Jared Howell Mission

Hey Everyone, It was kind of an up and down week, but I'm going to focus on the positives in the interest of time. We have this guy that we're teaching who Elder Patterson was teaching his first transfer but stopped meeting with the missionaries last transfer. A couple weeks ago he called us up and asked to meet again. As Elder Patterson has told me about their lessons before versus our lessons now, it's amazing to watch how God can prepare his children even more for the Gospel in such little time. He is so willing to learn now because he recognized the Spirit missing from his life when he stopped meeting with the missionaries, which is super awesome. We also got to sit down and talk with a guy that Elder Patterson has been trying to get in with for weeks. we asked him about his past experiences with missionaries, apparently they used to come by a few years ago, then he asked us about a couple of things that he had heard about the church from Southpark. That lea...

Hey everyone, This was a pretty awesome week. I really don't know what to write about, so this will probably be all over the place. Zone Conference was awesome, even though it ended up being 11 hours long. We talked a lot about repentance and how we can teach it more clearly as well as apply it better as missionaries. one of the best moments was when we were walking back from a break and Elder Christensen, one of my zone leaders, looks at me and says, "watch this." He was conducting so he gets up and continues the meeting, then bears a brief testimony, in which he says, "We're not the missionaries Baltimore deserves, but we're the ones it needs." (Which is a Batman quote for those who didn't get it) By that point we'd all been there for so long we just cracked up.  We met this guy who was sitting down on his porch, which is what a lot of people do here, and so we started talking to him. He had been drinking a bit and I just plugged in...

Hey Everybody, Elder Patterson and I were both fighting colds this week so we were moving a bit slower than before, but all in all it was still a pretty good week.  We had an awesome lesson with a lady named Destiny on Tuesday, she's a less active's daughter. She was really touched by the Book of Mormon. We ended up doing weekly planning on Wednesday instead of our normal Thursday because Elder Patterson felt really sick. We decided to pull out of the city a bit, so we stayed in Essex all day Thursday. We ended up tracting all day and got rejected by every single door we knocked on. The one miracle we saw was while we were walking down the road on our way back to our apartment for dinner. There was a small 9/11 memorial and an old Vietnam Vet sitting on a bench. We went over and started talking to him and ended up having an amazing conversation about God's love and how he helps us in our trials. I told him the story about footprints in the sand, it's a poem ...

Hey Everyone, This has been a fun week out here in Baltimore. Readjusting to the bus schedule has been interesting, we literally have to plan our lives around when the bus is going to come. Brother Wight drove me down to Essex and Elder Patterson and I got right to work. We stopped by one potential and he let us right in. We started teaching the Restoration and when we got to the first vision, he went off on how the trinity doesn't make sense, the most memorable phrase was, "Y'all got a pronoun problem." It was hilarious.  Then on Thursday we had a lesson with a recent convert family, the kids got baptized a couple of weeks ago. Probably the craziest lesson I've ever had because not only was that family there, but also two of the mom's sisters and their families, so including us, there were more than 20 people in that room, most of them kids, so yeah, that was fun. Friday we had a lesson with a part member family, their daughter is getting baptized...