Happy Halloween from Elder Roderer

That's my district after the Ward Halloween party. Plus a random little girl from the Ward. The Sisters made the tomb stone for Elder Ryder.

Hey!

Hello everybody!

So this week was less exciting than the last, but that's okay I guess.

Elder Ryder and I went biking again last Monday, and we actually finished the A trail, so that was really nice :) We only had to stop like 5 times to catch our breath, and Elder Ryder only threw up a little bit :) We're totally doing it again today. 

We taught Kyle a couple of times this week. It's kind of slow going, but he is retaining stuff, it's just that you have to help spark his memory. He's a great kid though.

I texted John Sunday morning to see if we would be able to see him at church, and he replied and said no, and that he is not going to attend church anymore, even though he's been to church all of one time, and that was like 5 months ago. When I asked him why, he didn't reply, so we don't have a clue as to what his problem is.

We went on an exchange with the Zone Leaders this week. It was pretty fun. The ZL that I exchanged with actually is from the town next door to me, and we knew each other back when we were like 12 years old. :) During the exchange, we tracted into a "non-practicing" wiccan. That was pretty interesting. After the exchange, we went to Zone Meeting, and got to learn from some other missionaries. Good times!

We help someone in the Ward that's adding an addition to his home, and so we went and threw up a couple of walls on the inside. I was feeling pretty accomplished :)

Thanks for reading!

~Elder Roderer

Flat Tires, Flat Biceps, and Answers that Fell Flat

Hey Everybody!

So this week was pretty fun! 

Last Monday, Elder Ryder and I went to a super snazzy mountain bike trail that we ran across a while ago, and we had a pretty great time on it. There are 4 different trails/loops (A-D) and to get to B-D, you had to ride on A, but since the A trail just by itself is 4 miles long, we decided to just stick with that one. Also because on the trail descriptions, the A trail seemed like the easiest one while C and D both said "VERY TECHNICAL!!!" The B trail seemed pretty doable, but would have added 6 miles to our trip, so we chose not to do that one either. 

So we park our Jeep at a member's house that lived sort of near by (About 2 miles) and just rode to the trail trail head, because at the parking lot for the trail, it said that you needed a recreational passport, and we definitely don't have that, and we didn't want to get a fine, so we just avoided that parking lot altogether. So we start riding on the trail, and we're just having a grand old time zipping along the foresty path, until about half way through, when Elder Ryder gets a flat tire.... and we didn't bring any equipment to fix the tube... Smart, I know.

But long story short, we power walk his bike 4 miles back to the Jeep in about an hour, zip back to the apartment, shower, change, and zip over to a member's house to teach a Family Home Evening lesson. It was pretty great :)

Our investigator John, owns and teaches a Crossfit Gym, and he would always invite us to come over sometime to work out. Lately, he's been a little tough to get in touch with, so on Saturday morning, we had about an hour with nothing to do before a memorial service that was happening at 11 that we were going to attend, we decided took him up on his offer. It was a productive visit. We stopped by his gym when we figured he would be there, and sure enough, he was. It was really good to touch bases with him again, so hopefully we'll be able to start meeting with him more consistently again. 

The work out though, was nuts. He started us off with a warm up that was really more like a legit work out, and then he had us do a 10 minute work out that was really more like torture. So total, we exercised for maybe 20 minutes, but the next day, dang near every muscle in my body was sore, and it hurt to move pretty much anything. And today, it hurts like fire to reach my arms up like at all. It was great though. I'm totally going to do crossfit when I go home. I could get swole in like a week. ;)

We had interviews with President Gerber last Friday. It was pretty great because they showed us the new Meet the Mormons film. While I missed like a third of it because I was in my interview, it was still sweet. Everybody go watch it, because if nothing else, it's a great feel good movie, and it'll warm your heart. The interview was good too, BTW. :)

