Jacob - February 20, 2017

Hey family, this week was good. We were able to find a few more people
to teach this week which was good, so little by little we are building
up a teaching pool again. We were able to try out a few new finding
ideas that seemed to work that involved us going to areas that had
zero records and trying to find the hispanic people in them. That was
probably where most of our efforts went this week, trying to find. I
can't recall of anything else. Just the normal stuff like District
Meeting and an exchange. But as you noticed in the title, today's
transfer day. I'm staying in garden Grove for transfer number 5 and my
comp is staying too. That also means that sometime during this
transfer I'll hit 1 year on bike, sort of crazy, but it's helped me
get fit and stay slim from all the tortillas I eat. Also this transfer
I am going to be a District Leader. I'm excited about it because all
the missionaries in the district are really great so I don't need to
worry about them too much. My only concern is trying to make sure that
I'm fulfilling my purpose as a connection between the Ward and the
District, fortunately our ward mission leader does a good job so as
long as we are working with him I think these will work out. Other
than that I'm not sure what more to say, to be honest this week was
just full of finding and not a ton of lessons... But we are meeting
tons of people daily, we might not be teaching official lessons, but
we are being sure to keep all of our contacts focused on the gospel,
so we are teaching when finding, and finding by teaching. Anyways
that's it for this week. I love you all, hope you have a great one!

Elder Baer

Jacob - February 13, 2017

Hey Family, sorry I'm not writing personal letters this week. We are doing a zone activity at a park and I don't know the next time we will have wifi, but also I write the same stuff to everyone anyways so it makes it easier and faster for me. But this week was pretty good. We may of not had the greatest week as far as numbers go, to be honest the last few weeks have been tough. We're just in a slump and trying to get out of it. We have a few investigators that we are trying to work with, but it's tough because they are really busy and hard to find. We don't have anyone solid at the moment that meets with us consistently. We've been doing a lot of finding and we are doing a good job at talking with everyone, hopefully with time we'll be able to find some cool people. But one thing that was cool this week is that we went out knocking with members. Not a ton showed up for the activity, but it was enough for what we needed. About 10 or so members showed up and went out with us to a pretty hispanic street that we have in our area. We got a bunch of potential investigators from it, but so far we haven't been able to teach many of those people. On the bright side it helped the members overcome their fears about sharing the gospel. I think that's what we were hoping for since knocking doors isn't the most effective way to do missionary work. Some of the sisters missionaries were mentioning that some of the member sisters started to share the gospel through social media after that activity so I think it brought a little more enthusiasm to the ward. Later this week we had a really good zone conference about the training that mission presidents received in preparation for the Missionary Broadcast this past month. We spoke on the topics of: The new schedule (ideas on how to best use it, since we have a little extra free time at night and morning), comp. studies, trying to teach the rising generation (studies show they are more receptive to the gospel), and lastly we watched elder bednar's segment of the training which talked a lot about repentance and how we can better teach it. That was really good. Later on in the week I went on an exchange with a zone leader over in his area, we spoke a little about consecration and we had a pretty good day of teaching. That night we had a session of Stake Conference which was mostly about the importance of teaching the coming generation the gospel. Elder Acosta (the area seventy) shared a scripture in Mosiah 26:1-4 about what the parents/kids could of done differently and it was an open discussion on that topic. It was interesting, but powerful. On Sunday we had another session of stake Conference and the topics of that one were sabbath day and setting our sights on the temple. It was good to, sort of felt like it was going on and on, but that's alright. Those were pretty much the highlights of the week. Love you all and hope you have a good one.


Elder Baer

Jacob - February 6, 2016

Jacob turned 20 yesterday!!!!

