The Hills of Mississippi and Other Things

On Memorial Day we went on an adventure, it was pretty sweet! We went up to Mississippi to a place called Tunica Hills. Yes, I got to see hills for the first time!!  We hiked down a ridge to a creek bed and there were rocks and boulders and waterfalls and hills!!! Oh, and did I mention HILLS!! You still couldn't see very far cause of trees and stuff, but it was nice to be able to walk up hills and feel an elevation change. We went with the 1st councilor in our stake presidency who lives in our ward and a bunch of other companionships from our zone. We got to stand under some waterfalls and I found a spider the size of my palm, it was alot like the ones we found at Sheep Falls a few years ago that were giant. I was crawling through a tunnel in the stream and got through it then Elder Rawlings was going through and this giant spider almost crawled up his leg.  This was right after we had a zone conference where our mission doctor came and talked to us about bugs and how we need to stay away from them.  He showed us a bunch of bites from brown recluse and black widow spiders. But it was one of the best preparation days I've had, getting out and actually hiking on hills. It was probably about like hiking half way up our Iona hill but that's pretty giant for here, especially with the heat.

Missionaries at the waterfall at Tunica, Mississippi

We caught an Alligator Turtle

We have another general authority coming this weekend. We have a leadership meeting with him on Friday and he might be attending to our stake conference.  I'm still not sure, but it's an Elder Gibbons from the Second Quorum of the Seventy, not an apostle but they are still spiritual giants that are always good.

Well, we had a good week this last week.  We found a new less-active that we are working with who recently returned from Iraq. He is the former bishops step son. We got word from the bishop to go visit him so we made our way over and sat down and talked with him and found out that he still has a testimony and was able to pray and read on his tour and it helped him out alot he said.  But he has been out of church for a long time now and hasn't been able to get the drive to come back.  He knows its true, he  just struggles to keep at it.  We left him with 2 Nephi 32 and told him to read it and he did so that was a start and hopefully we can keep working with him.

Oh, I gave a talk in church on Sunday, I almost forgot. It was on obedience and I told the story of my golf ball in the eye experience at Eric Forbush's expense.  I talked about having a broken heart and contrite spirit and being broken like a horse and not just the Godly sorrow that comes (similar to what Eric was feeling) but also that being broken means we are trained and we learn that there is no other option than obedience.  I used Nephi and his life, how he went and did what the Lord commanded and just had that obedience ingrained in him. I talked about how both books he wrote end with him talking about obedience. The first one is the last two verses in the first book of Nephi and in the end of second book of Nephi he said "I must obey".  He had it truly ingrained in his heart. It was probably the best talk I've ever given. ha ha!  I talked first and went for like 23 minutes and I didn't even get through alot of what I had.  My companion said he was praying that I would go longer than the 15 minutes we were each given because the night before he timed his talk and said it was only 5 minutes long.  When I sat down by him on the stand he just said thanks because he hadn't told me about how he was praying I went long, he said it was answer to his prayer.  But that clock shot by freakishly fast!  Everyone loved the golf ball story, especially a bunch of the young men. haha!

Oh, we pulled a joke on one of the bishop's counselors this week. There is a joke around the ward that brother Ferrel is nicknamed the "hammer", Especially in the meetings we go to he is always referred to as the hammer.  So we got a Thor hammer, there is a long story that involves a crawfish boil and an inside joke and some exceeding curiosity on his part. Anyway, we went over to his house on Sunday because he was sick and ate with his family.  Right before we left we pulled out the hammer and gave it to him and it was like a little girl just found out she got a pony for Christmas!   I thought he was going to scream! haha!

Elder Hausladen and I have earned some serious street cred with our bishopric and ward leaders because we ate our hearts out at a crawfish boil/pool party/young men's and young women's activity last Wednesday. They had over 200 pounds of crawfish and they invited us to go (and no, we didn't participate in the pool party).  They were worried they had way to much food, but we pounded them down and then in the last pot they made they added a full jar of Cayenne pepper and we weren't even phased.  We actually liked it even more!  haha! My hands and lips were on fire the rest of the night but it was fun and there were a bunch of nonmembers that the youth brought  that we hopefully can get some leads on.

I found out this week that a kid that we found and started teaching in Abbeville got baptized this week!

Well, that's about all I have time for today... love y'all!

Love, Elder Ritchie

Fishers of Men and Perch

Hey Family,

 

Had a good week this week! Found someone new to work with that has actually been to church the past two months. He is a member's friend and he says he likes it much better than the Catholic church he usually goes to, especially the testimony meetings and how you don't have to knee down over and over again. He graduated the year after me and his member friend graduated the same year as me.  They remind me of how Peter and Dylan are always together. He said he wants to keep coming to church and that ever since he started coming, his mom who is going through chemo therapy has been doing really good.

 

I got to go fishing for the first time on my mission this week. A member of the bishopric has a pond right behind his house and he invited us over and we threw the cast net out and caught some little perch. So I finally got to fish a little bit.

 

Our other investigator named K. has been doing pretty good, she hasn't made it to church but the last time we were over there she had read to 1 Nephi 9 and said she was learning a lot about faith.

