to fix this missions culture. I fully believe that he is backing me on this one. And that he will provide us with specific miracles that we are in need of to accomplish what we need to make a big change in everyones attitude in the mission. but i am going to need alot of prayers and so is my companion. and the people that we are working with. so please pray for us! specifically pray that people in our proselyting area will recieve visions and dreams that will prepare them to recieve the gospel. all right i have time for 1 cool story from this last week. so we have been teaching this man named david watson. he is 42 years old and had a stroke and a heart attack 3 years ago. he is not doing too great health wise. but he is a great guy. so last week we found him a ride to church but we couldnt get a hold of him sunday moring. . so we met with him this last week, we were with a member named bro. craig. we knocked on his door and he said that he didnt have time because he was going to bible study. well i convinced him to let us in until his ride came to pick him up. i asked him why he didnt come to church and he said that he wanted to go to the church that is right by his house cause it is easier and that is where he was last week. well i felt that i probably had about 5 minutes to teach this man. I taught the apostasy, if i have learned anything here in jamaica it is the apostasy . my testimony has grown so much of the great apostasy. I am right in the middle of it everyday here it is really crazy. so i feel that i have gotten really good at teaching it. so i taught the apostsy for a few minutes and just tore up any faith or belief that he had in any other church and than i built him back up with the restoration. It was really powerfull and at the end i said so david you cant go to any other church! you need to come to gods church and be baptized. He accepted to be baptized on the 31st and came to church yesterday. he really liked it. I love the spirit and the power that it has. I know that with god all things are possible. I love you all and i am gratefull for your support and prayers. Vive Israel!!!
Elder Olsen
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