Hey mom, my birthday was good. I didn't tell many people about it, so
no one sang to me at church (thank goodness). I haven't baked my cake
quite yet, maybe tonight. But last night I had a good dinner with Hna.
Palacios. She made us tacos de pollo, chorizo, al pastor & carne
asada. Pretty simple, but really good. At the dinner they sang to me
and by chance the Hna cooked a cook the day before so I did end up
getting cake on my b-day. The ties were mas o menos, the solid color
one is good, the other one I'll probably only wear with a suit or
sweater, but thanks for sending them. Also we saw a member today at
downtown Disney, she took a picture of my comp and I and sent it to
you.
It's good to hear that you saw JaNeal, how is she doing? Sounds like
she has a pretty crazy job, I'm not sure what it would be like to be a
truck driver. Also I'm glad to hear you had a good time with john's
grandma. I tried to call grandma Ehlert this morning, but I think the
line got cut or something, I'll probably just try writing her a hand
written letter and call that good. Also sorry you missed church
yesterday, that's not fun.
This week was an ok week. We teach people, but it's been people that
haven't been progressing so that makes it tough. We weren't able to
find anyone new this week despite that we are talking with everyone.
So we are staying patient. Fortunately we are contacting people and
adding people to the potential investigator list so hopefully some of
them will become new investigators this week. Other than that though
there isn't much to report on our area. Tomorrow there will be a ward
activity where they will come to our area and knock doors. We are
excited because we believe it'll bring a lot of joy to the members and
help out our current situation. Also this week we had a zone meeting
about the spirit and our missionary purpose. That was a good meeting,
really edifying.
This week and the past few days I've been reading in the Book of
Mormon and also I've checked out some talks on the subject of
consecration, sacrifice and the sacrament. The other day I read a talk
by pres. Uchtdorf called "living the gospel joyful." I think it was a
talk to the sisters of the church, but I really liked his comments
about how the commandments are council from our Heavenly Father, they
shouldn't ever be looked as a to do list for if they are then they
lose their purpose. I read a different talk by him as well called "you
can do it now!" It was about rising up from weakness and despair. But
it spoke about making the goals of others, our goals as well. For
example let's say the stake president has the goal for us to be better
at home teaching. That goal would serve us so much more if we made it
our personal desire to do it rather than just pleasing the stake
president. Maybe we should look at the commandments with that same
mindset. That was just a little connection I made, didn't connect
those points during personal Study, but thanks for prompting mom think
about my studies a little more in depth. But I think this is it for
this week. Thanks mom, love you!

Elder Baer

Elder Bean and Elder Baer

Jacob - January 30, 2017

This week was super interesting. So last year, in January we got that worldwide broadcast about teaching Repentance and baptizing converts and this year we had another one that went more in depth into the topics that were shared last year. It was like watching a district meeting except it consisted of Apostles and General Authorities. Lot's of insights were shared which were super good, I really liked elder Bednar's comments and how we should always look at the gospel as one in Christ, rather than a step by step process. Lot's of good stuff. But they also shared some changes that apply to all missions. There is now a new daily schedule where daily planning is in the morning instead of night, so before personal study we plan. (That's the biggest change). Comp study can now be 30 minutes if we don't have a lot of lessons to plan for, same with language study. Trainers now only have 30 min to do 12 weeks. And at nights from 9:00-9:30 we write in journals and prepare for bed and from 9:30-10:30 we have the option of when we want to sleep. (My comp and I have been doing workouts at night, we are in a competition to see who will have the best abs after 30 days). Also the key indicators have been changed, there are now only four indicators that we report on which are "Confirmations," "New Investigators," "Investigators at Church," and lastly "Investigators with a Baptismal Date." It's pretty big changes since it's affected the way we do Daily Goals because we don't have to set goals for other lessons, member lessons, or RCLA lessons, but we still try and think about what we want to accomplish, we just set other types of goals instead. As far as my week went this week.. Well it was pretty similar to last week. We tried to find a bunch, but not a lot of people are open to us at the moment. But we are talking with everyone and doing our best to get the message out there. I'm confident that we'll find someone more interested soon. But i'm doing good, i just try to stay positive and patient in the work and just do my best when we are out and working.