Heating It Up in Tempe

Our District after we hiked Casa Grande Mountain this morning Hello everyone! So it has been a pretty eventful week. As you can tell by my subject, I am pretty excited that the weather has gone from the 100's to the 90's. We even hit the 80's a few times this week. Pretty exciting, huh? I know. I am pumped too. The Evans' Baptism So first of all, we had our first baptism on Saturday. A lot of people came to support, even Will and Lindy came which was awesome. We met some new people from Wilcox, AZ and it was really cool to see the Evans doing missionary work, even at their own baptism. It was a great experience to see how much this gospel can change an individual. I have seen the Evans family grow together and become so happy since I have been here, and Saturday was a perfect example of that. Brother Evans couldn't get the words out to baptize her for a long time. It was a special moment for them. The Spirit was as thick as triple chocolate cake ...

The Evans family is the real MVP, they got me a cake for my birthday. And sang to me. What is up everyone?? So glad to be able to talk to you all as a 19-year old...haha!! Not gonna lie, I feel absolutely no different, especially because it really didn't feel like a birthday, but thank you all for the birthday wishes and the cards & presents, it made Thursday pretty awesome! :) We went to Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch and got some KILLER wings & had a blast. They gave me some free cheesecake bites for dessert & they were really good. This week was super dope. We had transfers, & as you can see, I remain in CG!! I love this area so I was really relieved to hear that. Elder Fowles was transferred to Chandler, so that was pretty sad, he was a super funny guy. But Elder Hawkes is Elder Cleveland's companion now & he is super funny. He is on scholarship for BYU track after his mission & I go running with him in the morning, & wow, I feel su...

Holding a baby pig born that morning. My companion thought for sure he was going to get sick after he found that out. He didn't. Hey everybody!!! Hope the life in good ol' North Idaho and wherever you are inthe  world is going well. Things in Casa Grande are still in the 90s and still pretty darn awesome!! I am having a lot of fun getting to know new people as well as get to know the ward better as I stay strong in the work. There were some awesome experiences this week I will share with you. Alright, so first of all, this week we met this new guy. He is a miracle in his own right. He has dealt with lots of trials in his life and has been looking for peace. His wife is a less-active member of the church, so this last sunday they just decided to go to church out of the blue!  They LOVED it, so we met with them twice this week to see what he wants out of church and to start teaching him the gospel!! Our first lesson, we put him on date for an  October 22nd  baptism #aw...

#squadpic Hey everyone! So good to say that it is September now :) September has  the best weather of the year, in North Idaho at least. It is still in  the 100's down here, but life is still pretty good :) I am getting  used to the heat a little more, and it should start cooling down a  little in the next few weeks. But there was a lot that went down this  week, so I am going to have to pick and choose what I share, so we  will see how this goes :) So this week was the hardest I have worked yet on my mission, and E lder Grigsby said the same. We were ballin' hard with finding while  we were teaching and teaching while we were finding. We ended up  receiving 11 referrals this week, which is a HUGE number, especially  for Casa Grande. We upped all of our weekly goals and achieved every  single one other than church attendance. Our goal was 10 investigators  (double the weekly average) and we ended up with 8, which is still ...

  Desert Turtles, Princess & Peanuts One of the families we had dinner with have these turtles. What is up everyone! So good to be able to email all of you :) I can  envision all of your smiling faces and you all are looking good ;)  Just kidding. This week was pretty awesome. At the beginning of the  week, we were looking at the schedule and thought it would be a slow  week, but hey, the Lord always provides. Me and Brother Beebe's sick elk...made me feel like I was at home again. Notable events for this week, on Saturday we took the E Family to  the Mesa Arizona Temple Visitor's Center, which was an awesome experience. They have a walk through program that talks about God's plan for families, and it was such a spiritual experience. It made me miss the fam a little bit (Love you  Barlow clan ;)) But it was so good for them to feel the spirit. Sister  E kept bearing her testimony without being asked and we were just  like d...

The sunset was killer after a dust storm this past week. Alright, everybody. SO I hate it, but there is not as much to write  about this week. Most of what you are going to hear happened  yesterday. But hey, that is okay because the experiences that I had are BOMB :) Alright, so this week was pretty slow for the most part. From  Wednesday morning to Friday evening we had taught one lesson and had  over 10 cancellations I think. So needless to say we were a bit  discouraged. But Elder Grigsby told me that the bad days usually mean  that something good is about to happen. And man oh man was he right.  But we will get to that.  I decided to get some of that #flagswag going on last night! Last week I told you a little about some sisters we are teaching . They are so cool. They made us literally like 20 pounds of chicken and rice to eat on Tuesday so we haven't gone hungry haha.  However, on Saturday we were notified that one of...

Hello world :) How are all of you? You must be doing awesome because life is so awesome. Look around you. All of us are so lucky to be here on earth and to have everything that we do. We should be so grateful for literally everything. I have seen that this week. So my week was pretty awesome. Surprisingly, it flew by much faster than I expected. Like it seems like yesterday was like Thursday. So that was pretty cool. Casa Grande is really weirrd. The people are interesting. They like to talk A TON and a lot of the members seem to enjoy talking about deep doctrine...so that is really interesting. It is so HOT down here. It really is. But I am so glad that I have a car to drive around instead of suffering in the heat my first transfer out here. That would make things much more interesting. So yeah. I have had more water in these last 12 days than I have had in the past YEAR. Not even joking. It is pretty crazy.  So yeah, miracles are real. We are working with an awesom...