June 20th, 2016

Dear Family and Friends,

We were able to meet with Grant again is week. He said that after
reading the Book of Mormon passage we gave him, he made a decision
without really realizing it. Looking back on the experience he
realized he had chosen a good thing over a bad thing. He feels he is
being led to make good choices. I can see that reading in the Book of
Mormon and applying what he learns is helping him to have less
disposition to do evil.

We had a dinner teaching appointment with Walter and Terri, some
really friendly investigators we met a couple weeks back. We brought
Brother Pohmer with us because they have a similar religious
background. Brother Pohmer definitely helped relate to Walter and will
be a good fellowshipper for them. We probably won't be teaching Walter
anymore though because we ended up needing to be really bold with our
invitation to read the Book of Mormon and Walter wants to stay where
he is at. He thinks that as long as you know your destination it
doesn't matter which highway you take to drive there. We will follow
up with Brother Pohmer every couple weeks to see if Walter decides to
reach out since they got along so well.

Wednesday, helping the arriving missionaries with setting up their
iPads went a lot better this transfer. We had revised the instruction
sheet so that it was simpler and in a different order. The only
problem that we had was that Sister Pead turned on her iPad and it
didn't have the church restrictions setup, so we had to give her
another iPad. When she turned that iPad on it also didn't have the
church restrictions. So we got a third iPad (I turned it on just in
case Sister Pead had more bad luck and because we didn't have anymore
spare iPads) which thankfully worked.

After helping with iPads, we worked on the picture by zone that we
needed to send out that night before transfers in the morning.
President Daines didn't have all of the transfer assignments settled,
so we ended up getting sent away to the other room again to "take a
nap" while President Daines finished the board. President Daines
couldn't really decide on whether or not he wanted to transfer Elder
Low to Mansfield or leave him in Powell. Prior, in the morning, we
were told he was leaving and so he started packing. Now that President
was done with the board, he settled on keeping him in Powell, but said
that he might transfer him in a week. I think he may be toying with us
and we have no idea when, if at all, a transfer will happen. After we
were done and we got back to the apartment, we got to bed at 2AM. A
new tech elder record for me!

Transfers went fairly smooth on Thursday. Despite not having the
Brower's, there were a couple of zone leaders that stayed and offered
their help so that there wasn't as much of a burden on the mission
office staff.

Friday, before we started updating the assignment histories on the
back of the transfer board cards, President Daines said he only wants
me to write on the cards because he can't read Elder Low's
handwriting. That kind of irked Elder low a bit and messed with our
schedule because now we had to find something for him to do while I
wrote the assignment histories (which will take twice as long now.)

I have been trying to make companion studies more effective because
lately some studies just turn into tangent upon tangent and I want to
get back to studying doctrine. I have been trying to use the mission
study plan and Preach my Gospel more to focus our studies, but have
been facing some resistance from Elder Low when suggesting different
things we study.

All of the "study and discuss" sections from the fundamentals lessons
have been really painful to go through and there is a lot of dead air.
I can barely get him to offer more than a one word answer or half a
sentence without needing to coax more involvement out of him. I know
he has more insights to share and I have heard lots of great things
from him in the past. I don't know if he is just not wanting to try
the fundamentals because he feels the principles are so basic and
obvious that they are not worth discussing. Maybe there is something
more I can be doing to make these fundamentals interesting and
applicable.

In Sacrament Meeting, Elder Low and I were able to stand in on the
confirmation for Alyssa Carson. Her baptism was Saturday and the
bishop, stake president, mission president, and former bishop were all
there. It was funny to see how much priesthood leadership showed up
for a nine-year-old's Baptism. The baptism went really well though,
and the Carson's are now preparing to go to the temple.

Instead of having speakers in Sacrament Meeting this week, the meeting
was opened up to the congregation to come up and share about a hymn
that has influenced their life. After their comments, the congregation
would sing the first and last verses of the hymn. It was an
interesting meeting, probably the most unique sacrament meeting I have
attended.

After church, the Relief Society brought in a lot of pies for the
elder's quorum and high priests for Father's Day. There were a lot of
pies and it was really nice of them to go through all that effort.

We didn't have a dinner planned, so Bishop Stevenson invited us over
to dinner at his house where they were grilling some food for a get
together with some family and a family from the ward. We talked to
Brother Rogers about a fly gun that his kids got him for Father's Day.
You load it up with table salt and then it shoots like a shotgun. He
was really excited to try it out and we may get a video of it in use
in the next week or two.

We also talked with the Stevenson's son (or son-in-law, I don't
remember) and he had some really funny stories from his mission to
share. Him and his companion were using a crockpot on a metal counter.
They noticed that if they had their hand on the counter then every
time they went to stir it with their metal spoon, they would get
shocked and the spoon would go flying across the room. One time, he
also had a tiny black fleck in his eye that he couldn't get out. So he
took a super soaker, held his eye open, and shot his eye at an angle
trying to flush it out. Bad idea.

Have a great week everyone.

--
Elder Aaron King
Ohio Columbus Mission