Ethan Wasden - California, Anaheim Mission 2017-19

Hello everybody,  This week has been crazy spiritual and crazy fun and while on a mission fun and spiritual just go so well together. The Area I am in is known as Tustin Meadows, and it is a more humble place than you would originally find. It also has a lot of Spanish and it makes me wish I would have paid attention more to my Spanish classes. We are constantly teaching people and now have 20 investigators! I am definitely not bragging here, because all of them came before I got here. We did, in this week alone, put six of them on date to be baptized and I am excited to see them progress towards that goal.      The last amazing thing that happened this week was a stake conference. We got to hear our mission president speak and we also got to hear Elder Karren of the 70 speak. They both are amazing spiritual giants, and I am super happy to know that those are some of the men that are help leading this church. That is all I have for this week and I am super grateful for all

Hey Everyone,   So today is transfers and because it is transfers it makes it all the harder to write emails, but since I have not written a group email in a while I decided I was going to at least do that.      To start I am moving from the Birch Hills Ward, which is one of the most northern parts of my mission, down to Tustin Meadows, which is the most southern part of my mission. Sounds like a long way doesn't it? Well, in truth it isn't that far at all, because my mission being pretty small.  In fact, it is the smallest proselyting mission in the world. Not quite sure how it will go, but I do have high hopes in everything.      This week, as well as every other week, has been an amazing experience. The biggest part of these last few weeks was having Elder Uchdorf come and speak to us in a mission conference, and also getting to shake his hand was pretty cool too.  It is difficult to describe the amazing feeling that filled my heart as I listened to him speak to us

Hey everyone, So this week has been another slow week. We did pretty close to 20 hours of finding this week, and I must say that when it comes to the major differences between California and Utah, there is no bigger difference then the fact that Californians don't talk to each other at all.  While Utah people seem to be more open and tend to communicate with each other more. We asked a lot of people this week if we could help them and do any kind of service for them, and they all seemed shocked to hear someone offer such a thing. They all told us they were good, and we ended up with pretty much no discussions this week and no service.  I was feeling pretty down on myself. Then I remembered something that my dad and I had gone through before my mission. We were in Salt Lake and we were driving down a road and I was pretty much passed out in the passenger seat. All of sudden my dad pulled over and got out of the car. I was not sure what was going on, but I got out to a

Hey Everyone, These last few weeks have been pretty crazy due to the holidays, and I have had a lot of surprises come this month. To start, we had a lot of people seemingly come out of nowhere and want to learn more about our faith, which is super awesome for us. A couple we are teaching is still going strong, and we are hoping that we will be able to help them grow closer to Jesus Christ in any way we can. We did have a pretty solid potential pop up, but sadly he has been avoiding us and there is not a whole lot we can do for him since we can't even meet with him.  Luckily we are still able to pray for him. We had an awesome encounter with the Persian Culture. We had set up a return appointment with a couple and they welcomed us back with open arms and when they invited us inside we instantly knew that we were in for an out-of-the-country experience. We gave them a Book of Mormon in Farsi, took off our shoes and tried to teach them (Notice the word tried). We had an awesome

"What Jesus Did for Me" by Yongsung Kim Hello everybody, This week has been pretty crazy as far as experiences go. However, I have to say that I have loved all the emails you have sent! It has helped me through my hardest times and I am super happy to know that I have such great examples inspiring me. So my experience takes place on Thursday night. We were about to head in for the night when I thought to go see if a potential investigator was home.  We walked up to his house, but decided not to knock because of how late it was. We went next door and talked to a man standing outside and he was not interested, but still super nice. So as we were walking back to our bikes and stopped in front of his house and decided to give it a knock... the potential opened the door and he stood there looking at us as though he had seen an angel. He invited us in before we could get a word out and as we sat down he told us why he was so excited to see us. Literally, right before we k