It warmed up to 50 last night!!! How amazing, we had snow melting and everything. It was some really enjoyable weather and I am really happy that it did. The sun never came out though. Gray clouds are depressing. Saturday and Sunday was Stake Conference. We went to Neenah on Saturday to watch the session there. The main focus of the meeting was sharing the gospel through social media. I was happy to see this but somewhat disappointed that we as missionaries won't be able to take part in the Stake Presidents vision. I guess we will have to wait. On Sunday there were several great talks given and wonderful stories shared. The talk that stuck out to me most however was of a younger woman in her early 20's. Her entire talk was on her testimony of the Atonement; it was beautiful and inspiring. The spirit filled the room and I was greatly appreciative that she shared with us that amazing and hope-filled message of the Atonement.

In other news, on Saturday I bought $2 gloves with rubber grips on them for the upcoming Oshkosh Ward Turkey Bowl game. They are work gloves meant for the winter so now I will have warm hands on Thursday and grip to catch the ball. I'm excited for football!

Appleton District at Stake Conference.
I'm the shutter guy so I made the most of jumping in.

Transfers were on Wednesday. Elder Stevenson has moved to the Neenah ward. I was able to see him at Stake Conference. My new companion is Elder Merrill. He is from Idaho Falls, Idaho. He has four older siblings, and none younger. He is a 2014 High School graduate and will be attending BYU-I after his mission. He has one nephew and two baby nieces (both were born after he entered the MTC; bummer). He played golf in high school. Elder Merrill has been out on his mission 5 months as of December 2^nd so he's still on the younger side at18. I was a little shocked when I made the connection that he was born in 1996, the same year as my sister Adrienne. I'm serving with someone just barley older than her!!! Crazy stuff! Elder Merrill is a pretty chill guy. He loves to have a positive attitude so I think with two optimists we are going to see great work get accomplished in this area. Already we have seen a small difference in the work, with a few new names for us to put on the board. He wants to spend some time with the former investigators and also the less actives. So we will be seeing more of that style of work get done. Where will all this take us and will we be seeing someone make the steps towards baptism? Who knows, but we will be working for it.

Mr. Chill, my new companion - Elder Merrill from Idaho Falls.
 

It was a good week. We had our service projects, lots of tracting, and a few appointments with people. A less active family that we are meeting with has agreed to take the missionary lessons in order to help get their two daughters baptized. This family is a lot of fun to have lessons with because the mom really makes sure that the kids pay attention instead of horsing around or monkeying around. I will make this comment though. The 4 year old boy is super funny when he talks. He still has this great innocent kid’s voice and he is full of spontaneous energy and he loves to talk your ear off about the wildest things. He shared with me a story once and I just about died of laughter because this kid is so darn cute. Maybe someday I will get a video of him and share it when I get home.

Elder Stevenson's last Animal Shelter day. 
The cat decided that his hair needed a cleaning.

Video of the week: http://www.mormon.org/christmas#d

Love you all,
Elder Luymes



This is the two foot salmon that Bro. Fisher gave us two weeks ago. This baby was a monster to prepare, cook, and clean up after. We never got sick and it fed us many wonderful meals

This was given to me at a luncheon at the airport where we do service on Thursdays. EAA is a bunch of great people, simple work and free food on Thursday.

 

Oh man it’s cold. Snow came down twice this week. The first snow came and melted before noon the same day. The second snow storm came and only dumped an inch on us at best, however it is so cold that the snow hasn't melted and it could be here to stay. The weather we are having right now is what we would normally expect in December. An early winter is not welcomed by anyone and now only begs the question: Spring comes early too, right? I'm hoping so, that would be a great way to end the mission with an early spring :)

