September 2017

September 5, 2017

Yes. I got a new companion. His name is Elder Heal and yes we are still planning on a baptism this Saturday!! Hopefully it all works out!!

This week went pretty well! We worked hard to try to find new investigators but we were having no luck. Saturday I had an exchange with Elder Perkins from St George. We are both sick of tracking lately because nothing has been coming of it. So we were trying to think of something new we could do to find new investigators. He said last P-day his mom sent him a picture of the missionaries down in St George and they had a lemonade stand and were giving away the Book of Mormon. So... we decided to try it. We went to Cole St. which is downtown Enumclaw and there are  a bunch of restaurants and stores on that street and tons of people. We set up a table with lemonade and a bunch of  Book of  Mormon, pamphlets and Mormon.org cards. Everything in our arsenal. ha ha. It was fun. Most people would see us and cross the street before they got to us. So we did not talk to a ton of people. We did talk to a bunch of teenagers because they are cool and they will talk.

Towards the end of the week we got a call from a member of the ward and he told us how he has this neighbor who came to him and told him he needs help changing. He has been an alcoholic most of his life and his life is falling apart. He said how he has seen Brother Emmett (the member) and his family going to church each Sunday and he admires that and wants that in his life. The member is starting to take him to the ARP program. He is setting up a time for him to start taking the missionary discussions! I'm grateful that the Lord always blesses us as we work diligently to find people to teach. This gospel is truly amazing. I know that God lives and that He sent His son Jesus Christ to take upon him the sins of the world. I'm so grateful for the Atonement of Jesus Christ and not only how because of it we can repent and become cleansed from our sins. But for the enabling power of the atonement. The atonement enables us to become so much more then we could ever become on our own!

I love you all.
Elder Ethan Stucki



September 11, 2017

This week went really well! I always start doing weird things on my mission. For example... I have always wanted to use all caps handwriting. So at the beginning of my mission I started writing it all caps. I heard some lady the other day saying how they don't even teach kids how to write in cursive anymore and I was like "I don't even know if I remember how to do that." So I started writing in cursive and I'm actually kinda good. (surprisingly ha ha) This past week I remembered one of Kailor's letters that he said he was working on memorizing The Living Christ. So this past week that is what I did. Now I can add the prophets testimonies to my testimony when I'm out tracting.

Saturday was a really fun day. The church had a day of service so the whole zone went down to Orting because Orting was hosting a service day and there was supposed to be like 300 people there Members and non members. There was probably only like over 100 but it was still really fun. We all met at the soldiers homes and did a ton of service there. There are 20 different buildings there and they are all old for the most part but it is also like a veterans hospital and people live there also. We spent like 3 hours cleaning all the sidewalks, painting curbs,  putting bark down, pulling weeds etc. It was fun.

The best part of the week had to be Saturday afternoon!!  It was a little stressful with the baptism because our investigator L. is only 17 and her parents were giving her a hard time about joining the church and wouldn't sign the permission slip for her to be baptized. But with a lot of prayers and fasting Friday morning they finally signed and allowed her to be baptized. So with a lot of help from the members we were able to have the baptism on Saturday and it was amazing! Baptisms are always the most spiritual times I've had on my mission and I am so grateful for this time I have to be doing the Lords work.

I am also so grateful that I was born and raised into the church!! I look at  L. and T. who are not that much younger then me and all that they went through to be able to join the church. It wasn't easy. Neither of them had support from there families and I know it wasn't an easy thing for them. I think a lot of times we take the gospel for granted when we are raised in it. We don't always know and realize how important all of it is because we've never really had to search and study to find out if it is true or not. We just figure it is. I know all growing up I never really sat down and tried to figure out for myself if the church was true or not. I wish I would have! I'm so grateful for this opportunity that I have to be on a mission and to be able to study each and every day. I wish I would have done it sooner! The gospel is so amazing. The church is true. The priesthood has been restored to the earth through a modern day prophet. The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ. If you are not reading it each day, Do it! I know that there is power and blessings that come from reading it each day that each of us need in our lives. If not President Monson wouldn't have taken the 3 minutes he had at General Conference to implore us to read it each and every day. 

