Week 34

Low quality picture of a really high quality car!

Hi y'all!

How was everyone's st Patrick's day??

This week was great, but it definitely had its fair share of
disappointments. Jerry was a solid new investigator, but when we
showed up Tuesday morning for the lesson, he told us never to come
back. Then Tuesday night, per request of Elder Arnold last week, we
had to drop 2 of our eternigators, Sheena and Antonio. We are doing
everything we can to find new investigators!

Wednesday we had an awesome lesson with Danny, we brought a bunch of
kids from the Mission Prep class, and they did great! They all had to
put in their two cents, and it was a really long lesson, haha, but
Danny loved it. And we got him on date for baptism April 16th! So
that's the good news! The bad news is the phone call we got from him
this morning...he is having marriage issues and wants us to stop
lessons for a while until he gets stuff figured out.
(

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo) Its so dumb how once we start making
any progress with someone, Satan steps up his game. I wish our
investigators could see things from our perspective!

On he Bright side, we've been stepping up our finding efforts this
week, specifically with e members of the Ward. On Friday, we made a
TON of cookies and brought them to our investigators, recent converts,
and a few specific members and asked for referrals. Haha we thought a
little bribe might help ;) we had some success with that!

Friday night was the Agua Fria Ward st Patrick's party. It was a ton
of fun! Plus, we have SWEET members! A few people brought their
nonmember friends and introduced them to us, so we can start meeting
with them this week :)

Saturday and Sunday were stake conference. We had Elder Teh from the
70 come. It was awesome to hear from two GAs in two weeks! He shared
some cool things about simplifying and focusing on what's important.
President Griffin also spoke, it was a good meeting :)

That night, every single one of our appointments fell through, so we
decided to sit in on mission prep. It was great, but the best part was
after it was over. Brother Doyle, an older member of the Ward who also
came, decided to give us a ride in his wife's car, the batmobile. A
2016 Corvette Stingray, with lots of extra things that I don't know
what they mean. I guess you could say it was a good night :D

Also to note, we saw a wolf on the way home. A full grown white wolf
crossed the street right in front of us! So what's the smart thing to
do? Obviously flip a u-turn and follow him down the street. We
followed him with a flashlight through our window through the
neighborhood for a while (umm?), until he dissapeared into a field. It
was like something out of a sci-fi book! It was awesome :)

Spiritual thought! We sang hymn 43 in stake conference, and this line
really stood out to me!

     "In the furnace God may prove thee, thence to bring the forth more bright,
     But can never cease to love thee, thou art precious in his sight."

I know that God loves us more than we can imagine. Whatever we go
through, however hard it is, never EVER feel like he isn't there! He
knows exactly what we need, and he has so much in store for us. He
leads us along at the fastest pace we can handle, because he is a
perfect parent, and he knows how to best help us reach our eternal and
glorious potential. I love him so much :)

I hope you all have a fantastic Easter week!!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Pictures!!!

This is my desk in my new area!

My new comp- Elder Phipps

Knockin' Doors!

Week 33

Hello Everybody!! :)

The work goes on! Here's this week's highlights:

Finding! Finding new investigators, dropping old eternigators, and
building member missionary work! Elder Phipps got really sick the week
before I got here, and the work died down a little, so we're trying to
turn this place around. We have a lot to do, which keeps us busy :)
speaking of...

Sick! I got to spend all of Saturday in bed. Feeling a little under
the weather all week, and I guess it finally caught up with me. I
slept 18 hours in one day and it felt sooo good. I made it through 6
hours of church Sunday, but passed out when we got home. Feeling
better everyday, hopefully I'll be 100% by tomorrow :)

Mission Tour! Elder Arnold of the 70 came on Thursday, it was awesome!
He doesn't mess around, all of our eyebrows got a little singed. He
had some great advice about finding new investigators and becoming
better missionaries.

