Excerpts from Letter to Parents 3/27/2017

This past week went very well and was a pretty smooth transition. As you know I took over Lakewood and got three new companions. I am very pleased with each of them because they work very hard and understand our purpose. Elder Anderson and I are the zone leaders and we are training Elder Schmidt... not related to the Schmidt's in our family as far as I know, and Elder Fuentes is also part of the companionship. They are all great guys and we are really enjoying it, and we get a lot of work done and spend a lot of our time knocking doors. Elder Anderson is a great help and is very proactive for such a young missionary as a zone leader. He and I are very similar and have a ton of fun! Like last night we were throwing a little football at a can a ton of times in our apartment and had a contest who could hit it the most. It was pretty close but I happened to be on fire and hit it like 8 or 9 times out of 10  haha! 

Other than that we were not able to baptize someone this week which was a bummer... but we are looking forward to the 8th for our solid investigator E to be baptized! He is like a golden referral that we got a couple weeks ago and he has been coming to church for a couple weeks lately. So good things are happening. I am seeing miracles everyday and since I have been here I have seen a lot of seeds planted, however it can get discouraging that we are not harvesting as much as we would like but I am sure that we will see success as we "continue with faith" like they say. Well, there is the update for the week.

 Elder Schmidt, the new missionary, meets his trainers: 

 Sunday Dinner at Sister White's home:

Funny Events 3/20/2017

This week was great and we got our transfer calls! I will be staying here and Elders Stapley and Sutton will be moving on to different areas in the mission. Elder Sheffield also got his visa and will be leaving to Samoa today!!- Sure going to miss that guy! Anyway I will be staying here in LAKEWOOD and getting Elder Anderson as a new zone leader and we will have Elder Fuentes and a new missionary in the companionship as well. It is going to be a blast and I am excited to be training again! It sure will be a good amount of stress because I am going to be the only one who knows the area for at least this first week haha.

Funny Events:

• On Sunday I was showing Elder Sutton a wrestling move and smacked my elbow on the kitchen counter! It hurt way bad at the time and hit me directly where my funny bone is. I remember walking over in the kitchen and saying to myself how bad that hurt when all of a sudden I woke up on the ground wondering why I was lying down on the tile! Elder Sutton just stood there laughing way hard because he had watched me just take a dive backwards and pass out on the kitchen tile leaned up against the dishwasher, he thought that I was joking until I "came to" and asked how I had gotten there, and how long I had been there. Of course, I was only out for about 5 seconds lol. But what a weird experience, and quite ironic that in all my time of contact sports I never have passed out, but one good shot to my funny bone and I was out! No need to worry though because I was completely fine.
• Then earlier in the week Elder Sheffield jumped off of a balcony into a nearby bush so that was pretty funny. He came out with minimal scratches haha!
• And last but not least, we ran into a man named Blaine who is not totally all there. But he was way excited to go to church and wanted to come out so we got him a ride to church. Turns out he wasn't very into the whole church thing and wanted to go home before it even started so that was lame.. but at least he tried haha! Oh and needless to say he showed up in a very velvet black dress on Sunday so that was interesting.

Well I hope that you all have a great week and enjoy the Spring weather!!

Elder Bullough

It's a Beautiful Day! 3/13/2017

This week was a blast and it went by super fast. We had a ton of meetings that kept us pretty busy. Elder Sutton and I had the opportunity to go to a stake mission preparation fireside for all of the youth in the stake. We were invited to go help answer questions that the young men had about serving a mission and how they can better prepare to serve. It was a ton of fun to be with all of the young men talk with them about how I had made the decision to serve and what it has taught me. They also had pie afterward so that made it even better! Hahaha.

Anyway Elder Suttton, Sheffield, Stapley and I have been companions for about 5 weeks now and this next week will be the end of this transfer cycle, meaning that some of us could potentially get transferred. This whole transfer we have been working and praying and fasting and working to find someone to teach about the restored gospel and baptize. And Wednesday we got a referral from our Spanish missionaries for a man named S. The interesting story is that they were knocking doors in our area trying to find people to teach when they came across S and he invited them in and they gave him their phone number and a Book of Mormon. He called them the next day and said he had been reading the book and wanted to learn more. So they told him that they would send us over and we would be able to answer his questions. That day I called him and Elder Stapley and I went to go meet with him. Turns out he and his wife loved what they learned from the Book of Mormon and asked us if they could become members of the church! As you can imagine both mine and Elder Stapley's facial expressions had probably dropped to an "awh" as we replied that they could. We went back throughout the week and taught a couple more lessons and then both S and his wife came to church this week and are excited to be baptized this week. We will be focusing on teaching them a little more this week as we prepare them for this next Sunday, and if all goes well they will be the miracle that we have been working and praying for! 

