A big hello to all my family, friends, and coaches back home, at school, and serving around the world! Hope this email finds you all doing well and enjoying life! This week has been a little crazy, but it’s been really fun and we are working really hard to find people to teach. All the investigators we have right now basically just expect us to come over and hang out. As soon as we start bringing up anything gospel related they seem to not like it, so we’ve been doing a lot of finding and the usual stuff when you have relatively few people to teach haha. But I love the area and ward. It’s a really small ward but the members are so awesome and I love serving them!
So Monday was P-day and we basically get like zone p-day every week in Rochester because there’s 5 teams in Rochester so we always hang out at the stake center. It was MLK day so a bunch of kids from the different wards came and balled with us. So that was fun! There was this one kid that came that thought he was the next Michael Jordan or something. He was rocking the Nike dri fit shirt and the knee pads and all that, and thought he was some hot stuff. So our first possession on offense he was guarding me, and I caught it in the post and just destroyed him haha. I just drop stepped and basically put my shoulder through his chin and just put in the nice layup. He just looked at me like, “What the heck just happened? I can’t guard that.” Anyway, we had a good time and it was good to get the competitive juices going a little bit! We had a lesson Monday night with a less active lady named Sister Keene. She was super nice and seems like she has a desire to return to activity in the church. She had some questions about some doctrinal things she didn’t understand. We were able to answer all of her questions and she said she felt much better about the questions she had by the time we were done. Her goal is to get her temple recommend so she can do her parents' temple work for them! So we set some goals and plans with her to help her work towards that!
Tuesday morning we all met at the stake center to watch the First Presidency message. That was super awesome! I’m grateful to know that President Nelson, Oaks, and Eyring were all sustained by the Quorum of the 12 and they have my sustaining vote as well. I know they are men called by God, not self-appointed, or voted in by the people.
So after that we did our personal studies and planned for the day and then had some lunch at Perkins with Bishop Roberts. He’s a great guy! I like him a lot. He runs marathons and is like 60, so he’s in pretty good shape haha. We talked a lot about members we should work with and how the work is going in the ward. He wants us to work with the Young Men a lot, too, so they can get excited to serve missions and get a feel for what it’s like. That helped me a lot when I got to go out with Elders Murphy and Comerer before I came out here. Those guys were a party haha. After that we headed down to Stewartville and stopped by a bunch of people on the way down. We got an appointment with this less active lady named Sister Averbeck set up for later in the evening on our way back up from Stewartville. We stopped by pretty much everyone in Stewartville and met with Brother Swenson, who is a less active. He’s super nice and has a super cute little baby boy. His wife is a pharmacist and he’s a stay at home dad. We got his Facebook contact info so we could communicate that way and send him stuff each day so they can read the Book of Mormon and watch videos and stuff we send them. I’m not sure why he doesn’t come to church. He said his wife works Sundays and he feels weird going to church by himself, so I’m not sure. After that we knocked some doors for like an hour and it was super cold haha.️ We gave away two Books of Mormon but not sure how solid either of them were. But you never know! After that we had dinner with the Oeltjens. They live in Stewartville and are super cool. They remind me of the Gretz family, that I knew in Apple Valley, a lot. Brother Oeltjen joined the church like 2-3 years ago and they have a kid that struggles with drug problems. They’re awesome though, and made some bomb spaghetti for us. After that we had a lesson with Sister Averbeck. She is really cool. She joined the church in Idaho about 20 years ago. She’s from the Rochester area originally and moved out there for work and joined the church. When she moved back to MN her husband had an affair and now is with his girlfriend who is 26 and he’s 50. Kinda weird. So she’s still kind of struggling with that. We talked about some things that are holding her up from coming to church and stuff, and talked about how to work through them. She’s got a lot of potential, so hopefully we can get her some fellowship from the ward! After that we accounted with the Sisters. The Winona Elders (Peterson and Michelson) came over to spend the night. It was a night to remember I’ll just leave it at that.