DANNY CAME TO CHURCH!! It was awesome! He loved it and really feels
like this is the right thing for him to be doing. We should get him on
a solid baptismal date this week :D

Spiritual thought: In 1 Nephi 17, the lord asks Nephi to build a ship.
I think it's really interesting the first thing he says in response.
He doesn't ask "why?" or "how?" or even "what should I do 
first?" He
asks [paraphrased] "where should I go to get ore, so that I can make
tools to build it with?" Then he makes a bellows and fire and the
tools and starts taking action to accomplish what the Lord asked him
to do. We see the same example with the Brother of Jared. The Lord
asks him what he thinks he should do to obtain light in the barges. He
exercises his faith and makes 16 small stones for the lord to touch
and make shine. Sometimes, our Heavenly Father doesn't tell us all we
need to do. He tells us the end goal, and he promises guidance, but he
expects us to use our agency to press forward in the best way we know
how. D&C 9:7-8 says this pretty clearly too. As we prayerfully and
wisely make our own path towards God's end goal, we show our faith,
earn the trust of God, and most importantly, become more like him.

Great Scott I hope you all have a great st. Patrick's day!

-Elder Wheeler

Week 32

Hiya!

How's the world outside of Arizona? Cuz this place is great!! I love
Prescott Valley, it's beautiful up here, the weather is perfect, and
the people are awesome! :) This week was still a little stressful and
weird... it takes a while to get used to new streets and names...but
I'm learning and it gets a little easier every day!

So a few big things happened this week:

1- our zone was asked to start biking more (I just got away from
that!) so we went and bought a really nice bike for Elder Phipps.
Biking here is a whole different story than the valley, there's less
light and no sidewalks and everything is either uphill or downhill.
Biking is nice because you get some fresh air, plus it's easier to
contact people along the way. But I love driving! You can get places
sooo much faster and fit so many more appointments into a day! But
president is inspired, and he says this will help our numbers, so
we'll do it :)

2- our zone set some pretty hefty goals for this month. We are doing
everything we can to find new investigators and get people to church,
and just the last few days the lord has put a few people in our path
that have a lot of potential! Setting goals with faith brings
miracles! :)

3- Danny. He was my first lesson in the area. He is super excited
about the church and keeps asking us for scriptures to read
(yessssss). He's been sick lately and hasn't been able to make it to
church, but hopefully this Sunday he will!

4- we put Aiden on date for baptism! We planned to teach his grandma
Debbie about baptism, but the spirit took control of the lesson, and
we ended up putting him on date for April 9th! I love when that kind
of stuff happens in a lesson, it just helps my testimony that Heavenly
Father is mindful of us.

5- service! Like every day this week! We raked leaves, moved rocks,
put up shelves, moved bigger rocks, dug ditches, painted a house, cut
down trees, and have just as many service projects planned for next
week. It keeps us busy and is fun :)

6- this morning on our way to the park for exercise, we almost got
sprayed by a skunk! I saw it just as it put its butt up in the air and
I've never seen Elder Phipps run so fast!! #closeencounters

I wanted to share a spiritual thought with you guys: so I was reading
in Jacob 7 about how Sherem tries to make Jacob doubt his testimony.
There were a lot of other people who were deceived, but Jacob wasn't.
He had a foundation in the scriptures and in the Holy Ghost, so when
temptation came up, his testimony was strong enough. Especially in
these last days, there are a lot of things that try to deceive us, and
there are many more to come. Satan is a smart guy, and if we don't
have a strong foundation in the scriptures, and a strong testimony of
the Holy Ghost, we will be deceived. It's sooo important for us to
study the scriptures, because that's how we receive revelation. That's
how we feel the Holy Ghost. We can't be deceived if we learn to
recognize God's voice :)

I love all of you guys! I hope you have a great week :)
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 31

Hiya :)

My new area is awesome! I'm up north in Prescott Valley with Elder
Phipps, over the Agua Fria and Mingus Foothills wards. The members are
awesome and gave me a really warm welcome. We get to drive everywhere,
and the temperature is perfect all day. It feels like I'm back in
Idaho! Also, my roommates Elder Tribe and Elder Hedrick are really
good cooks, so we all pool our money together and eat like kings every
day. We're grilling steaks for dinner tonight! So um yeah, I like it
here :)

This week was a little crazy, I was trying to get all settled in and
learn my way around. It's so much quicker to learn an area when you
can drive! I love how open it is here :) we actually took our bikes
out for some contacting a few nights ago, just because it was so nice
out. Video to come

We had some really good lessons this week too! Once I get our
investigators' names down, I'll tell you more about them :) haha also
did a lot of service, painting walls and packing uhauls and moving
rocks. We're staying busy, which makes the time go fast!