Love you all and have a great week!

Pictures of a Service Project:

50 foot long vines

God Is In The Details 3/6/2017

This past week we went over to have a lesson with S. I had mentioned before that she had accepted the baptism date of March 10th. Before our lesson with her this past Friday, she had texted us and mentioned that she felt overwhelmed with things that are happening in her life so we agreed to take off the date. Devastated by this news we pondered, what we were going to talk about Friday? If we would take someone with us from the ward? And if so, who? Well after a lot of thought we decided to look through our ward list and find a member to take with us to the lesson that would be able to friendship and answer questions on a personal level. It seemed like we couldn't find anyone and at last desperation we had the thought to call Sister Halmont. Why we had not thought of this person before--I don't know!? It sounded perfect so we called her and she agreed to come with us. And it was perfect. After just a few minutes of us talking together with S, each of us in the room realized that it was the "right match!"

If you can imagine two women in the same room that had never met each other before, but had everything in common from growing up in the same town together to graduating college in the same year at the same college but never knowing the other, that was them! It was incredible and each of us were amazed how inspired this meeting was. The best part was that each of them understood one another because they grew up in the same religion both having either parents or grandparents being well-known ministers in that church. Both Elder Sutton and I had no idea of either's childhood or which college they went to or even their religious background. This was a match made in Heaven. I am sure that it was refreshing for S to know that God was sending the right people her way and the answers that she is looking for at this point in her life.

Well I hope that you all have a great week!
With much love,
Elder Bullough

Here is a cool picture that was painted on a wall that I thought I would share with you all:

Excerpts from Letter to Parents 2/27/2017

Elder Bullough did not have time to do a group email letter this week, so here are some things he wrote and told his parents about:

I am doing great! I have already learned a ton this transfer! I have a great companion, Elder Sutton, who is very inspiring as well so it makes the journey fun! Sheffield our boy that we are training is also a blast and a great worker so it makes training and being a zone leader pretty smooth. I have enjoyed training on my mission so far, it is so fun!! However, it is sad because most of the guys I have trained are just waiting for their visas so they leave...that is the only sad part! 

Anyway, there are 14 zones in the mission and 168 missionaries not including the senior missionaries. With them, it would put us at probably 180 or so. I am pretty sure that this zone is the biggest in the mission and our ward alone has 10 missionaries in it, haha. There are sisters and us 4 elders and then a couple of senior missionaries as well. The basic role that we have as zone leaders is to get to know the zone and to inspire them. We take part in a training about once a month that we get from the mission president in our MLC (Mission Leadership Conference). This is held monthly and many of the pics on the blog come from this. We also have the chance to work closely with the stake presidents in our zone. —This is probably one of my favorite perks of being a zone leader! Every stake president that I have met has been like a spiritual giant and such an example. We meet with our stake presidents about once a week.

I have enjoyed my mission a lot! And recently I have had such a feeling of gratitude looking back and I am so grateful for the opportunity that I have had to meet the people that I have out here and to see their lives change! Such a blessing! Anyway, I have also seen how much of an increase [there has been] in my life. Recently I have learned so much and I am excited to apply the things I am learning. I love what the Lord says about seeking to learn— it is a skill that is priceless.

By way of work, it had slowed down drastically throughout our mission and especially throughout our zone for these past two months. To be honest, it has been difficult because this zone is known to carry the mission. But I am excited because we talked as a zone and decided to do a zone fast yesterday, so Elder Sutton and I are expecting to see some great things happen in this next month!  

Here are some pictures from the Washington Tacoma mission blog (calledtoservewa-tac.blogspot.com):

Sunday Dinner at Sister White's house:

A Great Week! 2/20/2017

This week went by so quick. So much seemed to happen this week that I don't remember very much. It is kind of a blur. Anyway, we had some special visitors come up and visit that used to be in the mission. Both of my trainers Elder Ellis and Elder Lundgreen came up and visited the mission. It was great to see them again and super weird to see them not as missionaries anymore.

Anyway this week was great, it started out kind of busy with Elder Sutton and I preparing a couple trainings for the missionaries in our zone for both Wednesday and Thursday in our meetings. The meetings went great and got us ready for the work this week.

We had a neat experience this past week. S is a lady that we are working with and she has been progressing very well. She has been coming to the church for the past month and has been reading in the Book of Mormon. In fact, she is already past the Book of Alma! So this past week Elder Sutton and Sheffield went and had prepared a lesson for her. For the past little while, even before I got here, they have been trying to help her commit to baptism. At first she was a little hesitant, so they helped her resolve concerns and understand why baptism is so important and is the next step. After about an hour they came home excited as ever because she accepted their invitation to be baptized on March 10th! 

Well, hope that you all have a great week! 

