General Conference!

 (Elder Slade)

To the best friends and family a person could hope for!

Another week of miracles! This week God helped us put two people on date for baptism! Lisa is getting baptized on Oct 16. She is an awesome woman who has had a rough life. Neveah is getting baptized the 26th, and she is one of the easiest girls you'll meet. We are excited for both of them! There have been several awesome miracles that have led them to where they are, allowing them to enter the covenant of baptism, and take that next step towards Christ!

General Conference was also this week! It was SO good! I loved all of the speakers! Onf of my favorite was by Marcus B. Nash about sharing the gospel. He listed a few of the blessings of the gospel:

-Sharing the gospel brings joy and hope in both the giver and the reciever!

-Sharing the gospel brings power into our lives!

-Sharing the gospel brings protection from temptation!

-Sharing the gospel brings healing!

I have felt the truthfulness of these blessings as I have served for the past 20 months! Sharing the gospel has brought me so much joy, and above all else, it has brought me closer to my Savior Jesus Christ! I love this work! I love my mission! I wouldn't want to trade it for anything!

Love yall!

Pictures:

1. A picture we sent to Lisa hyping her up for her baptism!

2. I went on an exchange with Elder Johnson, who was my first District Leader in the mission. Pretty exciting!

3-4. Went on a hike early this morning, and it was beautiful!

5. We went to Kneaders for breakfast Saturday morning before general conference and got the unlimited French toast! To die for! Elder Rollins has also been with us for  a few days. His flight to his original mission, Brazil, got cancelled, so he stayed with us for a few days until they flew him out. He is an amazing missionary!

S9 E4: "Yes, I believe in Jesus"

 (Elder Cummings)

What's up y'all!!

         So we have a friend named Bruce. He's from mainland China right. The missionaries have been teaching him English and the Gospel of Jesus Christ for about 6 months now. This man is awesome. We meet with him 4x a week to help him and he is always coming with more and different "Bruce-snacks"(Chinese snacks ranging from a sponge cake that could outlast a Twinkie by at least a century to vacuum packaged spicy tofu). Then on his off days on Tuesday he always invites us over to cook us an authentic Chinese meal. He's so awesome.

          It's been so cool working with him though. Just last week he was talking about how being a Christian is hard back in China. He said, "if someone ask me 'Bruce, are you Christian?' it is difficult to tell them but deep down, my first thought is "Yes. I believe in Jesus. Yes, I believe in Jesus".

           This week we asked him. "Bruce, is baptism your goal?" And he said "yes brothers, it is very hard for me, but yes I want it". Please please please pray for Bruce. If there is anything you get from this email it's PRAY FOR BRUCE. This is a man who 6 months ago couldn't tell you anything about Jesus Christ besides that he was a leader and now he has faith in Him unto repentance and believes that it is through Him that he can be truly happy, and ultimately be saved. For reasons we can't fully understand because of the language and culture barrier, this is a very hard decision for him. Please pray for him. He needs strength and faith beyond his own.

We're fixing to have a great week y'all. Looking forward to tell y'all about it!

Elder Cummings

Rain and Rescheduling and conference

 (Sister Putnam)

Hello, everyone!!

Well, the rain has officially started back up in Washington, and it's super cold now!

General conference was wonderful this weekend! We watched the Saturday evening session with our friend Anna. She said loved it and enjoyed Sister Eubanks talk about the church's humanitarian aid. She also really loves that we believe in living prophets and it's so cool to see her testimony grow!

Amy was still sick this week but we hope to give her a baptismal date on Wednesday so pray for Amy!!

Sister Alyssa Putnam

Craziness, guitars, and weddings

 (Elder Slade)

To the best friends and family a person could hope for!

It's been a crazy week! This week was transfers, and we've been swamped helping pick up new missionaries, dropping off missionaries, figuring out transfer transportation, and doing trainings. It's been a blast, but pretty exhausting! I've learned SO much from my new companion Elder Gurney. He is from Utah, and is such a good missionary! I feel like I'm getting trained a second time by him! 😂

Despite all the craziness, we've been seeing miracles in our new area. We found 4 new people to teach! One of them is a kid named Beckham who loves guitar. We started the lesson singing a hymn while I played guitar, and he really opened up after that! He said he would love to keep being taught by us! He has such a strong faith in Jesus Christ! It's awesome! The Lord gives us talents to connect with certain people he puts in our path!

We had another sweet experience where another person that we're teaching, named Lisa, got married! We went to her wedding, and now she is that much closer to baptism! She is hopefully getting baptized this month!

Anyways! I love you all!

1. Saying goodbye to Elder Thomas

2-3. Selfies with Elder Gurney!