I don't have a ton of time, so this is goodbye for now. Hope y'all
have a great week!

-Elder Wheeler :)

Weeks 29 & 30

Hi :)

Did you guys watch the game last night? Yeah so did all of
Glendale...haha last night was wayyy slow. We were really hoping the
Cardinals would make it to the Super Bowl the year we served here! We
were all excited and ready to go buy Super Bowl shirts...

This week went fast!

We are now official Arizonians (pretty sure that's a word). We spent 3
hours Tuesday morning on top of a 20 foot ladder picking oranges, and
the rest of the day picking thorns out of our arms. Haha it was crazy,
but homegrown oranges and grapefruit are worth it!

Max is a less active kid in our Ward who just turned 8. We've been
working with him for a while to get him ready for baptism, and on
Saturday he was baptized! It's awesome to see people come to Christ,
whether it's introducing them to Christ, or bringing them back :)

Also, it's warming up! 80 degrees feels nice now, but we're not
excited about what's coming...

Other than that, this week was kinda disappointing...we had a couple
solid (or so we thought) investigators tell us to stop visiting, and
not a lot of progress with our other investigators. Just one of those
weeks I guess :P

I hope you all have a great week!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 28

Hi :)

Did you guys watch the game last night? Yeah so did all of
Glendale...haha last night was wayyy slow. We were really hoping the
Cardinals would make it to the Super Bowl the year we served here! We
were all excited and ready to go buy Super Bowl shirts...

This week went fast!

We are now official Arizonians (pretty sure that's a word). We spent 3
hours Tuesday morning on top of a 20 foot ladder picking oranges, and
the rest of the day picking thorns out of our arms. Haha it was crazy,
but homegrown oranges and grapefruit are worth it!

Max is a less active kid in our Ward who just turned 8. We've been
working with him for a while to get him ready for baptism, and on
Saturday he was baptized! It's awesome to see people come to Christ,
whether it's introducing them to Christ, or bringing them back :)

Also, it's warming up! 80 degrees feels nice now, but we're not
excited about what's coming...

Other than that, this week was kinda disappointing...we had a couple
solid (or so we thought) investigators tell us to stop visiting, and
not a lot of progress with our other investigators. Just one of those
weeks I guess :P

I hope you all have a great week!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 27

Hello! Sorry this is being sent out late, the wifi at our office
stopped working and we had to get dressed and go somewhere else to
send this...

This week flew by! A lot of finding and a lot of lessons! Also a lot
of coming home exhausted, struggling through nightly planning, and
passing out by 9:45...

Tuesday we helped Shorty move...we had mixed feelings about that. It's
been so cool to see him come so far, but it was sad to hand him off to
other missionaries.

Thursday was Zone Conference! Good discussions, and I got to lead part
of one. It was scary, but cool at the same time :)

I don't really have much else to add, I'm almost out of time.
 I hope you all have a great week! "Feast upon the word", there's some
cool things to learn from the scriptures!

-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 26

This week was great!

We've been ALMOST hitting standards for he past few weeks, but no
matter how hard we tried we couldn't put anyone on a solid date for
baptism, or get anyone to come to church. So, we decided to make a
special effort this week to be STRICTLY obedient. Not that we weren't
already obeying the rules, but this week we really focused on being
out the door exactly on time and getting to bed by exactly 10:30 and
little things like that. And guess what?? We had an awesome week!!

