Monday, August 26, 2013

Email: How Blessed I Am

Hello to my wonderful Family,
                     I hope this email finds you all doing very well. From the emails that I have gotten it sounds like this past week was pretty crazy. Well ya know I wouldn't expect anything different from the last few weeks of summer in the Payne household. I am really glad that baby Sara is doing well. I have been thinking a lot about the recent additions to the Payne family and it is just such a miracle that we have two brand new little babies that are doing so well. The miracles seem to just keep coming. I am so grateful to the Lord for blessing me with such a wonderful and supportive family. I have been contemplating that a lot lately, just how truly blessed I am. The reason that it has come up and I have been thinking about it is because I have quite a few investigators that are really struggling right now with their families. One person is a girl who just recently had her two kids taken away from her. Her ex-husband came and took them away because her husband has some custody. The problem is that he took them all the way to Wyoming. She has been really distraught because of it. She started questioning everything that she has been taught and she is just in a really rough spot right now. We went over and talked a lot with her, mainly that we need to look at the eternal perspective of things. That when times get tough, that is the time that we need to really lean on the Lord for help. We seemed to help her feel at least a little bit better towards the end of the lesson. Now second the other family that is going through a rough time. It is the family that just recently had the mother and the Son baptized. They are just going through a really rough time as well. The husband is currently trying to quit smoking a he is having a really rough time of that as well. He is extremely stressed and as you can imagine it is not easy to quit smoking. He has been trying really hard to quit for a long time and it hasn't worked yet. So right now they are having a lot of financial hardship. I feel so bad because I wish there was more that I could do. We are just constantly reassuring them that the Lord is going to help them and just to have faith in him. So like i said I have been expressing a lot of thanks in my prayers to my Heavenly Father because of the wonderful family I have. Along with that i want to wish Mom a very Happy Birthday this week. Thank you so much for always being there for me. I am so blessed to have you. I know that i can always rely on you for help. Thank you again. Well I love you all very much. I apologize that this weeks email was sort of jumbled and crazy but that was sorta like my week. haha i love you all so very much. Also before I forget thank you very much for that package. It pretty much just came up out of the blue and definitely brightened my week, especially the Superman ring. i actually ended up wearing it to church on Sunday. It may just become my new Sunday ring. I love you all  once again.

Love Elder Payne

Monday, August 19, 2013

Email: Baby Sara and Beautiful Hike

Hello Payne Family,
            Holy Smokes only one week goes by and the whole world back home changes. First off I want to congratulate Linds and Rob with their new little baby Sara. That is so awesome that she is finally here. It seems like just yesterday that Drake was telling me over Skype that she was pregnant and now she is already here. I am really sad that i wasn't able to be there to meet her but i know i am where i should be.

         So mom i did hear about Hailey getting baptized. That was such a miracle to hear that. It has definitely been a very long road for her and i am so sure that her getting baptized is going to help her so much. I did call President to find out if I could go down to it and for some reason he said no. I don't really understand why. Him telling me that was really upsetting. I mean someone that i had worked so much with and poured so much time and energy into and I am not allowed to go and witness it. I didn't really get it. It especially sucks because i talked to her and congratulated her on getting baptized and she told Elder McMurray and I that we had to be there. Now I have to tell her that we aren't going to be able to go really sucks. I am sure everything will work out fine though I just wish it had gone a little different.
               
             So this past week was really quite slow. We were able to see  a few miracles though. Unfortunately the week started out with both Elder McMurray and I getting sick. It really was a bummer because getting sick really sucks but even worse getting sick out here on your mission is even worse. We did our best to push through it though. On Tuesday we had this great service project. We along with the whole young men's quorum went to a less active guys house that we work with a lot. He had a whole lot of yard work that he needed to be taken care of, so everyone brought their weed whackers and went to town on all of the weeds. They had everything cleaned up and ready to go in a matter of about 45 minutes. It was really impressive. Then after we had sort of a impromptu lesson with all of the young men and even better our investigators that came and helped as well. The Bishop said some very powerful things about cleansing ourselves and preparing for missionary service. It was great because both I and Elder McMurray got to bear our testimonies of missionary service. That was a wonderful night. On Thursday we had a lesson with those same investigators and set baptismal dates with them. Oh by the way they are the son and husband of the lady we baptized a few weeks ago. Anyways they accepted the date of Sept 7 for baptism. We are so excited for them both and are working very closely with them to help them get there. So now comes the highlight of the week. So all of the youth in the ward have been planning on going and doing a big hike up a mountain near here called Mt. Lassen. We thought hey this would be a great opportunity to take our investigator to get to know the youth, so we got to go on an awesome hike. We hike from about 8,500 feet to about 10,500 feet elevation. It was a beautiful hike and very spiritual as well. We got to say a prayer on the top of the mountain and wow that was amazing. I am very grateful that i got to go on that hike and see all of that. It was definitely an experience I will never forget.
             Well there is pretty much my week, it was definitely a great week but it was a very interesting one as well. I love you all very much and I hope your week goes great

