April already?!! 4-1-13

April already?! dang....

I got your Easter package, thanks for that! I also got lots of candy from ward members yesterday so I've got a whole box full of goodies. Part of me wants to eat them all but the other part of me is telling me I’m just gonna get fat. so...i'm making it all last! I'm not gonna have a whole lot of time to write handwritten letters later today because we're going to the stake presidents house for an Easter shindig thingamabob. and if i have time later on I'll probably take a nap, so will you thank G+K+D+H+A for the Easter card? thanks :)

Also, I got a card from Cathy Peterson. I don’t remember who she is but she says she's an old babysitter and that she can’t believe me and Jake (dont know who jake is) are old enough to be on missions. I wish I could remember who she is because that was nice of her.

 i think I've finally found a way to introduce myself to people so they remember how to pronounce my last name! Elder Geddes, just like lettuce! So my running shoes that i brought out with me, are falling apart. bummer. *Cough cough birthday present cough cough*..I absolutely hate asking you to send me stuff. But we play a lot of B-Ball out here in VA so maybe y'all could send out my dark nike basketball shoes for my birthday or something. Dont send those rancid light blue nike shoes though. The mailman would probably think its a skunk and toss it out before it gets to me. Alright...im done begging now.

This week has been sick tight! Best week in Yorktown yet. We found yet another 2 new investigators, and the best part is they don’t want to bash with us! Belinda is one of the new investigators. She's like 60 and has 4 horses, a dog, and like 2 cats. i dont know how she keeps care of them all. So of course we offered to help. Anyways. when we went out to meet her we brought the Spanish elders with us so we could have 3+ males with us to go in the home, but for some reason we sat outside on her porch for the whole lesson. We would be shivering and teaching at the same time. The cold didn’t seem to bother Belinda though. We taught the Restoration and it went really well! She has a son who served a mission in Utah and has sisters who are members and for some reason she's never talked to  missionaries before. So we're stoked to be the first to teach her. We got stuck talking about prophets at one point in the lesson because she had a concern about how we're supposed to know if someone is a false prophet or a true prophet, so i open up to Jacob 4:4-6 which explains what prophets do. And right before I start to read it her devil cat jumps up, claws extended, and latches through 5 pages in my Book of Mormon and starts falling down! This cat gives out a shriek all while ripping up my scriptures. Good news is that no pages were ripped out, just 5 pages with a massive tear in the middle of the page. When we got home I patched it up with tape. It's all good now. I still don’t like that cat though. Oh! when we we're saying the closing prayer to the lesson that same cat decides to jump up on my lap and rub all his fur on my suit coat. I had to exercise self restraint to not whack the cat off of me. Anyways, Belinda's awesome! Her cat -  not so much...

Next investigator, his name’s Jason. We found him in our apartment building 2 weeks ago when we were tracting. He works on submarines at the shipyard and sprays some type of coating on them so they don’t show up on radar, cool stuff. He also owns a cat, a well behaved one. And has like triple the amount of movies that Nell and Jason have. He doesn’t really belong to an organized religion and instead has his own beliefs. That makes it a bit easier haha. We brought a member with us and taught the Restoration. He listened, asked good questions, we answered and tied it all back to the message we prepared so this lesson flowed really well! The spirit was way strong too. His only concern was if Jesus Christ suffered for every person to ever live or for only those people alive at the time of the atonement. He's a pretty solid investigator though. We got him to offer a kneeling prayer at the end of the lesson and committed him to read and pray every day. He said he would, so hopefully this Saturday when we see him again he will have held up his part of the deal!

We dropped Tom because he's flaky, doesn’t keep appointments anymore. But since he lives close by we're gonna drop by every other week or so to see how he's doing. However, his less active daughter showed up to church yesterday! She stayed all 3 hours which makes me think that she didn’t show up only because it was Easter. So hopefully she's making a change :)

On Saturday we got in our service clothes to help one of the part member families living in our apartment complex move from one building to another across the complex. That took like 2 hours and when we were walking back to our apartment to shower some guys come up to us and tell us to come help them move. So we moved this 200 pound treadmill to the 3rd floor....and then after we helped them some other people called us over and had us move their couches from the 3rd floor down to the 1st floor. Man....i was so exhausted. It was good though, hopefully we made a good impression.

Also on Saturday, we were on our bikes contacting people, but Elder Brooks bike was giving him trouble the whole way. First it was his wheel was wobbling, then his chain fell off, then as we were pulling into our apartment complex his seat just snapped off!  His bike went down but he managed to stay up somehow. i was riding behind him and it looked like he just hopped off and his bike just fell into 5 different pieces and crashed onto the ground. Satan was working hard against us because of the success we had earlier on!

One last thing, so those kool-aid drinks you sent me, after we got home from dinner last night, Elder Stagg and I had a race to see who could chug one the fastest. I totally destroyed him. Mine was gone and he still had half of his left. i give the credit to all my experience with shasta shootouts!