 I love and miss each of you. I'm glad everything is going well! That is awesome that you have a new house to live in!

Elder Duncan      Orting                         2 transfers

Elder Scheidel    Orting                          1 transfer

Elder White        Victor Falls for            1 transfer

Elder Medley      Victor Falls for            2 transfers

Elder Pugh          Enumclaw 2 and 3       1 transfer

Elder Heal           Enumclaw 2 and 3       1 transfer 

By the way transfers are next week so I will email on Tuesday!

Also after the baptism I got the best complement I've ever had! During the interlude part of the baptism while L. was getting ready we got up and talked about baptism and the sacrament and bore testimony of it all and the restoration. After my Bishop came up to me and said "Elder Stucki when do you go home? It's soon isn't it?" I just laughed and said no I got a while. He said really? I said ya I haven't been out a year yet. Then he said "I thought you would be going home soon because you conduct yourself and teach like you have been out for 2 years already"

I do have to say I have felt the spirit working through me more lately then I ever have on my mission and I love it! I definitely know it is not always me when I'm talking and that is by far the best feeling when you know that the holy ghost is working through you!!

Yes. I have the Living Christ totally memorized. I'm just trying to learn and memorize as much as I can while I'm here because I learn so much better here then I ever have before. That's the help of the spirit I know!! It only took me 2 days to memorize it!! Crazy. I hung it up in the shower and I would read it in the morning and at night. There was a talk given last general conference and some one said, talking about The Living Christ, "some members have memorized the things that it contains while the other members hardly know of its existence" I wanted to be on the good side of that so I chose to just memorize it all and it comes in handy!
(When he said it I don't think he was saying to memorize the whole thing, but to know about it, to be aware of it, if someone were to ask you about it. Do you feel that you could tell them what is in it and what it is about? You don't need to be able to recite it to them but I think its important to know the message it contains)

I got pulled over but I didn't get a ticket

It was first thing this morning we got in our car and the first road we come to is a huge road and the speed limit is 25. It is so easy to get up to 36 and tiwi wasn't on yet. So it didn't check me and there was a cop half a mile up the road. It was kinda funny because all of the registrations are expired and she was looking at it all and it was like. This is a $800.00 ticket for not having insurance and a signature on one of the papers. I explained it wasn't our car and what not. I told her tiwi is there to keep us in line and that is why I slowed down because it told me to. ha ha

I love you all. Have a good week!
Elder Ethan Stucki



September 19, 2017

This week went pretty good. We had a really good lesson with a recent convert L. We taught her the restoration and she is amazing. She has such a strong testimony of the gospel even with all of the negativity that her parents and family show towards her. We also had a good lesson with B. who is another investigator. He could be baptized the only thing that is holding him up is that he needs to get married. So that's something we are working on right now.

   I went on exchanges with Elder Christensen this past week as well in Buckley 2nd and that went really well. We had a focus on inviting some of their investigators to baptism but the lesson we had with them fell through. I guess they ended up putting her on date last night which is awesome! His companion Elder Perkins went home yesterday and is now back in St Geezy.  ha ha. Lucky boy. Nothing happened during transfers for me and Elder Heal. We are still together and still serving in the Enumclaw 2nd and 3rd wards. I'm still training and still the district leader...  We are getting like another 24 missionaries today and like 40 percent of our mission will be in training now.  We have lots of missionaries going home too! It's crazy!

The weather is crazy here!! For like the past 2 months it has been a smoke cloud here! There have been 2 big fires on the other side of Mount Rainier so all the smoke has been rolling right down into Enumclaw. It's tough to breathe. It was at one point so thick you couldn't see more then 200 yards but the rain came and washed all the smoke away.  2 weeks ago it was like way hot and it was hot all the way until like 3 days ago the clouds came rolling in and so did the rain. So it has been gray, wet and like 48 degrees. It changes so fast. I'm don't think I'm ready for the rain to come back again but oh well. I don't know if its because of the weather change or what but we just can't get people to talk to us lately. We have been doing a lot of tracting lately because we don't have a lot of people to teach. I have a love / hate relationship with tracting. I always hate starting and it is just hard to get myself to start tracting but once I get going and talk to the first person its kinda fun. You never know who is on the other side of the door and that's where all the good stories come from is tracting. You meet some interesting people out tracting!!

