General Conferance in Denham Springs

New address:

2630 Kelli Dr. #C3

Denham Springs, LA

70726

 

 

So I got to my new area this week and I'm a normal missionary now :) no more zone leader for now!  I'm still a district leader but I'm shooting for junior companion haha!

 

The new area is really cool so far, probably the best functioning ward I've been in down here and the most like a home ward but with alot of part member families. I still haven't been to church yet since it was conference so I will have to wait and find out for sure.

 

We had a pretty good weekend, we had a returning member at conference in all the sessions and we had her think of questions that she had and she said all of them were answered and she was just really happy afterward. She is in her mid 20's and just trying to find her way back. She is trying to find out if this is really what she wants and trying to find out how she can get closer to God. She wants us to start teaching her the lessons but I think we will try and get her a Preach My Gospel and have her teach us the lessons, learning by faith! haha! We also had a less active show up randomly to Saturday's afternoon session and we were able to talk to her and she wants to start coming back to church. She grew up in Salt Lake and moved down here a few years ago. Her husband is not a member and has been asking questions and he came to the Sunday afternoon session and we set up a time to stop by to see them. So, it was a pretty awesome week. 

 

I'm living with Elder Gentry, a missionary I trained back in Baton Rouge and it has been awesome to be around him because he is a completely different person. He's changed and is outgoing and not shy at all. He is the senior companion. Oh, I think I'll make him start doing all my district leader stuff so I can tell president that he's ready to be a district leader, haha!  My new companion is Elder Hausladen from California and he is cool super chill, we get along really well. I'm going to miss Thibodaux though, it was alot of fun and we had some awesome things going but Elder Curtis ended up staying there which made me happy because it didn't get double transferred after all.  We got the call on transfer day right before we headed up to Baton Rouge that he was staying, so we already said our goodbyes to everyone.  

 

I'm super excited for this area, its going to be alot of fun. It's weird because it borders my Baton Rouge area but is completely different. Baton Rouge was the hood and this place feels like the Hamptons of Louisiana. 

 

Have a great week,

Love, Elder Ritchie

 

Teaching Iranians and Fried Chicken Prayers

Yeah, conference was really good, I loved it! It was different watching every session in the church, but kinda cool. I still missed my legos and my pjs, but I probably got a little more out of it that I do with my legos. I can't believe Star Valley Idaho is getting a temple, haha, probably because they were praying for something to do there.

Well, we had a good week other than getting people to conference. We tried but weren't able to get anyone there. But right afterward we went and saw Darrius and committed his son for baptism. His wife and daughter aren't really interested but his son Sam is very interested and Darrius has been telling him a lot about it. We even got him to offer a prayer in front of everyone at the end of the lesson. He was able to recount the whole Joseph Smith story from the restoration dvd we watched with them a month or so ago. And we had left a Family is Forever dvd with Darrius before his baptism and Sam had watched it and loved it. It was really cool to have Darius there bearing his testimony to his son about what he had felt when he was baptized because Darrius has a solid testimony. He even faced some"anti" when he went to an Iranian Christian service with his wife and was talking to the pastor and the pastor found out he was in the LDS church and started talking bad about it and he defended the Church and questioned the pastor for talking bad about something that made him feel good and closer to God. That's what Satan tries to do! Teaching Sam made me miss teaching Darrius though and whenever he likes something he always lets you know by telling you "vonderful"! He kinda throws a "v" in for the "w" because of his accent. He is just a super awesome guy and I think the best part of the lesson with Sam for Darrius was when we let him know that he could baptize his own son because of the priesthood. We mentioned that one day Sam could be a missionary like us and Darrius really liked that too. His eyes lit up when we said that because he loves missionaries especially what they do. I hope that his wife and daughter will follow their example as well. Actually, we found out the daughter, Roxy, was reading the Book of Mormon we left and she said she was on page 7 and she was enjoying if! So, there its hope! Now I just wish I spoke Farsi so I could talk to his wife a little better.

My companion is form Lovelock Nevada and one of the Spanish missionaries in the apartment is from Rupert so we have had a pretty heated week in the apartment (Boisie State played Nevada in football) but good old Boise pulled through for me and Elder Christiansen from Rupert haha! I don't think revenge is always a bad thing. We turned the other cheek, we just happened to beat them pretty good in the process! LSU is still standing strong at number one so the town's still happy. And the Saints won too so eveyone's in a great mood. I'll have to send a Fleur de Lise/ tiger eye sticker home because I know you all are big Saints/LSU fans... haha!

My favorite talk from conference was D. Todd Christofferson's about repentance, I thought that was a good one and I kept thinking about his spring on about being cut down too. President Eyring's was probably my second favorite, but they were all good. I think the ward liked the one about the Seventy who was riding his bike and prayed for a quarter so he could get some fried chicken and the Lord answered his prayer. I liked it too, kind of a humble faith filled prayer.. and then to top it off we had some fried chicken afterwards too!

But I gotta get going!

love you all and take care
love elder ritchie

Favorite Foods and Other Things

I'm ready for conference! I can't wait! We get to watch some TV and relax a little bit.. haha! joke! But seriously, we had a good week, I was able to go on an exchange out to New Roads, a little town and work with a missionary in my district. The area is really struggling and they are pretty sure it is going to get closed down, so I think im going to give an instruction on diligence in district meeting this week to try to keep them going strong out there. I hope they keep it open because it will be really hard to open it back up after they close it because it is so far from the church.