Good news: We got Kohonna and her son Dante on date for baptism!
Bad news: it's not until the first week of May. I probably won't be here...
She and her Boyfriend Ray work for some tax place, so they are too
busy to get married until after tax season is over...but at least we
have a date to work towards :)

Remember Shorty? The homeless guy who we visited over Christmas, and
who our Ward Council didn't think we should worry about? Well guess
who came to Church yesterday?!? It was awesome! He loved it, and he's
been reading the Book of Mormon and he has a ton of questions!
#soontobebrothershorty? #ithinkso

We had a bunch of good lessons this last week. Hopefully we will be
able to finally put Luis and his family on date for baptism this week,
and we have some new solid investigators, Bania and Jesse.

I also finished the Book of Mormon again yesterday. Moroni's promise
is so true, and I encourage all of you to give it a try no matter how
strong your testimony is :)

I hope you all have a great week! :)
-Elder Wheeler

Week 25

This week was great! I still can't believe I've already been out 6 months!!! 

 Thank you to everybody who wished me a Happy Birthday! We had a few
awesome members take care of us, and it was an awesome Birthday :)

Not a ton to tell this week, it was pretty uneventful. We had a few
good lessons, and some fun splits with the zone leaders on Saturday.
Our zone got 3 new faces last week, all cool guys. Also In my lunch
hour I've been learning how to juggle and how to speak Spanish. I
dunno, maybe they'll come in handy someday, haha.

I don't have a ton of time to write, but I hope you all have an
AWESOME week! Love and miss you all :)
-Elder Wheeler

Week 24

Hiya everybody! :)

This week was great. It went by wayyy fast though!
Highlights:

Wednesday: we ran into the worst bible basher I think I've ever met.
This guy relentlessly fired question after question at us for almost
an hour, trying to stump us and destroy our testimonies. But we arent
just any stumpable missionaries. We are Elder Wheeler and Elder
Conover. We held our ground! Haha seriously though, he wasn't even
listening to our answers, so all we could do was bear testimony and
invite him to pray about it.

Friday: president took our zone to the temple and then to breakfast as
a reward for contacting over 1800 people in December. It was pretty
awesome. I've been really lucky with how often I've been able to go to
the temple since my mission.

Saturday: exchanges with Elder Bradley and Elder Davenport. Really fun
and I learned a lot. Also, Elder Davenport came to our area with Elder
Conover. While they were crossing the crosswalk, a car wasn't paying
attention and clipped the back of Elder Davenport's bike (my bike)
going probably over 25mph. He walked away without a scratch and my
tire was just a little bent. He should have been thrown into the
intersection and be in the hospital right now, but he's perfectly
fine. The Lord watches over his missionaries :) #tendermercies

Sunday: awesome lesson with our new investigator Josh. Sadly, he is
YSA age, so we will probably have to turn him over to those elders...

Hope you all have a great week!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 23

Hi guys! I hope you all had a happy holiday season...because we are so
ready for it to be over!! Haha nobody wants to meet with the
missionaries during the holidays, and I miss doing missionary work!
This week was just a little slow, that's all...

It was fun though! In a non missionary kind of way. We had both New
Year's Eve and Day off, so we had some good studies, did a crazy
intense workout in the gym, reorganized our apartment, and bought a
spikeball set! Spikeball is so much fun and were getting really good
at it!

We mostly just contacted some referrals (not much to show for it) for
the first part of the week. Also got a nasty flat tire on Elder
Conover's bike (I swear that bike hates us), which slowed us down for
a while.

BUT, on the bright side! We had an awesome day exchange with the zone
leaders on Saturday! I went with Elder Gardner, and Elder Stott came
to our area with Elder Conover. It was awesome to catch up with my old
roommate and to get some really good advice about training. We also
had a super cool experience when we were with Dallin from the YSA
ward! It went something like this:

Gardner: hey so we need to find this referral. Her name's Delfina. We
have an apartment complex address, but not the apartment number. Let's
pray to find her, or whoever else the Lord wants us to find.

Wheeler: definitely. I can pray for us. *prays with much faith*

Dallin: I'm thinking of the number 131. Let's look for it.

*we walk around the complex, don't find it*

Gardner: hmm, let's talk to that family over there on the bench. "Hi,
would you guys like a picture of Jesus?"

