elderjacksonmcmullan.blogspot.com

 Monday December 28, 2020 We took a few pics of Elder McMullan while talking to him on Christmas day.  (It was so AWESOME talking to him and seeing his handsome face!) Also, a member sent us these pics of the Elders opening their gifts she spoiled them with on Christmas morning. :) 

 Monday December 28, 2020 What's up everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas! It's pretty much the best time of the year because most people are pretty jolly. I'll give you a rundown of what our Christmas day looked like. So basically our President told us not to bother anyone on Christmas so they can have their family time. Unless we had something pre-scheduled then we could go. In the morning we went to a members house and had breakfast and opened a ton of gifts. All of the gifts she got us was food so that was much appreciated haha. Then after her house,  we pretty much had nothing. We had dinner at 2 and came home at like 3 ish and then the day was basically just chill. We had 3 movies that were approved to watch and so we watched those with the other Elders in our house.  The best thing we did on Christmas was that I made some mega brownie thing. One of the members gave us a recipe to make so we did. It was in a 9x13 pan that we put cookie dough at the bottom, ...

 

 Monday December 21, 2020 Merry Christmas y'all!  This email is going to be short but it's ok. Basically we have Sarah ready for baptism this week and her son Daray said that he needs more time to be ready. They are both super solid so I think it will all work out. Then we found 3 new people this week. They are all super elect! Pretty soon we could have 3 more people on date. All 3 of them are member referrals. That's basically how we find new people is through the members. So everyone reading this, tell your missionaries about anyone that you think could use the Gospel because that's pretty much the only way we can find new people nowadays. At least here in Mesa that is. Things are going super good! Not much else to say. Today is a busy p-day so I gotta bounce. Love y'all I'll talk to you later! Pics: 1. A member gave us Christmas Story pajamas. Pretty dope 2. My district 3. Elder Pulsipher and this super dope kid named DeAngelo 

 Monday December 14, 2020 Hello everyone! How was everyone's week? Everything is doing great over here. Nothing is super exciting or crazy over here. We are still working with our 2 people on date, Sarah and Daray. Sarah is still trying to overcome her Word of Wisdom issue so her date got pushed back a little. Daray said he needs more time so we have to talk with him and see what's going on. BUT, both of their dates will have to get pushed back even more because they are in quarantine because they tested positive for Covid. We came in contact with them the day before they tested positive, so we also got put in quarantine. It was only for three days with us though. The nurses said that if at the end of three days we didn't have symptoms then we would be good to go, and that's exactly what happened. We are out of quarantine now and feeling fine so it's all good.  Last night we had a ward drive thru thing. The wards aren't allowed to do an actual party so one of th...

 Monday December 7, 2020 Aayyoooo. What's up everybody. I'm out here serving English now and it's so fun! I miss Spanish because the people are always fun and it's a cool culture, but I also now get the ability to speak what I want and actually have a clue on what's going on haha. Our ward is super cool! We have a great ward and there's tons of work to do. We have a new Ward mission Leader and he's pretty baller. One difference from this area and from my last area is that we actually have investigators! My last area we were just working a lot with members, but here we actually have people on date. So Sarah is someone we are teaching and she is on date for the 19th. She was supposed to get baptized this week but she had some issues with the Word of Wisdom. So please pray for Sarah when you can! We are also teaching a girl named Gemma. She is doing great and she is so ready for baptism. The only problem is that she lives with her boyfriend so she can't be ...

 Monday November 30, 2020 What is up everybody!! I hope everything is going good with y'all! Everything out here is going great! Thriving out here in the Spanish zone. We did another one of those battle for the cactus things and our zone one again. (dubs) So my win percentage so far is about a 60 something percent so I'm practically unbeatable haha. Speaking of Zones, I will be switching zones next transfer (tomorrow) to an English zone! I'm super excited to go English and see the difference between a Latino branch and a English ward and how they function differently. Right now I'm out in AJ (Apache Junction). I'm Spanish speaking out here, but now I'm just switching to English speaking in AJ. So I'm staying in the same house Haha. I'm just moving down the hallway to stay with the English Elders there. I will still be living with Elder Leakehe, but we will only ever see each other in the house. Elder Call is headed to be the Zone leader of the other Span...

 Monday November 23, 2020 What's up everybody!! How are y'all doing? I hope you all are doing great on this Thanksgiving week!  Nothing to crazy happened this week. Every transfer you have an interview with the Mission President and in my interview he told me that he's leaning towards sending me to English for a little so that they can rotate some other people into Spanish. Which makes sense so I'm not upset about it. I'm excited to go English if that's the case. Transfers are next week so we will see what happens!  Once again we are still working hard on the members and we don't really have anyone new to teach. Last night we did call this guy named Steven that we talked to like a month ago. We talked to him like a month ago in a Walmart parking lot and he asked us for a Book of Mormon, so we gave him a call last night. He's a super cool guy and super religious. He loves the Bible and loves God and he basically preached a sermon to us on the phone haha. ...