Love Elder Payne

Monday, August 12, 2013

Email: 2 Baptisms! And a McDonalds Stand-Off

Hello Family,
                  Holy Smokes where do I begin? This has been such an amazing week. We have seen a ton of miracles a ton of craziness and a ton of change. So I guess we will just start at the beginning. So Tuesday we began our day by doing a lot of running around, because we are the zone leaders we had to go and babysit a lot of missionaries because a lot were leaving. So we had to go out about 10 minutes North of where we live to pick up an Elder. Well come to find out that didn't happen he just ended up doing some other thing to get his new comp. Anyways back to the story, so we are heading back home to do some things and I was like man i would really like some McDonald's breakfast right now, and Elder McMurray was like ya me too. So we head to McDonald's. Well we pull into the parking lot and what do we find? Oh nothing much just a parking lot full of cop cars with their guns drawn and pointed at this car that was between us and them. So basically we were looking down the barrels of about 3 glocks, and of course the first words out of my mouth were, " oh man now we cant use the drive through!" ha ha ya no joke i am brilliant. So we wheel around and get out of there as quick as we can. We decided to park a ways away from the action and observe. Of course I snapped a few photos and I wont explain to much because i am pretty sure they speak for themselves. So after they get the guy in cuffs and start searching the car we go into the other side of McDonald's. It was awesome because while we were in there i got talking to a guy. He was super excited to learn that we were church people, so of course we picked him up as a new investigator.
                       So enough with that action, on Thursday we had our zone meeting. That is the one that Elder McMurray and I teach. We had a great time teaching it. We talked mainly about strengthening the faith of the missionaries and strengthening the faith of the members. It was great because we had out Ward Mission leader come in and talk about what missonary work is like from the members point of view. i thought it went very well and we all learned a lot. At the end we challenged everybody to go through and read Ether 12, because that is the whole theme of that chapter is faith. So of course that is my challenge to all of you. Go read Ether 12 and tell me what you think. Better yet tell Lindsay and she can put your responses on the blog.
                     Now we continue, Later that day we had the baptismal interview for Tracey and her son Demitris. They both did awesome and are so ready to be baptized. Continuing on through the week, we had a great lesson with Shane Toro. We went over the Restoration with him. It was so amazing when we were going over the lesson. We were talking about some things and I was explaining the Apostasy when i stopped and wanted to ask a few more questions to make sure he understood but he was just sitting on the edge of his seat and when i stopped he just blurted out, " Well then what happened?" It was so cool because I have never had an investigator that was that excited to hear the message of the Restoration. When we recited Joseph Smiths vision he was just about in tears. He told us that he got chills when it was being recited. What an amazing person. We explained that those feeling were form the Holy Ghost and they were confirmation that the message is true. We invited him to be baptized on the 31st of this month and he said he would pray about it!
                        Alright shall we continue with the miracles? i believe we shall! So Saturday we had one of the most amazing baptisms of my mission. Tracey and her son Demitris got baptized and what was even more amazing was that i got to baptize Demitris! What was also pretty neat was that because Tracey had brain surgery and isn't very strong I got to be in the water with them Tracey while Elder McMurray baptized her. It was such a neat experience. Then Sunday I got to confirm Demitris as well. It was amazing seeing someone as prepared as them both completing all of those ordinances. Later that night we visited them and I personally witnessed scripture being fulfilled.
2 Nephi 32:2-3  "Do ye not remember that I said unto you that after ye had received the Holy Ghost ye could speak with the tongue of angels? And now, how could ye speak with the tongue of angels save it were by the Holy Ghost?
 3 Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, they speak the words of Christ. Wherefore, I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do."
                    So she usually has trouble speaking but she said a prayer that was absolutely amazing. I will stop there because this is a long post. Well I love you all and hope all is going well. Good luck to Lindsay this week because she definitely needs it. I love you all.

 Love Elder Payne



Saturday, August 10, 2013

Pretty Pretty Princess

This picture came from a member saying that Elder Payne rocked at Pretty Pretty Princess!

Monday, August 5, 2013

Email: Paperwork and a Miracle

Dear Family,
                  Hello to you all. I want to apologize first off because this email will most likely be somewhat short. The reason being it was a crazy last week with mainly just reports and a lot of paper work stuff. So starting out with you all. I am so happy that everything is OK with Drake. I was so stinking nervous and I have been praying a lot for him. I am so glad that he is doing better. Also I am so happy about Hannah and her play. I am really glad that it all went so well, she looked beautiful in all of the pictures.
               Well let me tell you a little about the week. Like I said earlier the week was insane. It was mostly just doing reports and being in meetings. We had a big stake meeting that we had about a 40 page packet that we had to compile. Wow tell me about boring and stressful. What we had to put together was all of the numbers from the past month for the whole zone. We also had a thing which is called the Ward Mission leader process report. It is basically where you say whether or not your Ward mission leader is doing a good job. It was whole lot of fun let me tell you. Anyways we also had a big Mission leadership council. It was actually a lot of fun getting together with a bunch of really great missionaries that I have met and gotten to know. I also really like to sit and counsel with our mission president.
                  So as far as the baptisms go, well they didn't unfortunately. They all fell through for various reasons but we just pushed back two of them to this next week. We are excited for them because one of them, Tracey, has been waiting a very long time to get baptized. We weren't able to get to much other stuff done except for one amazing miracle that happened. So a member of our ward called us on Thursday and told us that they had someone that they would like us to meet and teach. Come to find out that it is the son of one of the members of our ward. He was going up to Oregon on Saturday to get baptized into some random community church up there. Well we met on Friday evening with him and had an amazing lesson. He told us how he didn't want to get baptized by some random person. So basically he was explaining the priesthood. We soft committed him to be baptized and he accepted. We are going to continue to work with him closely. He was definitely a miracle and a major boost to our work.
                      Ok well here is the news with transfers. Elder McMurray is actually staying! Crazy right ? He has been here for 7 and a half months and will be here for about 9. Exciting stuff!
         Well I love you all so much and I am so grateful for all that you do for me and on my behalf. I love you all.

Love Elder Payne