We taught seminary Thursday morning because one of the teachers asked us to come in and teach. The task we were given was to teach about the responsibilities and duties of different Priesthood quorums as mostly outlined in D&C 20:38-67. We hadn't the foggiest idea how to teach that you teenagers at 6:00am in the morning and keep them engaged, so we went with the idea that Sister Belknap (The seminary teacher) gave us, which was to turn it into a Jeopardy game. It ended up taking a lot longer to prepare than we had anticipated. We stayed up preparing the night before until about 2:30am, and then woke up at 5:00am to get to the class that started at 6:00am. It was pretty rough. It felt like I was back in college. But we get there, and we decided to start off our lesson (Which we planned on being about 20 minutes long) with a nice little discussion on why the Priesthood is important and good stuff like that. I guess we forgot that we were talking to teenagers at 6:00am in the morning, because nobody said a word, so our intro took all of about 20 seconds. So after that, we go into our game of Jeopardy that we spent hours preparing the night before. When we were coming up with the questions, we were worried that we were asking too easy of questions, but as it turned out, that was not the case. These kids didn't know anything! They just sat there arguing and complaining with each other about how stupid their answer was that they threw out. Even if they would say the right answer, nobody else would agree, and they would complain about how dumb that answer was, even though they couldn't come up with anything better. And it's not like they had to go off of memory either. They had their scriptures, and we told them in what verses in Section 20 to look at for the answers, but they still would get it wrong. Like one girl read a verse to us that I guess in her mind answered the question, even though it definitely didn't, so I kindly told her that she was wrong, and then the girl next to her turns to her and says with this offended/prissy voice "Ugh, you read the verse to him!" Like she was so put off that this girl could read "the verse" to me, and that I would still have the audacity to tell her she wasn't right. It was pretty stressful. Oh, and also just for kicks and giggles, we threw in a question that had nothing at all to do with the Priesthood, because we though it would be funny. The question was "What wood was Noah's ark made out of?" We thought for sure that at least one of the kids would know that, but instead, a couple of the responses we got were "Painted wood" and "There are different kinds of wood?" Ironically, the girl that said that gave more right answers than anybody else in the class. 

We ended up only getting through about half of the questions before seminary had to end (We went way over our time on accident) so we finished, and spent the rest of the day exhausted and ashamed about our disaster of a lesson. But we found out a few days later that the class is sometimes like that, so it really wasn't our fault that things went to pot. At least that's what we're telling ourselves. I overheard the seminary teachers talking to each other saying stuff like "Our [seminary] kids don't know anything!" so I don't think it was just us.

We were able to finally teach Kyle this past week, so that was really nice. We're learning that we are going to have to take it really slow and teach really simply with him. But that's totally okay!

So Elder Ryder and I were talking the other day, and we realized that we are most likely the oldest companionship (Minus trios) in the mission! As far as mission "experience," we are at 43 months combined.

Anyways,

Thanks for reading my giant letter! :)

~Elder Roderer

I got turned into a mummy with toilet paper when we were at a member's house for FHE (Because we were teaching the lesson) so that was pretty great :)

Who Thought Conference was Awesome?

This guy did!

Hey everybody!

So I hope all of you had a chance to watch/listen to General Conference, because it was super great! Like always, there was something for everyone. One of my favorite talks was given by Elder Ballard, talking about how we need to stay on "The old ship, Zion."

The only showing of investigators for us was Kyle, who came to the Priesthood session. But he enjoyed it, so that's good!

It seems like Summer is pretty much over, at least in this part of the woods. It's getting kind of chilly. :/

One of our investigators, John, totally stood us up for our appointment, which isn't uncommon, but it was frustrating, because we even got a member to come with us, and he wasn't even there. It's really frustrating, because this guy is super cool and he knows that the gospel is something he needs in his life, but he's not doing such a great job at acting on that knowledge. So please keep him in your prayers for us.

Random, but kind of funny. We learned last week that one of the members in the Ward is an Advanced, Master Gardener. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds fun :)

I don't have much time, because Elder Ryder and I are going to go hit up a mountain biking soon, and we don't want to run out of time mid way through the trail, so this email is pretty much done :)

Thanks for reading!

~Elder Roderer