Family: yes

Wheeler: "can we say a prayer with you guys?"

Family: yes

Dallin: do you know a Delfina?

Family: yes. I'm Delfina. Why?

Wheeler: (in my mind) Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah the church is true!!!

We taught them a lesson and got their address and set up a return
appointment and now they have a new investigator! Tender mercies are
so awesome :) So yeah, that was kind of a highlight of my week!

Yesterday our sacrament meeting time changed to 9:00am which is
awesome. But now we have other meetings that start at 7:00am which is
less awesome...haha. It was nice though, we had a full day to work
after church. We had a good lesson with Luis and his parents and are
ever so slowly progressing them towards baptism :)

We should be having a baptism in a few weeks for Kohonna and her son Dante!

Other than that, not much to report. Just that I love training Elder
Conover and our ward is awesome and I'm excited for the holidays to be
over! x)

I hope y'all have a great week!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 22

This week was awesome!

First of all, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas! We did :) skyping
home was so cool! See, I got lucky, I've been out almost 6 months and
this is my first of four calls home. Elder Conover's only been out
about 5 weeks, so he still remembered what his family looked like. Now
he's only got 3 calls left. Haha

Because it was Christmas week, most people didn't want to meet for a
lesson. But we did some fun service and contacted a few cool people :)

Tuesday was cool, we did service and had a video conference call from
the church with all of the training companionships in the mission. We
came straight from service, so we didn't even have time to change out
of our service clothes. We just threw white shirts and ties over our
clothes and set the video to only show from our waist up. Haha it was
pretty awesome.

Wednesday was just a TON of contacting, aka doors being slammed in our
face...but then we had a cool lesson that night! We stopped by
Kohanna's house to offer her a blessing because she's been feeling
sick and hasn't been able to meet with us lately. (I think I've talked
about her before. She's an investigator with a lot of potential, but
isn't planning on getting married to her boyfriend until next fall) We
showed up and I was able to give her a really neat blessing. Then, Ray
(her member boyfriend) steps outside with us and tells us that she
really wants to be baptized and they have decided to get married in
like 3 weeks! They're gonna get baptized soon!!! We are so pumped!!

Christmas Eve was sweet. We were supposed to stay home unless we had
scheduled lessons. Well we had scheduled lessons, so we bought a bunch
of cookies to bring to them. But then everybody cancelled and we were
stuck at home with a bunch of cookies. So we called up the District
leader and we hung out with them in our apartment and ate all of the
cookies :)

We also had Christmas off, so we spent almost the whole day at the
institute building, playing ping pong and pool and air hockey and
foosball and all sorts of board games with the zone. It was sweet!

So then Saturday rolls around, and we're both a little trunky from
skyping home, and nobody wants to meet the day after Christmas. So we
decide to go visit Shorty, the homeless guy. We got some money for
Christmas, and Elder Conover had an awesome idea. We bought a shirt
and some sweats, walked him to the laundromat, and had him change
while we washed his clothes for him. It ended up taking a few hours,
but we had fun getting to know him a little bit and sharing Mormon
message videos with him on our iPads. He was so genuinely grateful,
and asked us to leave him with a prayer. It made the whole thing worth
it when he tearfully asked us to come back and share our whole message
with him. I don't know if this can actually lead to a baptism, ya
know, because he doesn't have a car, house, or job, and he has a
drinking problem...haha but I'm glad we were able to help him out! :)

Aaaaand for all my choir friends out there...yesterday I sang in
sacrament meeting! Sister Godfrey is the ward music director and found
out I was in choir and finally convinced me to do it. Haha I sang a
cool arrangement of Teach Me To Walk in the Light. It reminded me how
much I miss choir :)

And that about sums up my week! I hope you all had a great Christmas
and have a Happy New Year!! :D

-Elder Wheeler :)

Merry Christmas

Thank you so much everyone for the ornaments!

Merry Christmas everybody!!

