Elder Beach Minnesota Minneapolis Mission: Week one in the books!

A big hello to all my family, friends, and coaches back home, at school and serving the Lord worldwide. Hope this email finds you all well and enjoying the beautiful fall weather and time of year. I love fall here in Minnesota and I am seriously loving sharing the gospel so much! I’ve really caught the missionary spirit and I’m just loving life on the mission right now! I was super sad to leave Elder Meyer and Sauk Rapids, but Hutchinson is way fun already and the Branch is awesome, so I’m excited to be here. Elder Layton is pretty fun, too, and we have a good time all the time.

So Monday was p-day and we found out I was getting transferred, so I did some packing and laundry and emailed and all that good stuff. We had dinner with the Robacks on Monday night and it was great. We had salad with chicken and tons of veggies to add on! I love it! They’re a way cool family and I’m going to miss them a lot! After dinner both of our appointments in Becker fell through so we came back up to Sauk Rapids and finished our Book of Mormon video and posted it on Facebook. Apparently there’s some rule about not trying to make your videos go viral, and that was not our intention, but apparently it has like over 2k views, so that’s pretty sweet! If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out! Elder Meyer is the star of the show!

Tuesday we actually did a ton of stuff. Usually on Tuesdays of transfers I just pack and say good-bye to people, but we ended up doing a lot of missionary work in Sauk Rapids and it was awesome! We raked and mowed Connie’s lawn one last time and she was pretty sad to see us get split up. I’m grateful I’ve been able to help her out with her yard work and stuff. It’s been fun! After that we had a quick lesson with Ashley and her kids on their front porch. We talked some more about the Plan of Salvation with them and our lesson was cut short when one of her kids pooped her pants and then started trying to take off her diaper and drop it on the porch. So it ended kind of weird, but it was a good lesson and I hope they can continue to get taught. We were driving up to north Sauk Rapids to stop by some people and as we were driving, we saw this lady out raking leaves. She was elderly, so Elder Meyer was like, “We should stop and help her!” So we did, and it turns out, she was 95 years old and lived by herself! She still does yard work by herself and all that. She was literally brought to tears by the fact that we stopped and offered to help. She said she had been raking leaves and shoveling snow by herself for 10+ years and no one had ever stopped and offered to help. We were able to give her a Book of Mormon and she insisted we take $5 each. We tried very politely to decline, but she wasn’t having it and made us take it. She was so thankful and happy we stopped to help and it literally just made my whole day to serve her! Basically the rest of the day we just went around and said bye to people and then capped the day off with a lesson with LJ. It wasn’t the greatest lesson and he said he still wasn’t going to stop drinking coffee yet. So we talked some more about that and how it isn’t just something we are asking him to do, God is asking us to do it. We also shared the promised blessings with him in D&C 89. I hope he can exercise the faith to quit drinking and trust that God can help him with it!

Wednesday morning the Hutchinson Elders just drove up to Sauk Rapids and dropped off Elder Meade so he could ride down to transfers with Elder Bentley, and then I rode back to Hutchinson with Elder Layton. When we got there I was like, “Oh my gosh. This apartment is trashed.” So I was like, “Ok, we gotta clean this place up a little bit.” It was disgusting. There was like rotten food and stuff in the cupboards that had been there for like over a year and just garbage everywhere and it was a joke. So we spent about 2 hours cleaning just the kitchen and it still isn’t in pristine shape, but it’s doable now. After that we went out to Glencoe to visit some people. The guy we were supposed to visit wasn’t home, so we stopped by Lloyd Thurn, a recent convert in the branch, and had a good visit with him and read 2 Nephi 29 with him. He is such a solid guy. He’s got a heart as big as outdoors! I’m excited to continue to work with him! After that we basically knocked doors until dinner because Hutchinson literally has no one to teach. We found one person named Kayla who was pretty cool and talked to us for a while about the Book of Mormon and what makes our church different from other churches. She said we could come back this Wednesday so that was cool. After we knocked forever we went out to this guy's house named Ron Cody. He lives out on a farm, so we helped him haul some wood around for their fire and wood burning stove and stuff. After that we had dinner with their family, so that was pretty good as well! He’s a good dude, just got some kinda crazy ideas on religion and stuff like that. He loves the missionaries though, so that’s awesome! Sorry, not a whole to report on Wednesday. Just lots of knocking doors with little success.

Thursday was very similar to Wednesday. We cleaned up the apartment some more in the morning. I literally don’t think it’s been cleaned for like 3-4 months. It’s thrashed. Like our apartment in Sauk Rapids wasn’t the cleanest, but it looked like a 5 Star super nice hotel compared to Hutchinson’s apartment. So we cleaned up some and then went grocery shopping because they had like no healthy food at all. Just lots of beans and rice and ground turkey and stuff like that. So we got a ton of fruit and veggies and yogurt and good stuff like that so I can stay slim haha. So Thursday we went out to Silver Lake and Lester Prairie. Silver Lake is this super small town like 12 miles east of Hutchinson. And then Lester Prairie is like 9 miles past Silver Lake. So anyway, there was like 2 people in Silver Lake and neither of them were home, so we knocked doors for about 3 1/2-4 hours and found 2 new investigators, talked to some super nice cool people, raked some leaves for a lady, and tracted about half the town haha. It’s pretty small! I absolutely love knocking little towns like that. I’m excited to continue to do so. We find some people who are super mean, but some are just way nice and humble and ready for the gospel! It’s awesome. We had dinner with the Jacobs in Lester Prairie Thursday night and we got there about 30 minutes early so we drove down the road until we found a very small neighborhood and knocked it! The second door we knocked we met this lady who worked in Eden Prairie with a doctor who’s a member of the church. She was super nice and receptive so we gave her a Book of Mormon and invited her to read it, and she said we could swing by whenever we were down there! So that was pretty sick. After that we had dinner with the Jacobs. Brother Jacobs is a recent convert as well. They are way cool! We had a good dinner and then I guess the Elders usually play a board game with them after dinner. So we played “Ticket to Ride”, which is a way fun board game. Haha we had a good time with them and it was good to just talk and get to know them. Something that will be a change of pace thing for me is in this branch the members and missionaries are super close and we actually do stuff like playing board games with the members and doing a lot of service for them just because everyone is so spread out and we are sometimes the only people from church they see besides Sundays. I’m not used to that because I’ve been in smaller, more densely populated areas my whole mission, but I’m excited to really get to know everyone in the branch and serve them! Should be fun!

