Monday, June 30, 2014

Another Baptismal date this makes Three

Hey guys, sorry I don't have much time this week to email, but here is a bit of what happened, I'll talk to you more next week! 
This week has been pretty good. We got another baptismal date with S_. She has been taught for a while and the only struggle is to help her be more committed to trying to find out if what we teach is true. Our other two baptismal dates are doing well also. D_ has been very busy recently, but we are seeing him this week, and J_ seems to be getting more and more interested in the message. We are seeing her tonight and hopefully it will go well. I called Healix about the appointment with the cardiologist and they rescheduled for this thursday, because we missed the last one.
We went on exchange with Farnborough this week, and Elder Wetsel and I learned from each other and had a lot of success. 
I am doing well, I am very excited to help people progress, and am trying to do my best to help people come unto christ!
Hope you have a great week!
Elder Brown

Monday, June 23, 2014

Exciting and crazy week!

We are having tons of success here at the moment, and loads of fun. I have had nothing but sun for the last month or so! It is really nice, a little to warm in a suit though!

We haven't seen a lot of animals, except pigeons! THEY ARE EVERYWHERE! they walk right up to you in between your legs fly around in busy parts of town! They are just so comfortable around humans! It's Weird!!! 

D__ is doing well, we haven't seen him this week unfortunately. He had a lot of extra work this week! J__ is doing great. She came to our Saturday session of stake conference and it really helped her a lot! We had Elder Moriera, the area seventy speak to us. She went up to him afterwards and  said he helped a lot, so that was cool. Then last night she texted us with two refferals to teach her friends! AWESOME! I'd say she felt something at conference! Haven't seen S__ and M__ for a long time, but we set an appointment finally for tomorrow afternoon, so hopefully it goes well! 

Some photos of classic Crowthorne 
Elder Jackman 

Elder Brown


My week was exciting and crazy! On exchange we had a hedge take off our side mirror of the Zone Leader's car! 

Elder Grice and I had to save the sister missionaries because they didn't have their flat keys, and broke a different key in their lock so we didn't get home until 10:00 pm. 

Elder Jackman and I had an interesting experience this weekend after stake conference on Saturday. We got caught in downtown reading at 10:30 pm. lost, without a phone or our flat keys! Reading is like a 20 minute train ride away, and is a massive city. We weren't sure if we had enough money for a train any way. Drunk people everywhere, full of sin and darkness at that time of night! The Zone Leader's saved us and we slept in the reading flat that night! GOOD TIMES!!   

It is so weird to think of me being halfway done! I am not quite there yet, a few months to go till then but still. It has gone by fast! You honestly don't know how fast it has gone! Thanks for the info on the biking problems, but I think we are starting to figure out what it really is! I saw a general practitioner this week and she referred me to a cardiologist. She thinks I probably have Postural Hypotension, or something similar. She took my blood pressure a bunch of times in different positions as well as going from one position to another. My blood pressure dropped about 23% when I stood up from lying down on the bed! You should have seen her face when I stood up. She was so surprised that I thought SHE was going to faint! I think she thought I was just unhealthy and lazy at first!

Anyway, I love you guys and hope you have another good week.  I attached a few photos for you! We made pancakes with Jerrie on Saturday for dinner just before stake conference.



 Elder Jackman and Elder Brown 

Monday, June 16, 2014

Record of Book of Mormons in one day

This week was great for us! We got another baptismal date! A Filipino lady about 30 years old, a friend of Michael, our recent convert. She is due for baptism for the 12 of July! Turns out that she is the reason Michael ever found the gospel as well. Missionaries had talked to her on the street and she gave the pass along card that they gave her to Micheal, and he called the missionaries and asked to be taught! Crazy right! We talked with D__, our other Baptismal Date, and we are going to try and bring him to the visitors center at the temple soon! Gave out a bunch of Book of Mormon's and had a bit of a competition with a member on how many we could give out in one day. Our record so far is 12 and his is 25! He is so cool! 

We did service for a part member family, the husband is a non-member, and he drove us around in his BMW M3 convertible, which is actually quite a nice car! It doesn't look really cool, but it is quite fast and just feels nice! The service we did was basically to tear trees out of his garden and pile them up. It was pretty fun actually, and I felt like a beast. He was super impressed with our work, and we are hoping that it will open him up to being taught. 