Elder Bullough

P.S. Anyway, I also thought I would write that Sister White fed us some great food yesterday, we had ribs and chicken! It was such a good meal and tasted amazing! Here is a good group picture of us. Some of those guys are now home like Wyatt Lundgreen, Lacasse and Franks who are in the back row. They came up this week to visit the mission! 

  

This is Sister White. She is the one who fed us chicken and ribs! She is the best!

Missionaries & former WATAC missionaries gather at Sister White's house on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2017 for a delicious dinner of chicken & ribs. 

Greatest Miracle of Them All! 2/13/2017

Update: I was transferred the other day back to Lakewood. Ironically, this is the ward that I actually started out my mission at. I am glad to be here and my new companions are Elder Sutton, Elder Stapley, Elder Sheffield who we are training. He is waiting for his visa to go to Samoa. It has been a blast so far and we are constantly laughing!

The Greatest Miracle of them all:

About 3 months ago I was in a companionship of 4 in the area of Gig Harbor. Every night in our mission we knock from 5pm to 7pm. So to find the place that we would be knocking we each prayed over the map and chose five streets each. As we were correlating we noticed that three of us had chosen the same street. Elder Lund who had already been in the area before decided not to choose that street because he had knocked it before and had not found much success there. But we decided to go on the whim and have two of us knock that street while the other two of us knocked a different area. Elder Killian and I were knocking that specific street when we got a call from a member of our ward, Coleman, who had recently returned from his mission asking if he could come out with us and that he was off work early. We readily accepted his help and told him where to meet us. As we were knocking we took a side road that was more of a back driveway and wasn't really even part of the main road, but it was dark so we didn't see the difference. Well, as we got to the bottom of that road we knocked on the door of C. C was met by all three of us at the door and she declined our first offer to share our message, and persistently we tried again but she shut us down. And as we were about to go on to the next door, Coleman spoke up from behind and asked, "Is there anything that we can help you with?" To be honest, I think that we ask this question a million times a day and rarely get anyone to say yes, but it was just the right time and the right place! C looked at him with a confused face and then back into her house and then back at us. She said that as a matter of fact she did need help because she and her whole family had just moved in and she had no way of taking all the boxes from the garage to the basement. That was it, we were helping and carried down a number of boxes for the next half hour and then when we finished I asked C if we could share our message with her. She accepted! So we went into the dining room and shared the first message! She had lots of questions but accepted our invitation to come out to church. The next day she came to church with us, then the next week we went back and answered questions and that week she brought her mom. This was the beginning of a great process. For the next couple of months we continued to teach C and her family the lessons. Lucky for us their almost next door neighbor, Brother Smith, is a member of our ward and came to each of the lessons with us. He was a huge help in their conversion! 

Just under a month ago, C happened upon a verse in 2 Nephi 31:17, which ironically talks about baptism by water and also the baptism by fire (the Holy Ghost). This was a great jump in her process and from there we continued to do our best to answer all of her questions and concerns and to help her get baptized. Each lesson was completely taught by the Spirit. I will never forget the Spirit that I felt or the way that it guided each of us during our visits.

Meanwhile, C's daughter M decided to move back up with her family after finishing some schooling down in Oregon. The Saturday before M came up, we invited C to invite her to come with us to church. The next week she brought her daughters and M became more interested as well so she started to sit in the lessons. 

One of my favorite parts of this story is that one day we had prepared to teach a lesson about the commandments shortly before their baptism. When we got into the lesson, we could feel something was missing. And just then C told us that she was just having a hard part with "Joseph Smith." So we felt inspired to throw out our old plans and teach the first vision again and then read Joseph Smith's History as well so that we could hear his story from his own words. When we did this it was powerful and I can still remember how that room felt as we were reading his story! We committed them to pray that night and ask God if Joseph Smith was a true prophet. Well, when we came back the next day both of them had gotten their answer! C mentioned how she had felt the Spirit as we were reading about his story and believed it was true. And M told us that she prayed and got her answer as well, in her own words..."I got a strong, Yes!" That is incredible, I am always amazed with our Heavenly Father and how much He loves us to give us answers to our questions that we have. 

Well to finish the story C and M were baptized on the 12th of this week and it was a wonderful experience! The baptismal service was amazing and each of the talks brought a sweet message and the Spirit to the room. I am proud of the choice that C and M made and I know it will bless their lives forever! 

Love you all and hope that you all have a great week!

Elder Bullough

Elder Lund, M, C, and Elder Bullough

Brother Smith, Elder Lund, Z, M, C, L, and Elder Bullough

M, C's mother Z, C, and C's other daughter L

Elder Sutton, Elder Stapely, Elder Sheffield, and Elder Bullough

Elder Stapely, Elder Bullough, Elder Sheffield, and Elder Sutton