Wednesday we had to get up at like 5:45 am to be on the road by 7 am for Zone Conference up in Lakeville. We got there about 8:30 am, which was good, and then headed in to get the party started. Zone Conference was good! Lots of focus on driving in snowy conditions and how to avoid frostbite and all that good stuff. We played this crazy game where you had to run in the gym and answer a question correctly about technology safeguards, and I won in my group even with my cowboy boots on haha. The Rochester Zone took the championship, so that was dope! After that we went to go see Brother Stanich in Apple Valley since we were up this way. He was happier than a kid on Christmas morning when we walked in his room haha. So we visited with him for a little bit. He’s doing much better. He’s lost like 50 lbs and looks good. After that we started the trek home to Rochester. We dropped off the Winona Elders at our place and then went and had dinner with Sister Fieck at Bakers Square. I got this turkey bacon pita sandwich thing that was super good! We got to know Sister Fieck a little better, and she is so awesome. She’s a single lady who joined the church a while back, but is an awesome member missionary and is super solid. She’s way cool. After that we went and picked up some less actives for basketball and then headed to the church and balled out with us, the ZLs, Winona, and some investigators and less actives from all our wards. It was way fun! And I got to do some missionary work with one of the sisters' investigators after we got done playing. He was on my team the whole time so we were like best buds by the time we got done playing haha.
Thursday we basically did service the whole day haha. We accounted with the ZLs in the morning and went and got some more food because we were running low on veggies and stuff. After that we went to Channel 1 food shelf and all we did for 2 hours was take bread out of its package and throw it in this ginormous bin. We filled 5 bins completely full and the dude working there was just like completely blown away at how much we did. He’s like, “This would’ve taken me like 2 months to do by myself. Thank you so much!” We were like, “No problem, my man!” It really wasn’t that much work, haha, we just worked really fast for 2 hours straight! After that we stopped by a few people we found tracting but none of them were super interested except this dude named Bakeel we found who was a Muslim. He said we could come back on Saturday, so we got that set up with him. After that we helped the Gregsons pack up their moving truck because they are moving to Illinois. We helped them with that for about 2 and a half hours. We were the only people from the ward besides Brother Osterley that showed up, so I’m glad we were there or they would’ve been packing all night haha. After that we stopped by to see Tess, and she wasn’t there unfortunately. After that we had some dinner and went to the church to workout and then called it a night.
Friday we did some laundry and weekly planning at the same time. The ZLs have a washer and dryer in their apartment, so we threw in some wash there and then weekly planned at the church and then went back and forth for like 3 hours haha. Weekly planning was death this week. We went through the whole less active/part member family list and decided who we want to focus on and also all the investigators and formers who have any potential at all. So that took a good chunk of time, and then we tried to schedule stuff with them and got like 3 things set up and just planned in stop bys the rest of the week and knocking doors and contacting down town. After that we drove down to Spring Valley and stopped by a bunch of people down there. Literally no one was home. It was rough. We only got to meet with one person down there, and that ended up being a really good visit! He was a less active dude named Brother Larson. He joined the church like 5 years ago and is now less active. Not sure why. We shared “Waiting on our Road to Damascus” by Elder Uchtdorf with him and he really liked it. He said he felt like that’s how he is sometimes. He doesn’t always fan the flame of his testimony and sometimes just waits for things to happen in his life rather than make them happen. We ended up giving a Book of Mormon to his daughter who is like 7 or 8. She said she loved the Bible and I was like, “Do you ever read the Book of Mormon?” She’s like, “No! What’s that?” So we gave her one and left her with Moroni 7 to read because her favorite chapter in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 13 about charity. She was stoked out of her mind to read it haha. So that was pretty cool! After that on the way home we stopped by this less active elderly couple named the Lexs. They joined a while back and said they had issues with the doctrine of “becoming Gods.” So we talked about that and cleared up what it meant. Sister Lex had never read the Book of Mormon and knew basically nothing about church teachings except that, so I don’t know how she even got baptized. Brother Lex has dementia, so I’m not even sure he remembers anything. It was kind of a weird visit, but they were super nice and said we could come visit them anytime we were down there.