Friday was weekly planning and that was a little rough haha. Elder Layton doesn’t really enjoy weekly planning, so I kind of did a lot of it by myself and I don’t really know anyone or anything about the area haha. So hopefully we have a good, productive week this week! We should have a much more productive week than they usually have though, so that’s good! I’m amazed at how many missionaries have no idea how to plan or just don’t put in the effort to plan well. If you plan well your days and weeks go by so much faster and better! After weekly planning we knocked doors in Hutchinson for about an hour and half and didn’t see much success there. We had dinner with the Alveys after that. Brother Alvey is the Elder's Quorum President, and he is pretty cool! They’re a solid family in the branch and are super nice! I shared the Mormon message “Same Jersey” with them about the rival QBs and the one baptized the other the day after their game. They really liked it and we invited them to try and find someone they are friends with who may be going through some trials or may be interested in the gospel and share it with them or serve them and be their friend! After dinner we knocked doors again for about 5 minutes and found this older lady named Lorraine! She let us in and we taught her about the Book of Mormon and the Plan of Salvation too! She is Catholic and lost her husband and a daughter(?) recently I believe. She was so appreciative that we just knocked on her door and visited with her that she gave us $10. Once again I tried to politely decline, but I’m pretty sure she would’ve killed us haha. She was the sweetest lady, and it was cool to brighten her day so much just by visiting and sharing the gospel with her! After that we visited Sister Gonzalez and her crazy kids and boyfriend. She just moved into a house and is renovating it, so we are going to help her out with some of it. We just went over and got some details on it. Elder Layton went all star mode and taught her boyfriend a full restoration lesson and gave him a Book of Mormon, too! It was pretty sweet! I was like “Let’s go! You’re a beast bro!” So that was solid, and after that we called it a night!

Saturday we went up to Litchfield. We had one lesson at 4 pm and the rest of the day we just knocked doors and stopped by people. So we ended up knocking doors for about 4 hours again. We found this one lady named Rocky who was sitting out on her porch smoking. We were walking to our 4 pm appointment and we walked by and I looked up and saw her and I just felt like we really needed to go talk to her so we did! And she was super interested in the Book of Mormon and loved the fact that we used the Bible and the Book of Mormon to teach about Christ. We set up a return appointment with her for this Saturday and got her number and everything! It was way cool! So our 4 pm appointment was with Sister Lopez and her kids. We usually meet on her porch because of the rule of 3, but we get there and it starts raining buckets. Like insane. ️ So she told us to sit in her car until it stopped raining haha. So we sat in there for like 20 minutes until it quit raining buckets and then had a lesson with them about the importance of going to church and why we take the sacrament plus blessings of taking the sacrament each week! It was really good, but unfortunately they still didn’t make it to church on Sunday. Sad day but oh well. After that we ended up playing football with her boys outside and it was a party. Her kids are insane and the oldest one was body slamming his younger brothers and it was hilarious and we were laughing so hard haha. After that we did some more stop bys and then had some dinner at Subway (Subway is the G.O.A.T.) and then we stopped in Darwin on the way home to check out the world's biggest ball of yarn haha. That thing is enormous!

Sunday was awesome as usual! We had branch PEC before church so I got to meet some of the people there and then we had church and we taught primary and Elders quorum lesson! It was really fun! I got to meet Brother Constance, whom I guess is like this super weird dude in the ward. I haven’t been to his house yet, but I guess he has no furniture except for a TV, TV stand, and a 2 step work ladder to sit on. Then he has a blow up mattress for his bed and that’s it. Plus a super expensive safe full of gold and coins and all this money. He has a house but he just doesn’t spend money on anything. He just puts it in his safe. He’s a really nice guy, just has some interesting comments and stuff haha. Anyway, the Munoz family is awesome! They make up like half the branch haha. So it’s two brothers and both their families and then their kids' families too haha. They’re way awesome and I’m excited to spend some more time with them! Brother Munoz talked to me about football for like all of church. So we are like best buds already haha. It was sweet! I love the branch already and I barely know anyone. After church we knocked doors up in Dassell and found like 4 new investigators! We had another Sunday surge and it was awesome. I don't know if people are just more receptive on Sundays or what, but I love knocking doors on Sundays because we always seem to find people. After that we went to Cokato and visited this less active older couple who have a ton of health issues, so we got to meet them and visit for a little bit and then we had dinner with the Christensens! They are super cool and nice! We ended up talking about the biggest lessons we had learned on our missions and sharing those things with them. It was a way cool discussion we had! After dinner we drove up to Buffalo to sleep over before p-day because we went to the American Ninja Warrior place again for p-day!

This week has been awesome! The work is pretty slow in Hutchinson right now, but we are gonna pick it up and work hard and see some miracles! I’m way excited to be here and working with Elder Layton! Thanks for all the birthday wishes and presents! I loved all of them! Hope you all have a great week and enjoy life. Do what you love and let it kill you. Life’s too short to not do what you love with those you love! I’m so grateful I can be sharing the gospel I love with people I love! It’s awesome. Love you all!

Much love,

Elder Beach

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