Issaquah 1st / Tiger Mtn Transfer 3 Week 5

hello everyone!

so the rain is back... i cant decide if i love it or hate it yet. but i think the excitement of cooler weather will rub off in a few days of not seing the sun! but things here are good. we had an insanely busy week, we had a ton of meetings with elder edwards coming here and then we went to the temple too. it was a crazy but great week.
we had a great baptism on saturday! we baptized lisa she is a great lady, we had a great little baptism service( and by little i mean like 7 people came). but it was great she absolutley loved it. we were so excited for her and she was so excited because she absolutely loves the gospel and she has felt the healing effects of the atonement in her life. she is great and she has an eight year old daughter that we are going to try to baptise this next weekend but she doesnt like to sit still very long so its going to be interesting!

elder edwards came to the mission this week! that was amazing!!! he is such a great speaker! we had a zone conference with him almost all day and then we had the opportunity to go back that night to a fireside for investigators and recent converts and it was amazing we had a few investigators with us and one of our recent converts and it was such a powerfull meeting! i really enjoyed listening to him speak he is truely an inspired man. probably the main thing that i took away from him speaking is the fact that we cant just do minimums. in life and in the gospel if we jsut do minimums we dont get anywhere but we need to sacrafice and do all we can to make progress in what ever we do. he also talked alot on the healing power of the atonement and once we understand that we will become the greatest missionaries because we will have a strong desire to share the gospel with everyone we see, and help bring them back through the waters of batpism.

i also had a great opportuninty to meet with him one on one after the meeting. he interviewed all of the zone leaders in the mission! it was amazing cause how often do you get to be interviewed by a general authority!!!! it was sweet, but it was kind of sad i though of all the good questions to ask him after our interview was over... but it was still amazing.

oh also saturday night elder aiken and i were tracting out on tiger mountain where it is very rural and it was late and pitch black and raining. and we knocked on this one door and someone came to the door. and with out opening the door asked who was there, so we said "its the missionaries" then it went silent... a few seconds later we heard a round drop into a gun and then they cocked the shotgun! then the door opened and there was a guy standing there (who didnt look to happy to see us) holding a shot gun behind the door. he was pretty short with us and told us he wasnt interested and to leave and needless to say we left alright. we ran to the car and i mean RAN. and drove far away from there. we thought we were going to die! but it was a fun night tracting out in tiger mountain!

well i hope everyone has a great week
love you
elder berry

Issaquah 1st/Tiger Mtn Transfer 3 Week 4

hello everyone!

things have been going so good here! its truely been an amazing week we have seen so many great things and many mighty miracles this week!! the whole mission is on fire right now and especially our zone we truely had a blessing of a week for us and our zone. as a zone we found 22 new investigators and 10 new on dates! that is the highest this zone has ever seen! we have been blessed so much. the zone has been working so hard im so happy i can be here to see what is happening.

so after this last week the whole misson is running! they challanged all of us to run from person to person and from door to door. and believe it or not i actually love it. it has changed our mission because its given all of us hope and an increased desire to share the gospel with urgency. it makes us not wander around hoping for a miracle, to running talking to everyone and prepaired people are placed in our path every day. it is changing our mission so fast and the missioin is seeing alot of blessings and miracles.

i personally have had an amazing week with many really neat experiences.. but one of them was in a lesson we were teaching. we are teaching this girl who is 16 and she is on date for baptism. she refered herself on mormon.org and told us to bring a book of mormon but we couldnt take it to her house because her parents wouldnt like it. one day we finally got in and gave it to her then we didnt have contact with her for like 2 months. then we finally found a way back in we were talking to her about the book of mormon and if she had read any of it. she told us she was in second nephi! then we asked her if whe had pryaed about it yet. then she started to cry and she told us that she had prayed and god had told her that it was true!!!!!!! she then went on and tried to express how she wanted to join the church but she didnt know how. so we quickly explained batism and she is so excited! ahe already talked to her parents and has permission to be baptized!! we teach her a few times a week and the change i have seen the gosple make in her life will have forever strengthen my testimony. it made me realized that what we have and what i do as a missionary is real and it changes lives.

also we had stake conference this wekend which was amazing, but the thing i loved about it was i got to see all the people i loved in one place and it was a pretty rare opportunity. all of the recent converts in both of my wards were there, all of the members were there, we had a few investigators that were there, and all of my missionaries were there. i just loved seeing it, it was really neat for me to be able to look around a room and see all of the recent converts and be able to see the affect the gospel has made in each of their lives. it made me realize how important missions are because i was blessed enought to be able to see so many peoples lives that my labors here have benefited it was such a neat experience and gave me such a dirve to work harder to be able to help so many more people!

i love my mission so much its awesome! i love serving here and i wouldnt trade it for the world!

i love you and hope you have a great week
elder berry

Issaquah / Tiger Mtn Transfer 3 Week 3

hello everyone!

so this last week was awesome!! it was such a great week! it was probably one of the best weeks of my mission. i learned so much and it was just a great week.

we have like the greatest investigators in the world now and we had leadership training and zone leader council this week it was a pretty busy week.

so we had leadership training wednesday and thursday this week. and wednesday we had the director of media and the director of prosyliting over the entire church there!!! it was a neat opportunity. they gave great trainings on mormon.org and it ws so good to hear from them. they made me feel like a terrible missionary becasue of how well they know preach my gospel and it made me realize how much i didnt know! so needless to say i have been having really good studies since then.

we had zone leader council on friday and that was pretty crazy. that is when all the zone leaders the assistants and president larkin meet and we discuss how we are going to change the mission. it was an interesting experience but it was great!

our on dates are doing great! we are teaching this girl named skylar and she already has her own quad! its amazing but sorry i dont have much time this week love you gotta go

have a great week
elder berry