Our week was one uncontrollable roller-coaster. Due to the lack of success we are seeing at the present moment the Zone Leaders decided to blitz our area. A blitz is like an exchange but where both companionship's stay in one proselyting area. So with four Elders in Oshkosh we set out to work hard and make miracles happen. They certainly did. We taught a lot of lessons, we met a lot of people and we set up 8 appointments. It was very exciting to see this much growth all in a time period of 24 hours. The Zone Leaders stayed the night at our place too so we cooked some brats and enjoyed a delicious meal and a buffet the next day for lunch. On Thursday Elder Stevenson and I worked hard to get as many members as possible to the lessons we had scheduled. By Thursday night we had 7 member present lessons planned. We were so excited, and thrilled that we would be able to conclude this amazing week with even more great stuff to happen. Friday came, then Saturday, then Sunday. All 7 of our member present lessons either were cancelled or dropped, and none of our backup plans worked either. Nobody was home. Tracting is always the backup’s back up, so we did a lot more tracting and after several hours of doing so and not being able to talk with anybody. I vocally asked the question: What! Is there a Badger game on or something and everybody is out watching it at the bars? Sure enough, at the very next house we approached I could see through the windows the Badger game playing. The gentleman answered the door and I asked him the score (with the full intention of trying to start a conversation that would lead into something related to Jesus Christ). He informed me that the Badgers were winning and that he was not interested in our religious message. It was a heartbreaking way to conclude a week.

We did service at the Humane Society on Thursday. This time we played with the kittens first. They are an energetic bunch who love to play and explore. They were a lot of fun. I have several great photos but I will have to save those for next week because I forgot my camera cord. Elder Stevenson is getting transferred to Neenah which is a small city just 15 minutes north of Oshkosh. It is also south of Appleton (If you want to know a little geography). I'm sad to see him go after only serving with him for one transfer. My new companion is someone I don't know anything about but I am certainly optimistic that he and I can change things around here in Oshkosh. Our ward is having a Turkey bowl on Thanksgiving morning, that's exciting!!!

Scripture for the week: Omni 1:26

And now, my beloved brethren, I would that ye should come unto Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation, and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him, and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him, and continue in fasting and praying, and endure to the end; and as the Lord liveth ye will be saved.

Love,

Elder Luymes

 

Guess what!!! I made waffles again on Sunday! This time we had milk, water, eggs, and everything else we needed. So no funny business and the waffles turned out perfect. Our Sunday lunch consisted of waffles, desert from a member that we got last week, and some carrots. The blessings have been poured out upon us, the blessings of food. Food blessings are great and much appreciated. Let me tell you what we have in our fridge right now and how we got some of these food items. On Tuesday a member gave us a whole rotisserie chicken and we currently have that thawing out for lunch. Then on Wednesday a member called us very unexpectedly and without giving away any details he said "meet me at the Virgin Mobil store" We pulled into the parking lot and found his truck. He climbs out and throws at us a two foot long frozen salmon. We starting gawking at it and he shared with us how this is the smallest fish that he caught and since we had been so persistent in asking for one he decided to share with us. So now our freezer has a huge fish in it. On Saturday we were asked to help clean the church building. Boring right? Wrong! We found in the freezer 25 brats and 10 hamburger patties. We asked the member if he thought if it was okay for us to take them. He said yes but we decided to wait till Sunday to see if anyone would take them. Sunday (Yesterday) came and nobody from church took them. So Sunday night we called another member and asked if he knew anything about them and he didn't. He also gave us permission to take them. So with the permission of two members we took home 25 brats and 10 hamburger patties. We estimate that we have about 30 pounds of meat in our fridge right now. Pretty sweet huh!

Waffles for Sunday Lunch!

