Hello Everyone

This week has been alright. We didn’t have the car this week so we walked the first part of the week then the snow cleared a little bit so we biked the rest of the week. Our pants and jackets got pretty muddy from the murky water we had to go through and now almost all the snow is gone and it’s almost 60 here. Mid West weather is so crazy… my comp and I are doing great and the ward is pretty good and really small but the bishop is awesome. He has been trying a lot to help us out to increase our teaching pool which is awesome. He’s inviting this part member family over to their house next Monday and is also going to ask if they would be interested in having us share our message with them and if the say yes he’ll invite us over there too so we’ll see what happens with that. The area is slowly getting better and for the most part we are being fed well.

Transfers are this week so well see what happens. I think my comp and I will stay but we’ll see

Elder Birch

Hello Everyone

It looks like Elder Shurtz and I are staying together for another 6 weeks which should be fun.

On Friday we were out and about and we tried everyone that we had planned to see so we looked up some unknown members of our ward. We found one that was pretty close and went to try him. He wasn’t there (we think he moved) so we tried some of the doors around his place and like a door or two down from him this lady answered and said right now isn’t a good time but to come back tomorrow so we left and the next day we went back to try her. We were pretty sure that she was going to tells us no thank you but when we knocked on the door she let us in and we started to talk then Elder Shutrz said we are missionaries and she said oh I know I’ve meet with you guys before, it’s been about 2 years since the last time I’ve meet with you guys and before that I’ve meet with you guys for about 4 years and then she started to list a lot of missionaries that I knew and Elder Shutrz remembered that when he was on exchanges with the APs on of them who severed down here wanted to try this lady but she had moved and the elders didn’t know where she went . she has the Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Perl of Great Price, and a Gospel Doctrine book and today when we met with the bishop he was really excited to hear that we found her because her only two problems about being baptized was she worked on Sundays and she didn’t have a car/driver license but now she doesn’t work Sundays and she’ll be getting her license next week so that is really exciting for us and the ward so that has been the miracle for this week.

Oh and I got the package in right when I ran out of meds so perfect timing. Oh and thank you for rainbows and gold 😛

Elder Birch

Hello,

This week has been crazy we got a lot of snow Wednesday and Thursday and we were told not to go out basically Wednesday evening through Friday because of how bad it was. We got about 14 inches. There hasn’t been this much snow since 1961 so that’s cool but after a while of being stuck in our apartment we started to get really restless then on Friday night we were told about the mission splitting. It is happen July 1 so I might be here when it happens and get to serve in two different missions which will be cool. We weren’t able to get a lot of missionary work done this week so our numbers kind of sucked and there is supposed to be another storm coming today and tomorrow which will add another 10 inches on what we already got so that will be fun….. Other than all that nothing else too exciting has happened.

Elder Birch

P.S. Our mission president told us to get all our p-day stuff done before the storm then we could do studies after. It has been crazy here on of the days we were sooooo board of studying and so was our district leader that we walked over to their place so we could at least study together and play board games. It was about a 30 or 40 min walk normally and it took about an hour and waded through a ton of snow but we made it and it made the day a little better.

Hello Everyone

This week went ok nothing too exciting happened last week. Although today we had interviews with President Keyes and they went great. President told me how proud he is of me and how much I have grown since he first met me and that was nice to hear.

The ward is pretty cool some of the members are in the Air Force and the ward mission leader is in the Air Force and his name is Bro. Stark. I thought it was kind of funny. The bishop is really awesome. We meet with him almost every Monday morning to talk about how things are going and what the ward can do to help and yesterday he asked us what the ward can do to help increase our teaching pool and I mentioned something that my last area did. It was to have the members think of five names of friends or family, write them on a 3X5 note card and pray for them and to pray to help them to have a missionary opportunity with them every morning and night and the bishop really liked the idea and told us to talk to our WML and we could use this month first presidency talk to introduce it so we’ll see what happens.

Elder Shurtz and I are getting along great last night after planning and stuff we had some of this Styrofoam paper stuff and we decided to make airplanes out of it and that was pretty fun. His broke because it flew into the ceiling then the wall and then snapped in half but mine has managed to survive and a couple of nights before that we were a little hungry and we have this cool grill thing on our stove so we roasted hotdogs over it so we have been lots of fun together and working hard too I guess :P.

Well that’s all for this week, write you all next week.