Hope you all had a great week! We just finished a zone bowling
tournament, and now we're doing a district ping pong tournament in the
institute building. Yeah, it was a fun day :)

Great week too! Most people don't want to meet this close to
Christmas, but we did a lot of contacting and have a lot of people to
meet with in 2 weeks! Haha

On Friday our mission got to go see the Mesa Temple lights! We also
got to go through a session and then president treated us all to
dinner! It was really fun, and I got to see Elder Flynn again :)

Saturday we did exchanges, and I got to spend the day with Elder
Davenport! We counted 129 people contacted, and gave out SOOO many
pass along cards. 'Tis the season to be contacted by the missionaries,
haha.

Other than that, not a ton to tell. We're super excited for Christmas! :)

I hope you all have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 20 (Woah)

Hi!!

{moment of reflection} I can't believe the words 'week' and '20'
already made it into the subject bar of my email!!! Woah. Like, I can
still vividly remember stressing over my math final last spring. But
then I think back over everything I've learned in 20 weeks (plus 12
days in the MTC) and I feel wayyy old. {reflection over}

Anyway, how was everybody's week? Are you getting excited for
CHRISTMAS???? *pause for crowd reaction* ...cuz I am!! :D haha most
Christmas music is about the savior, and therefore approved, so we
play it in our apartment pretty much 24/7! :)

This week was awesome! And a little crazy. We spent a long time
tracking down Elder Conover's bike...our mission office just moved,
and in the worst possible timing of things, it got lost somewhere
along the way. So we had to call around to other missionaries and the
office had to call his mom and we finally got a tracking number and
traced it back to the FedEx warehouse 45 mins away where we had to get
a ride from the zone leaders and then bring it back and assemble it.
It's a really nice bike, and we were both really excited to have it up
and working...until we put one of the pedals on wrong and it
completely stripped the crank (the thing broke the other thing). So we
have to go order a new one today and use someone else's bike for a few
weeks. Haha I guess Lehi knew what he was talking about. 2 Nephi 2:11

Do you guys remember Luis? He was the 13 year old kid that stopped me
and elder Flynn on our way home and asked us about God. We met him
like 3 months ago, and he kinda fell off the face of the earth for a
while, but we met and had a great lesson! Literally a picture perfect
lesson, complete with good questions, solid testimonies, and the
spirit! And Elder Conover did so good!! I'm so proud of my little
trainee :,)

On Sunday we helped teach sharing time, super fun! Then that night we
went contacting and met a nice homeless guy named shorty, a scary
tattooed lady who very excitedly warned the whole street we were a
cult, a music teacher named Josh who has a lot of potential, and a lot
of other interesting people. Haha I love Glendale x)

Not much else to tell, just a lot of referrals and contacts this week!
Everybody wants to talk about the savior this time of year I guess :)
#tistheseason

Merry Christmas everybody!! Enjoy your winter coats :P
-Elder Wheeler :)

Week 19

Three Generations

Hi guys!

Say hello to my new companion Elder Conover!! He is from Bentonville
Arkansas, and he is FRESH out of the MTC. He's a 2 time state champion
wrestler, a beast at ping pong and racquetball, a spiritual giant, and
an all around awesome guy, and I'm stoked to be his trainer!

I hope you all had a great week! This week was a little slow for
us...we had a ton of lessons planned, but most of them cancelled. Kind
of a bummer for Elder Conover's first week, haha but he got some
really good practice with tracting and contacting!

Elder Flynn was transferred to the Surprise stake. ...Surprise! (He's
sick of that joke)

Good news: we had AiYanna's baptism Saturday! It was a really cool
meeting and a really spiritual experience! Elder Flynn came back down
to baptize her, so that was cool to see him again :)

Spiritual thought: in church yesterday we watched a really good talk
from president Uchtdorf in the 2010(?) Christmas devotional. There's a
lot of things that distract us or can stress us out about the
Christmas season, as I'm sure you all know. But I'm sure you also know
the real reason for the season. Make sure this Christmas, that you
take a step back and thank Heavenly Father for his gift to us :)

Sorry I don't have a ton to write about. I love you all!
Have a FANTASTIC week!

-Elder Wheeler :)