We have been doing a lot of less-active work lately because our ward has 600+ members but only 100-150 are very active. We have been seeing alot of them and we have had some back at church these last couple weeks. It has been really cool to see them there and seeing that they liked being back at church one because its "the church" and because the Baton Rouge 1st ward is awesome.

Oh, so we made donuts last night, beignet's actually, a french donut I'm not sure how to spell it but I had one down in New Orleans from Cafe Du Monde, it was so good!

I've been learning some Portugese lately because we have a member that is from Brazil and we have been teaching her friends and we teach them English to so they teach us a little Portugese too, haha! They keep saying that I could pick it up and speak it really well. Tania the member, wants us to go to the next world cup with her and stay at her family's place in Soa Paulo, that would be pretty sweet!

What picture did you find on his Elder Salazar's blog? He is living with us right now.

Oh,back to talking about food, we had some really good gumbo yesterday! And some jalepeno cheddar cornbread and topped it off with Blue Bell ice cream, the best kind of ice cream! We had cookie dough and birthday cake flavored! They need to get Blue Bell in Idaho and if they have it get Josh some cause he would be in heaven, its the best! I'm not much of an ice cream person and I cant stop eating it!

Haha! Rebecca is the primary president! That's sweet, we have taught a few primary lessons, its fun. I usually just use the pictures of Jesus on the pass along cards we have and let the kids hold my placque with my name on it.. they love that.

LSU isn't in our area right now. There are LSU elders, one is Elder Robins, my last comp. But last week the South Baton Rouge area was closed because one of the missionaies was a "visa waiter" and he got sent out so they closed the area and we absorbed it into the two other areas we already have. So we had the whole of Baton Rouge (which is giant, way more people than any other area in the mission) in our area for a while. I didn't know what was going on so it was pretty crazy. The mission president actually took us out to dinner the other night because he felt bad that he kinda left us in the dark for awhile. But it is all worked out and now they have missionaries back there so it's running smooth.

I gotta wrap it up!
love ya
elder ritchie

Conference was GREAT!

I loved conference I think I liked Elder Bednar's talk best about spiritual revelation and how there are two kinds, the turn-the-light-on kind and the sun-rises slowly kind. It is really evident out here in the field, some days you feel your not getting much help and then you think back and you were actually able to accomplish alot. And some days you just get an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment and revelation.

We watched the Saturday sessions at a member's house just down the road. Ask Luke if he knows them, they were in Pensacola when the hurricane hit there. We had our main investigators there to watch. They really liked it and they had some good questions especially about temples and being sealed. The gospel is doing wonders for them. The father is one rough looking guy but he has a big heart and the gospel is helping him show it because i don't think he knew how before. The mother is the golden investigator she eats it all up and always wants more. She said when she doesn't do church stuff now she gets depressed. She said I could come stay with them when I get off my mission and her cooking makes it a very temping offer, ha ha. She makes awesome gumbo and macaroni and cheese like I've never seen and stuffed bell peppers. Wow! but back to conference, between the Saturday day sessions we had a bbq and of course I manned the grill as much as they would let me, (They were pretty impressed of my skills being from Idaho) but it was really good! I don't know what people do here but the food is amazing. Well priesthood session was really good except I feel like I'm supposed to go get married now, ha ha. It was really good for our investigator, it showed him how he should be as a husband and he said he liked it. They took us to the church on Sunday too, and there was a ward potluck between sessions. Oh yeah, I saw my cousin Maria in the choir! It was cool I wasn't expecting that.

We had something awesome happen after conference, we went out tracking to try and find some new investigators because we were 2 under our goal for the week and just as we were leaving to go to a new area because we weren't getting anything thing other than the abrupt "I'm Catholic" response, we were driving and we saw a really big family out playing in the yard and as we got down the road a ways we just knew we had to go talk to them and so we parked and headed over and we got talking. It started off good and she was listening but then said she had her church and was happy with it. We asked if we could have a short lesson with them and she said, yes but she had her fellowship. But we gave her and her kids a short lesson and and then we bore our testimonies of how there was a living prophet and through the proper authority families can be together forever and we asked her if this was true, wouldn't she really want to know that? And as we were bearing out testimonies you could just she the change in her eyes and her kids eyes and she said, "yes, I would definitely want to know that", and we went around the circle and asked each one if they wanted to know and they all said yes. After that she was basically begging us to come back and teach her more. She said "I have to get your number". and we asked her when was the best time we could come back and she said "well there is tomorrow but that's my birthday", so we told her she had to let us bring a cake, and she said of course she would let us as long as it had pecans in it. Ha ha, so we are going to make a cake today with pecans.

Well, it finally rained down here... and it was crazy! It rained 6 inches in about 4 hours.. we were driving down the road and it looked like a river, it was so cool! I think I heard a tornado touched down in our area but in might have been in Ponchatula, I'm not sure, we don't get to watch the news. We were about to go into a lesson with some inactive members and their investigator daughter-in-law and we were standing under their entry way when a bolt of lightning hit less than a half mile away. The shock wave was like some one punched me in the gut and it almost knocked my companion over, it was so cool. Scary, but cool. I've never had the hair on the back of my neck stand up like that, it was intense.

Oh, my companion is Elder Cranney, he is from Draper, he is 26 and this is his last transfer. He is the former assistant to the president so he knows what he is doing. The other elders and I always joke the when he talks we are listening to a future apostle.

There are four of us in our apartment so we have a good time, one is from Pocatello so I give him a hard time for that and the other is from Brigham City.
Well, that's about all I've got. Take care, miss everyone!

love elder ritchie