Saturday was a crazy day. We did some stop bys in the morning and met a super nice less active lady who said we could come back on Mondays because that’s the only day she doesn’t work. So we will probably be going there next Monday because we have a couple appointments set up for this Monday. In the afternoon we went to downtown Rochester and did some contacting. We were there for like 2 hours and I talked to a ton of people. I’m pretty sure 95% of the people I talked to were insane to one degree or another. There are some crazy weirdos in Rochester. So basically I just ended up having a bunch of super awkward conversations with people, so that was fun. Most people didn’t want to hear anything about the gospel, but were more than happy to talk about anything else, so I tried to be nice and talk a little with everyone, but if they weren’t interested I would move on pretty quick to the next person. I met this really cool dude named Jonquel who is from Chicago and is living in Rochester while working. I got his phone number and he told me he had met with missionaries before and had a Book of Mormon. I actually passed Jonquel on the street and felt impressed to go talk to him, so I chased him down and ended up walking about 4 blocks with him while I talked to him. After that I went to go see how Elder Bowman was doing and he had discovered this women’s rights rally going on downtown that was nuts. There were hundreds of people there protesting Trump and how he apparently is suppressing women and won’t let them vote. Mom, you voted correct? People are so strange haha. Anyway, we ended up getting caught in that because they did a march and we couldn’t really get out of it. So we had to wait for it to finish. About 25 minutes after that we had a lesson with Bakeel. It went really well and he had read the first couple chapters of the Book of Mormon and had some questions about that. So we talked about it with him and ended up teaching part of the Plan of Salvation to him. He asked a bunch of questions right at the start that fit perfectly with what we had planned to teach, so it was a money lesson. After that we had dinner with the Dali family. They are way cool and love smoking meats, so next time we go over they’re hopefully going to smoke something for us. After that we did some tracting and some stop bys and then some Facebook work because we ran out of stuff to do around 8:30 pm, and people aren’t super happy when you knock on their door at 8:30 pm. So that was our crazy Saturday!
Sunday was good! We had a good Sacrament Meeting, and I got to help pass the Sacrament again this week. I really enjoy participating in the Sacrament. Now that I understand the importance and reason for it, it means a whole lot more to me! So I love it now. Brother Busby gave a really good talk about how we can attain Christlike attributes. After the meeting, Dr. Coleville asked him where he could get a copy of the talk. Brother Busby just gave him his talk right on the spot. Dr. Coleville comes over and is like, “I asked where I could get a copy of his talk, and the man just handed me the whole damn thing! Imagine that! What a kind man.” I was dying. Dr. Coelville is a hoot and half haha. He swears at the most random times, and it’s so funny! After church we had lunch really quick and drove out to Dover on the far East of our area. There was a less active part member family out there, so we stopped by and they weren’t home. As we were getting in the car to go stop by someone else, I felt like we should knock the street they lived on. So I was like, “Elder Bowman, we should knock the street haha”. He’s like “Uggggnhhhhh..... ok.” So we did, and met this awesome dude named Dane who was so nice! He was like, “I would love a Book of Mormon!” and took one and said he would start reading it that day. He said he just had shoulder surgery and would be off work for the next 2 months so we could come by and chat whenever we wanted! So that was sweet! Nobody else was home (out of 4 houses) but it was awesome to find him! After that we did some stop bys and then had a lesson with Sister Mancini. Her husband isn’t a member but is a way nice dude. She’s had a tough go the last few years. She’s broken her ankle and had some other health problems. We showed her the “Mountains to Climb” Mormon message and she really enjoyed it! She has such great faith. I was like, “Man, I wish I had faith like hers." After that we had dinner with the Voigt family. They’re a little unique, but super nice! Their kids were so funny. They all loved us and we had such a great time with them! Dr. Coleville invited us over to watch the Vikings game, so after dinner we stopped by to see Tess, but her boyfriend said to not come back anymore. I was pretty sad about that. After that we stopped by a few more people (most of them were watching the Vikings game and weren’t super happy to see us), and then headed over to Dr. Coleville’s place. We got to talk to him a lot about patriarchal blessings and how we receive answers to prayers while we were there, so that was awesome! The Vikings got destroyed so that kind of sucked, but it is what it is! Hopefully people will be brought to the depths of humility and be ready for the gospel now!
This week has been really good. The work here isn’t super popping right now, but I’m confident we can get it going again. We've just got to work hard! I really learned the importance of following the Spirit this week. Sometimes I get promptings and I just play it off like it was my own thoughts. I tried to follow those more this week and some good things came out of them! I know that God really knows who is ready to hear his gospel and we just need to follow the promptings to talk to those people. It is awesome! We got about 8-10 inches of snow here today, so we are going to be shoveling people out probably the next day or so because it snowed a lot and is still snowing. The mission is great! I’m having a good time and really enjoying it. Thanks for all the prayers and support. They help so much! There are some days I’m so worn out physically, mentally, and spiritually I honestly wonder how I can keep doing it. I know the prayers from back home help so much and I appreciate them a great deal! I love you all and have a great week!
Much love,
Elder Beach
#MavUp #10
The "First Presidency of the Rochester Zone". :)
Me and Elder Gooch - one of my comps from Minnetonka.
We went to visit Brother Stanich in Apple Valley.
Me and Elder Peterson - my MTC companion.
Me and Elder Nelson. He is in Minnetonka now and came out with Elder Layton.
Me and Elder Searle.