Well, I’m low on time. Love you all and hope you have a great week.  
Love, Elder Geddes

Walking in Yorktown

No shoulder or bike paths for bikes in Yorktown!

First time getting bashed!

March 25, 2013

We’re trying to do a bunch of service for thrift stores around the area and before we start we need to fill out paper work. One of the things requires your social security # so i totally forgot mine. If you could let me know ASAP that would be great!

Recently we've talked to a few members who have told us about when they served their mission back in the 70's and 80's, one served in Cali and said they had to memorize the "Mr. Brown discussions" and had to put stickers of Moroni and Joseph Smith on a board as they taught. It sounded strange that that’s what they did on their mish. Times have changed!

Dad, I wanna hear how your mission worked out and some things that have changed since you’ve served. I got a good kick about dad talking about golf season starting up. There’s this place in my area i serve called Kiln Creek, it’s this big utopian society  that has a golf course right in the middle of it, you should look it up. Anyways, whenever we go by it I think to myself "my dad would be on this course every single day"...one day we tried to take a shortcut by going across the course to the other side of Kiln Creek and got lost somehow. It’s a really hilly course and it destroyed our legs cause we had to bike across it.

Here’s something that gave me a good laugh last Monday. We were walking through Wal-Mart buying groceries and this guy in a motor shopping cart rounds the corner and almost hits us, he looks at us and shouts out "whoa! y'all are overdressed...Who are you guys?" he reads our tags and says "oh the Mormons." then he goes on about MoTab and a trip he took to SLC as a kid. But this guy had a green mustache.....I barely caught anything he said because of that green monstrosity, it was probably because St. Pattys day was the day before. But this guy started talking about how he works as a clown for his church....??? and on special occasions he even gets to go to church events as Peter Rabbit...hahaha...Walmart is the same everywhere you go! I’m excited to see what happens later today when we get groceries!

On Tuesday I went on an exchange with my Zone Leader Elder Garcia, he's from Kanab and knows the Robinsons. That was a cool connection we made. Elder Garcia is awesome. We talked to so many people that day. We found like 5 potentials so that’s good. I ripped this huge hole on my butt trying to get on my bike. The suit we bought online fits me the best but it rips every single day. I’ve had to stitch up the butt 2 times and both of the front pockets. It’ll be a miracle if this suit makes it 2 years. Anyways on Tuesday evening we were tracting and the last door we knocked on this lady opens and is like "oh! Mormon missionaries!" she started talking about how much she and her husband wanted to talk to us before. So we set up an R.A. for Thursday. This ladies name is Rachel and she's super Mormon, not to set a stereotype but she's friendly, plays the piano, and makes good desserts.

So on Thursday we go over to their home. Meet the husband David for the first time, and sit down. Rachel pours some water and gets us cobbler. We expected this to be a great teaching opportunity for me. Before we were able to say it David said he likes to start with a prayer. So that upped our spirits even more. We pray then to get into how to begin teaching. We say "we know our message is true" then David just starts BASHING us, total Bible belt bashing. It was insane. He started throwing out all these scriptures about how man has never seen God and how John the Baptist was the last prophet. I'm a pretty chill kid so I was keeping my cool. I didn’t know how to reply to anything though, and I need to do lots more studying! But Elder Brooks kept his cool too. And we had a member with us. I could tell Bro. McFarlane at times was ready to bust a cap. He’d get all red behind his ears when he got hyped up.

Anyways, we somehow got through the restoration. It took us 2 hours to do it though...Rachel has really good potential though. She’s willing to listen and agrees with the things we taught, especially how there's a prophet on the earth today. David mentioned at one point how John's the last prophet and there will never be another prophet and Rachel looked over at him like "what'd you just say?"

Here's one example of how desperate David was trying to break down everything we were teaching....we started talking about Moroni’s promise, Moroni 10:3-5. and in verse 4 it says "ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true" we all bore testimony of how we did what Moroni directed us to do and how we received that witness for ourselves then David says "hold up, all you guys said you prayed to know if it is true, that verse says to ask if it’s NOT true, so you did it wrong and that’s why your church is false"....me, my comp, Bro Mcfarlane and even Rachel looked at him like that made absolutely no sense. If you ask God if it is true, you'll get an answer "it is true"...if you ask God if it’s NOT true, you'll get an answer "it is true"....man....I get all heated up just thinking about everything he said in that lesson. Anyways, we think that Rachel will be a good investigator and David hopefully will settle down a bit so we are going to teach them again in April.

Just to clarify, we taught calmly and boldly the whole time so we could teach by the spirit :) David bashed the whole time!  

The past 2 days it's snowed pretty good! It was cool, I got a picture that I'll send, you can’t see how heavy the snow is falling though. They delayed school because of like 3 inches of snow....pansies haha.

I love all y'all! Hope everything’s doing good in Cache Valley. till next week!

--Elder Geddes

In honor of Mustache March.....

         Missionary stache