I love you all, and hope you have a good week. I will let you know how the doctors appointment goes, hopefully it isn't anything serious! I attached a few photos for you! Sorry, no photos of me or Elder Jackman yet, but tons of food photos! We made some pretty epic dishes!
Mangoes, red pepper, onions

 The note says "that determines your attitude in life"




Monday, June 9, 2014

New Campanion

It was transfers this past week and Elder Jackman is my new companion. He is 19 years old (a bit younger than me), from San Diego California. He is really cool, loves singing, loves the gospel, and gives Book of Mormon's out like Candy! He is great, A solid missionary! We are already getting a lot done together, and I am excited to work with him.

On Thursday we gave out 11 Book of Mormon's and on Friday we gave D___ a Baptismal date for the 27th of July and he accepted! We taught over 20 lessons since we have been together, since Wednesday and we are excited to keep it up! Elder Jackman feels very weird being off of Jersey island! He used bikes on Jersey and told me that the office paid for the bikes, so we called President Millar and the office and got it all sorted out and had bikes by Saturday afternoon. DON'T GET TOO EXCITED THOUGH! After about 5 minutes on the bike I was lightheaded and felt sick. We stopped for a while and then continued, but I couldn't do it, we called sister Ellis (who had bought the bikes online for us and we are going to pay her back) and brought the bikes back to her so that she could return them. We continued the rest of the day as normal, but I could hardly do anything! I didn't recover from the less than 10 min bike journey until Sunday morning, and even then I didn't feel well in the morning and almost blacked out! On Saturday evening when we walked to correlation I felt like I was going to faint. At first I thought I was just out of shape, but we have been talking about it and I have been thinking about it and we think I have a physical problem of some sort. The more I think about it the more sure I am. Back home after the BSA swimming test on Melita Island, I felt extremely nauseous and extremely lightheaded, whenever I ran the mile at school I got lightheaded and took a long time to recover, I was at Micheal's (a recent convert) home a few weeks ago and was helping him change a light bulb in his ceiling, which is fairly high up and I had too stop for a while because having my head facing upwards nearly caused me to black out. I usually feel fairly lightheaded in the morning, it was like that even at home, but I never thought anything of it, and so never mentioned it to you guys. When I was with Elder lamb, we went running in the mornings, and it was usually OK, but I felt a bit lightheaded and sick then as well. We think it might be a cardiovascular problem of some sort, but I have no clue. We found out yesterday that sister Ellis probably can't return the bikes, and in order to have enough travel money this transfer we will probably pay her back with personal funds. The bikes cost £75 each, so at least it isn't too bad, but it will still be quite the chunk of money. I still have enough on my card, so don't worry about it. You don't have to transfer any money or anything. .Any advice on what to do about this would be appreciated. Other than that though our week was great!
I forgot to bring my card reader again, so no photos this week sorry! 
Elder Brown

Monday, June 2, 2014

The Sword of Truth

Its the feeling of the spirit that gives us a solid testimony. As we learn from Laman and Lemuel and others in the Book of Mormon, signs and angels change nothing. The spirit is the only power convincing enough for us to know of the truth. This is one thing that I have really learned since I have been out here. There can be false prophets, false visions, false angels, false signs, and they may convince us, and all of these can come from the power of the devil, for he has the power to deceive. He can fake the visuals, and even the audio, but what he will never be able to counterfeit is the feeling we get when the spirit is in our presence or, in some circumstances, within us!

This week was pretty good, we started teaching a new person, D__, this week and we taught him twice in the week! He is very interested and as he was taught before 20 years ago, he already knows a bit, and he finds the restoration fascinating as well as comforting. The discussions we had with him were so involved that I felt like we were on a podcast or a talk show. A bit like the Joseph Smith papers program run by the church if you know about that. 

We stopped by one of our investigators, De__, who is hard to get a hold of and always busy. We found out that since our first visit he has been reading as much of the Book of Mormon as he can and has also been praying. He said that he is starting to believe it is true and it has brought him a lot of comfort in his life recently! On top of that, S__ and M__ are doing quite well, and although they couldn't come to church they are starting to progress a bit more. We met another person through them and we have two appointments with them during this week, so hopefully those will go well also! 

I am glad you have been getting new ideas for family history work. As a mission we have started to fill in our own "My Family" booklets. Any help you could give would be appreciated! I'm sure you already know what the my family booklet is like, but basically we need photos of people and stories as well as the basic info about them. We are being counseled to use it as a new finding tool, so once we start to fill it out we can use it on the street to start people talking about their families and we can start teaching them and showing them family history, etc.

I love you guys all very much, and I sent a few photos of me and Elder Fisher wielding the sword of truth!