It is also where you see a lot of miracles. This past week Elder Heal and I set a goal to talk to every person we see. "while we are out and about" and that's hard to do because sometimes I just get caught up going through the plans we set for that day and don't talk to everyone we pass on the street. This week we were walking down the street after we set that goal and the first couple people we went to just blew us off until we were walking past this apartment and we saw this man out watering plants.  We stopped and got talking to him and he just stopped everything he was doing and talked with us. Elder Heal offered him a Book of Mormon and he turned it down. He started asking tons of questions! We ended up answering his questions for 45 minutes just one after another and every question he would ask we answered it by tying it back to the Book of Mormon and modern day prophets (one of the best things about missionary work is when the spirit brings things such as scriptures to your remembrance) and by the end the conversation he asked us for a Book of Mormon!!! We didn't even have to offer one to him again!! It was so awesome!!

I  told you last week how I memorized the Living Christ. It comes in handy!!! I used it several times this week while talking to people and its so cool because its like using the prophets and apostles testimonies to teach people!! It is a lot of fun!! I love this work its amazing!!

That's also crazy all the people getting married back home but good for them! Also fun you are in the house!! What is the upstairs like!?

Love you all
Elder Ethan Stucki



September 25, 2017

This week went really good. It was the first Saturday of the transfer so we had another finding festival that went pretty good! We set a goal to find 5 new investigators as a district and ended up finding 5 potentials. Hopefully those 5 potentials will become investigators. We found 2 really awesome potentials in our area which is nice. We have been struggling to find anyone lately so we are excited to go back and teach them! It was a pretty good day. It was weird because I woke up that morning and I was just excited to go out tracting. Which isn't always the case. I went with two other Elders, Elder Nielsen the first half and Elder Holden the second half. They are both pretty new they came out with Elder Heal and they are both studs. They are full of excitement which makes missionary work so much more fun when you can just be excited about it. We went the whole day just laughing and having fun as we talked to people and it made such a big difference.

One of the guys we talked to as we were just walking down the street laughing and we saw this guy and went up and just started talking to him. We could tell at first he wasn't interested but we just kept talking to him just about life and he used to play professional baseball! He is a little older now. We started teaching him about the Book of Mormon and left him with one to read. He told us that he usually never talks to "our people" but when he saw us he told us he just kinda "laughed inside" and said they are some characters ha ha. I love this work. I really do!!

One thing I have been trying to do is when I am out is just smiling and laughing the whole time because people notice the missionaries and when they see us laughing and having a good time I think that's something that most everyone wants! Two different people that we talked to on Saturday told us at the end of the conversation that they don't usually talk to the missionaries but something told them to today. I think it is about how we carry ourselves as we do the work. People notice the joy we have in our lives and they want it too.

This doesn't just go for missionaries. The same concept applies to everyone. I've talked to members before and they have had coworkers who came up to them and asked them about the church and the members never told them that they were members. But the people could tell because of the members example and how they acted. I think many times we can have missionary opportunities just by trying each day to be an example.

People are always watching what we are doing.  Anyways I guess what I'm trying to say is just try and be a good example as you go about your day. Laugh, have fun, be kind, serve others. These little actions can go a long way when people see you doing them!! I love this gospel and I know it is true! I'm so excited for conference this next week and I hope you all watch it and listen and take notes! It is a time for us to hear from living apostles and prophets and their council and guidance in these latter days! Like modern day scripture it is good stuff!!

I love you all and hope all is going well back at home!!

All of my buddies are doing really good too. Chance, Rio, Hayden and Kailor. I guess Kai Rockhill is going on a mission too!! That's awesome!
Everything is going good and the weather is starting to cool off which is nice. I don't know if I'm ready for all the rain though.

I love you all.
Elder Ethan Stucki