 

We also had a really spiritual lesson with M. this week, she is the one that has been coming back to church. We talked with her about faith and repentance and she was able to open up and describe how she has been able to feel happy again. Over the past couple of months she has been coming back to church she has been able to feel like all the problems of her past have been erased. She said she struggled with organized religion for a long time but now she was able to feel what it was all about and know that God was really there and that he loves us. She then went on to tell us about how she is just worried about her younger brother and how he is where she was not to long ago and how she wants to help him and his wife to feel what she has felt.  She was curious to what the best way to help him out was, so we just told her that prayer and being an example to him is the  very best thing to do if he doesn't want to listen.  She said that being and example has already helped because he commented on how she is so much happier than she used to be and she was able to tell him  little bit about why.

 

Anyways, that's just a little of whats going on down here.

 

It was good to talk to you all last week.

 

love y'all,

 

Love Elder Ritchie

Good things come after a flood!

Hey, so I never know what to write after I just talked to you so I'll keep it short I guess.  We had a really good week, we were able to find some new investigators, one called our mission president and said that he needed some support and help with everything he was going through. He has been out of a job and needed God.  So we have had a couple lessons with him and he is really thinking about baptism and if he is ready to make that kind of commitment in his life. 

We also started meeting with K. and her friend K. last Monday and taught them the restoration and gave her a Book of Mormon and when we came back two days later she had read the first couple chapters and started telling us about  how Nephi killed Laban and took the brass plates back to the wilderness.  She had also read a pamphlet we left with her and she said she wanted to still do the questions on the pamphlet and look up all the scriptures. She has been doing really well!  Her friend K. sat in on a lesson and he was interested too.  We are going to meet with them both again tomorrow.  Hopefully we can get them to church this next Sunday, they said they wanted to come yesterday but they weren't able to make it.

We moved apartments early this morning. We took our beds and couch to the new place a couple miles down the road. We actually live in our own area now which is going to be really nice and the members are excited because they won't have to drive so far to go out teaching with us or to pick us up for stuff. I think it will be a lot better for the work because it will give us more time and we will be able to focus more with only two of us in an apartment.

Well I can't think of a whole lot else that I can tell you that I didn't tell you yesterday. I think I told you about flooding the apartment before we even lived there. That was a pretty funny experience to have a couple of inches of water in your brand new apartment but we got it all fixed we just happened to open the vacuum right before and sucked the water and dumped it in the sink.

Well I think that's all!

Love you all !

Love, Elder Ritchie 

Celebrating Mother's Day!

We got a package from Sam on the day before Mother's Day.

It was full of Louisiana Treasures.

And a card that said:

Dear Mom,

I saw this dog card and it reminded me of you so I thought I'd get it.  I also got you some Zapps, they are pretty good, the Crawtator ones actually taste pretty close to crawfish. The Voodoo are just delicious.  I got you some "Slap Ya Mama" It's alot like Tony's and some LSU paraphernalia cause I realized I hadn't sent any.  Well I hope you have a good Mother's Day!

I love you!

Love, Elder Ritchie

Then on Mother's Day we got to talk with him!

He sounded great. 

We invited Grandma Ritchie and the little cousins over to say hi!

It was a great Mother's Day!!!

Thanks Elder Ritchie

Proud Ionian

OK Mom, I will have to start telling people I'm from Iona except our address is an Idaho Falls address.  But I'll be a proud Iona missionary for you!  (Elder Packer told a story in our regional conferance about President Kimball encouraging an Idaho missionary to tell everyone his home town with pride.)

 

 I found out I'm staying in Denham another transfer, transfer calls were last night so I felt pretty safe but while I was writing this, the president gave us a call so I thought I was gonna have to start packing, but he just ended up giving us someone to stop by and see. So, false alarm! 

 

Well, its been super hot this past week. It's been in the high 90's with signs of a hot summer coming.  We had a really big thunderstorm last night that cooled things down a little for now but that just means when it warms up it's going to be even more humid.  It's hard to breathe sometimes after it rains because it gets so humid, last summer it felt like it was foggy all the time because the air is so dense with humidity and it sticks to you.  You have to use the defogger in the car all the time and it doesn't work very well.

 

We had a good week this week, we have been able to set up a lot of dinner appointments with members. We taught a new investigator yesterday that we were able to find because we talked to the bishopric and they gave us a long list of people to see and track down.  The one we tried to see didn't live there anymore but we were able to talk to the woman that lived there and she was curious about what we believed and told us to come back by so we went over yesterday and taught her the restoration and she thought it made sense and she even invited herself to church, which is usually a very good sign. We have another lesson on Wednesday with her to so we are pretty excited.  We haven't been able to find too many new people lately, mostly just less active work.

 

 

Oh yeah, I forgot it's Mothers Day already, feels like it was just last month we had Christmas. I have a package I'm sending with some stuff in it I think you'll like.  Sunday I'll probably call around 6 here so 5ish there.

 

So Dillon is gone again! Nice! Did they say whether or not he would just do another year or make up some of what he missed? I think we have had missionaries do both in our mission. (Sam's friend Dillon is returning to his mission after six months home with a back problem).

 

Well that's about all I've got this week.

 

Love y'all,

Elder Ritchie