 Monday November 16, 2020 Hello everyone!  Everything is great over here in AJ! Nothing too exciting this week. We are just working hard with the members and helping then realize that when they work with us we can do more. Not gonna lie but our Branch isn't helping us out to much when it comes to missionary work so we are trying to help them understand that the members are a big part in the gathering of Israel. Make sure you guys are doing your part as well in your wards and helping gather Zion! This isn't the work alone of the missionaries, but rather it's a team effort! In fact the members could do a better job than the missionaries can. A lot of people view the missionaries as "robots" and scary people. This is why members are so important. People can be more receptive to a member or "normal person" than they are to a missionary. Anyways what I'm trying to say is that members are HUGE. There was a talk that I read a couple days ago called "Pu...

 Monday October 9, 2020 Hola a todos! Had to flex my Spanish there lol.  Welp sad times for the country as Biden took a fat dub. All the members were keeping us updated so we found out pretty quick. Honestly I don't care that much to be honest cause the longer I've been out here the more I've realized that whoever the President is doesn't really matter. As long as we follow God's plan for us we will be just fine in the end. Even though things can be hard and not going our way, God always has a plan so all is well! Heard there was a vaccine coming soon? (thx dad) Hopefully that can help clear some things up.  Everything out here is going good. We are stilling grinding with the members. We don't really have anyone we're teaching. Martha talked to us finally and just said that she wants to take things little by little. We don't know what that means, but I guess she's not ready for baptism yet. Nothing was too exciting this week. Member work isn't th...

 Monday November 2, 2020 Good week this week! Nothing was too exciting. Martha once again started to ignore us haha. It's really weird because she called us and told us how bad she wanted to change and she's ready to move forward. Then when we pass by her house she always hides and her kids tell us she's "busy". So ya that's how that's going right now. We're just going to wait and give her time I think.  Also I led my first lesson this week. I'm not afraid to lead a lesson, but my only fear is that when I say something I just have no idea what they said back, so they could have just said someone died and I'm all like "oh ok cool well I have a scripture about sacrament". Other than that my Spanish is coming along. Not good yet, but when it comes to speaking about the Gospel I can say what I want, then when we talk about anything else it's over haha. I just know with time I'll be able to understand more and more.  We had zone co...

 Monday October 26, 2020 Sorry this email is going to be pretty short, I didn't have a lot of time today...but all is well! This was a great week! We had transfers on Tuesday and me and Elder Call have a new comp! His name is Elder Leakehe. He's my new trainer now that Elder Stepan is out. He is really fun. Super energetic and out going. Just a really great guy to be around. He's from Tongan descent so he's got the island vibes. He doesn't speak Tongan, but he's super cool.  Nothing was super cool this week. We are just working hard with the members. Also, Martha is back! She stopped talking to us like a week ago, but then called us and told us that she wants to be baptized and start a new life! We still need to have more lessons with her and set a new date. Hopefully all goes well. Everything out here is good, nothing too exciting. Transfer week is pretty slow. I played volleyball today and spike ball which was really fun. Also I don't know what it's li...

 Monday October 12, 2020 Hello everyone! How's it goin? Everything here in Mesa is going well. This week went by really quick and I can't remember everything that happened. I'll start off with our "amigos". I'm pretty sure I've already told you guys about Martha and how we have her on date for baptism. Basically she is still going strong and we don't need to do much with her other than just meet with her every other day to keep her on track. We just go over a few simple things every now and then. Then with Gerardo he is still iffy. He still hasn't accepted baptism, but he's getting closer. We're teaching him the commandments to let him know what exactly he needs to keep and also we're bringing members from our branch to make friends with him so that he is more comfortable. He is still going good he just is taking longer than we expected.  Also another cool thing is now we're allowed to go street contacting! We are allowed to knock o...

 Monday October 5, 2020 Hello everyone!! Awesome week this week!! I was super excited for General Conference this week. It's crazy how your perspective on things change when you're out on a mission. Before my mission General Conference honestly was more of a burden to me because I felt like I could've got more time to sleep in, or had more time to hangout with my friends or something. Now that I'm out here and focused on the right things, my appreciation for the Prophet and the Apostles and any other leader of the church has gone up exponentially. Listening to their talks is the closest we can get to God other than receiving personal revelation for ourselves. It was so great to hear the words of them this weekend! I'll talk more about conference a little later, but for now I'll talk about our progressing people. So last week I said Alex and Gerardo were our 2 best people, but since then we've dropped Alex, and we are still teaching Gerardo. We dropped Alex b...

 Monday September 28, 2020 Wassup!! Ok this week was pretty crazy so this might be a long one haha.  So basically I'll just start off with our interested people. So for Gerardo, we invited him to be baptized twice this week, but he said no both times, only because he said he needs to think more about it which is understandable. But he did come to church yesterday so that was cool! Church here is still over zoom, but we go back to church every Sunday on the 11th of October.  And for Alex he's doing ok. We haven't really got in contact with him that much. The last time we talked to him he said that he stopped working because there was a co worker that got COVID. So he told us he was going to get tested the next day, so we texted him the next day to see how it went and we never heard back. Soooooo if he tested positive then we probably have it for sure, and that means we spread it to a ton of people haha. It's ok though I'm not to worried about COVID, if ya get it ya g...