Elder Birch

Hello Everyone

This week was good and bad we had 20 lessons this last week which hasn’t happened in a while and elder Shurtz is pretty awesome he is very enthusiastic but hasn’t been able to really learn effective missionary tricks. His first comp was going home that transfer and the his second transfer he was training for two then he had a comp who didn’t want to work so he is happy to have someone like me especially yesterday our most solid investigator got “antied” and now doesn’t want to meet with us and the rest of the day he was just down because almost every solid investigator he has had been “antied” and dropped him so he was just down and I was able to help hum out and told him some of my experiences and what helped me and kind of eased off working because he was having a hard time focusing but today he seems better. So now our area is down to about 2 or 3 people in our teaching pool. This week we are on bikes/foot so hopefully we will find more people that have been prepared

Oh and this transfer is going to be a 5 week transfer to accommodate all the new missionaries. Oh and I’ve also kept forgetting to say that when I was still in KC we were on exchanges and after we taught this one lesson that just went downhill quick something clicked for me and now it has been a TON easier to talk to people and teach. It has been great and especially now that I have to take the lead and show ways to do things like street contacting and tracting.

Oh and I did get the meds and thank you for the hearts as well

Well write you all next week

Elder Birch

Hello everyone,

Yea so I’m in Wichita now it is REALLY different from Kansas city its really flat and windy and not so condensed of a city. My new comp is elder Shurtz. He is from Centerville UT. He’s been out for about 6 months so this is my first time being with a comp with a lot less experience. It has been nice. My new address is 505 N Rock Rd, apt 111, Wichita KS. The area has been struggling because of a string of not very hard working missionaries and Elder Shurtz has only been here from one transfer and so we are both really excited to get to work here. The bishop is awesome. He is from Australia and we meet with him every Monday morning to talk about the area and they make us breakfast so that is cool. The ward doesn’t have a lot of active members but the roster has a lot of names on it so we have been helping out cleaning up the roster. Well I hope I’ll have more to talk about next week until then, see ya.

Elder Birch

Hello

This week I learned that Elder Armantrout is going to be training which means that I am going to be transferred and you can send the med to the mission office and they will send it to me sometime. Transfers are this Thursday morning.

This week and been kind of a bummer we couldn’t really get in with anyone that we found last week and we just had a hard time finding anyone.

On Saturday we had dinner with the person from Nigeria that we baptized and she made us tofu and some kind of really good soup that had chicken and beef and smoked catfish also mixed with some curie it was really really good we had to use our fingers though and that felt weird but it was still a really good night,

It feels weird that I’m leaving this area after so long I’ve almost been in this area three times as long as any other area I’ve been in.

The weather here is acting so crazy right now its supposed to get up to high 60 or even in the 70 and by Wednesday or Thursday it is supposed to get down to low 30s and high 20s. I’m loving how consistent the weather is here in the Midwest…

It’s crazy to how much snow you guys have gotten there and even a little ice storm ever since I’ve been in the Midwest we have had pretty crappy winters.

Elder Birch

Hello Everyone,

this week was really good we didn’t have the car this week so we did a lot of finding because our teaching pool was really small and we set a goal of finding 10 new investigators and we went out we did a lot of street contacting we found a lot of people though the bus stops and while we were on the buses and we were able to find 10 new investigators and we taught 28 lessons it has been a great week and the lord really has blessed us this week

Last Tuesday the mission got a message for our President Keys taking about what the prophet said about hasting the work how the age change was only part of it and how it applies to us too and how we need to do what we can to hasten our on work and this week we went out with that in mind we believe that is why God has blessed us this week.

And next week is transfers so we’ll see what happens I’m pretty sure that I am getting transferred though but who knows and I did see that elder from our stake on transfer day his first day out he might still be in the Lanexa area that’s where he was last

Elder Birch

Hello Everyone

This week was pretty good and got a lot of media referrals and the best part of that was this almost all of them actually new that the got referred or referred themselves which almost never happens so with that alone made this week pretty good toward the end of this month we have a general authority touring our mission I forget his name but it’s something Spanish so that’s exciting

We haven’t got that much snow here and what we do get is usually gone by the end of the week which is sometimes a bummer but I don’t mind it too much when we don’t have the car although it has been really cold the past couple of days.

Well nothing else too exciting has happened this last week.

Elder birch