S9 E3: Helping hands (cont.)

 (Elder Cummings)

Howdy y'all!

This week was a blur. With Zone Conference, exchanges, and hurricane relief efforts, it seems like I was typing the last email just yesterday.

Zone Conference was awesome though. Since Hurricane Ida, President Amos said that he's been getting lots of people telling him "it's hard, I just don't feel like a missionary". I have been one of these people. With the aftermath of Ida, a lot of our time has been taken with clean up and relief efforts. A couple weeks into it I started wishing that we could just have "normal" days of finding, teaching and baptizing. Basically I just wanted to proselytize as much as possible. And then President Amos pulls up and smacks down on how there is not much better to do than for missionaries, representatives and ambassadors of Christ, to serve and help those who cannot help themselves. I realized how selfish I had been. I had not been there for Ida, I was 300 miles away almost in Arkansas. Our apartment got power in 3 days, others got power after a month, some still don't have power. I genuinely felt chastised by the Spirit. These people needed help, and they weren't worried about hearing a message about Christ at this moment, they were worried about how they're gonna get to Walmart to buy food for their kids when there is a 3 feet wide tree trunk lay across their driveway.

It almost seemed no surprise when President called me and Elder Smith Friday night to be at the Gonzales Command Center at 6:30am the next two days. We woke up at 5 to drive the distance there, only to figure out that we would be the ones handing out the tools and supplies to those heading out to work sites, not the actual "laborers". Honestly not what we had expected, or wanted, but it was a great time for me to exercise charity and a better attitude about service. Afterall, God isn't gonna give me charity, He's gonna give me opportunities to be charitable

Have a blessed week!

Elder Cummings

Photo dump:

1. Some good ol chicken and waffles

2-5. Clean up

6. Random pic of me and elder Smith

7.another random one

8. Us and our mission presidents wife's 92 year old mom

Transfers again??

 (Sister Putnam)

Hey everyone!

This week we had transfers again, and Sister Hatton & Wayman left Alderwood, so the first half of last week consisted of us going out so that Sister Hatton could say goodbye to our friends.

Then Wednesday came, and we showed up to transfers. After awhile of being there, and everyone knowing who their new companion would be, I still hadn't received my new comp.  So, I asked the APs and they said that my new companion would arrive on Thursday, and she's a Sister coming from the Nauvoo historic sites, coming to do the proselytizing part of her mission. So Sister Fodnes and I were companions for the day!

So I met her on Thursday, and she is wonderful! Her name is Sister Rice and she and another Sister, Sister Wayment, came to the mission from Nauvoo! I am learning a lot from her!

We gave a lesson to a family using paper airplanes this week. For those of you who are missionaries, you might want to snatch this idea for kids!

🛩Paper airplanes! As you make the paper airplanes with the family, have them write by each fold the things they do to choose the right. This is how we allow the lord to shape us. And because we allow the lord to shape us we can go a lot further than without those things, like a paper airplane vs an untouched piece of paper.

Sister Alyssa Putnam

S9 E2: "A lesson and a blessin'."

 (Elder Cummings)

So we're cruising down the windy road in the RAV4, trying to find the neighborhood we had planned to contact in. We get there. We turn right. We park. We get out. And BOOM. There is a man decked out in BYU gear standing outside of his trailer waiting for us.

"I thought I seen y'all" he says as he waves us inside. We weren't planning on visiting with him, we didn't even know he lived there, we didn't know HIM, but we walk in.

Besides behind his Christmas tree that was still up, there is not a foot of space on the walls between his pictures and paintings of family, Jesus, and Church History. We look down at his coffee table and see stacks of temple names. This guy is such an amazing man and we could feel it when we walked in.

"Brother Walters" he says as he shakes our hands with a grip only those 35 lbs dumbells at the foot of his couch could produce, "and I'm glad y'all came today".

As we get talking with him we learn that he was having a rough day. He felt that the devil was attacking from all and every side. He said he had read his scriptures, did some temple work, and been saying prayers and could just not get bad thoughts out of his mind. We were able to share a quick message and he looks at us and says "Boys, I believe I prayed y'all here. Y'all ain't leavin till I get a blessin' ".

We were able to give him a blessing and it seemed that a load was just taken off of him afterwards. He smiled his Cajun smile and gave us the biggest hug. We had never even met him before.

God works in mysterious ways. He has a plan for us all. He answers prayers. I am so so grateful that I was able to be part of an answer to another of His children. He is aware of us. And this is all because He loves us. And "in this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him"(1 John 4:9).

Have a blessed week y'all!!

Elder Cummings