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