Other than glorious food, our week was mainly occupied with tracting and service. We did a lot of tracting for many hours this week. The cold weather is certainly not ideal but we need to find somebody to teach. Our service projects consisted of EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) which is an airport in Oshkosh where private planes are built and developed. So we often see some pretty nice birds flying in the air. At EAA we usually help out in the mail room moving heavy boxes for mailing and all of their many advertisements to EAA members. We also work the food line at Salvation Army. We had fewer people than normal show up to Salvation Army. But we get a great opportunity to talk to people of very different backgrounds. It’s fun when certain people come in that we know better because they know how to interact with us and goof off a little. We helped out with some of the members throughout the week too. We helped a senior sister move out of her apartment and put stuff in storage. She is very anxious to leave Wisconsin and get to Florida before winter really hits us hard. We helped another family with raking leaves. We spent a solid hour and a half raking and bringing the leaves to the curb for city pick up. The two dogs that this member has are very playful and I kept suggesting that we tie a rake to them and get them to help out too since they had so much energy, The last member that we helped was putting up their storm windows to help keep the warm air in. This project was a little interesting because the member kept hauling around this ladder to help us screw in the holds that prevent the windows from falling out of the frame. I found it funny because he would go through so much effort to haul this ladder everywhere from window to window. He didn't need to do this because I was easily able to climb up on something and reach the screws and put them in place. My 6ft 3inches was lot of help in this project. It also made things go by a lot faster because we didn’t need to place the ladder among all the plants and trees.

Lake Winnebago - bordering Appleton, Neenah, Oshkosh and Fon du Lac
districts.  We tract in this neighborhood and skip a rock or two.

The cold is creeping in. This week we are supposed to hit the teens and potentially some heavy snow fall today and tomorrow. Next week is transfer week. I doubt that I am moving but you never know.

Scripture for the week: 2 Nephi 12:3

 3 And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

Thank you, much love,

Elder Luymes

Dear Santa -- please send me two new shirts for Christmas.
The spray starch is doing a number on my shirts.

Happy Halloween, Zone Conference last Thursday, playing with cats, a ridiculously long train, and someone backed into our car. Does it sound like a crazy week? It sure was.

Tuesday was perhaps not the best day for us. We had several appointments cancel and it was the only day that we had a lesson with a non-member for the entire week. On the plus side of Tuesday; we met with a returning less active named A___, he is awesome and lots of fun to be around. He has a strong interest with Family History work and so we have been sharing with each other success stories that we have had in finding people and adding memories to the family tree. A___  has a medical chair to help support him that was broken. His back was aching so we took a look at the chair and decided how we were going to fix it on Wednesday because we didn't have the right tools on hand.

Wednesday was the day of no proselyting. I promise that I'm not a lazy, disobedient Elder. We drove 30 minutes in the morning to contact 4 referrals at a mobile home park. We searched far and wide and never found the park. This is also when we got stuck waiting for a very long train that stopped, then backed up, then inched forward. We lost 30 minutes waiting for this train all the way out in the boonies of Oshkosh. When we got home we changed and went over to the Humane Society. The cats were a lot of fun. Since it was our first time we didn't have much of an idea of what to do in the very beginning but we started improvising and we figured out a basic idea. One thing that we learned in the third cat room is to not beat-box with the cats. Its gets them all riled up and then they start to fight with each other. It’s not entirely my fault; Elder Stevenson was doing it to. After the cats we fixed A___’s chair and now it works like a charm. For dinner we went to Domino's and this is where the car got hit. The guy backed up his car and says he never saw our car and so now we have a nice dent on the left side of our rear bumper. We exchanged info, called the police because the church says to do so and guess what we learned... The man has a suspended license. Cool, that took up two hours and it only left us with one more thing to do in our day that wasn't proselyting; basketball with the Young Men. 

Umm. I'm playing with a cat.  Really I am.



He climbed up on my lap.  Now what do I do?

We had zone conference in Appleton on Thursday. That was a great training meeting and I love President and Sister Cutler. After the meeting we had to spend two hours filling out our accident report so that made up our entire Thursday. Not much happened on Halloween too. Because of church policy we can't proselyte after 5pm so we spent much of our time with a member family, an older couple and of course, tracting.

Fender Bender #2. Do you see my name on the car? Twice.

 That really sums it all up for the week. The weeks go by fast and they get colder too. Mid 50’s is now considered very warm. Let’s all pray for a warm winter.

Scripture for the week: Alma 13:15

 15 And it was this same Melchizedek to whom Abraham paid tithes; yea, even our father Abraham paid tithes of one-tenth part of all he possessed.

Thank you, love,

Elder Luymes

Zone Conference 10-30-14

Zone Conference Lunch 10-30-14, love the pink striped tye from mom.

Mouthful smile.