Robert vs. The Trailer Door

Maik!!!

Okay I don't have a ton of time to write here but I will see how fast my fingers can fly.  We are lucky enough to email at a members house since everything else is closed.  I got some weird news for ya though.  I'm TRAINING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  What the heck...President Batt better know what he's doing.  He said I was the best teacher in the mission but I highly disagree with him and hopefully I can show my greenie how to survive on the rez.  Hopefully he knows how to talk to people and isn't a very "large" guy because where he will be sleeping will only leave you a few inches to move around and that's for me.  I leave tonight for Farmington and pick up my trainee tomorrow morning.  Here we go!  Should be fun!  I love White Mesa though, hopefully the Ute have gotten somewhat used to me.  Before you are able to anything with most natives you have to be their friend first and let them know they can trust you.  We do lots of service again which I am very ok with....feeding horses, lots of weeding and small mechanics works and whatnot.  Lots of fun.  The winter should bring some interesting challenges here. 

To make matters more exciting....just because we are on the Rez things have to go wrong it just comes with the area.  The last few days there has been a Bear Dance that the Utes hold every year...basically a big party but I will talk more about the detailed stuff when I get home.  We have spent a lot of time listening to pow wow music since it's just a couple hundred yards behind our camper so we get to stay up til like 2 am every night listening to Native songs....which as you know is just a lot of ahhhhh yaaaaaa ahhh yaaaa's and whatnot.  I actually have grown to really enjoy it and when I get home everything I own will Native decoration on it.  but ya we walk in our camper to end the night and then we try to go back out to lock the truck and the door is jammed.....wont budge...nothin....so we were locked inside last night with a broken door.  Elder Mclaren decided to put some muscle into it and rammed the door which is usually how we get it open anyways....nothin.  But the glass all broke and scattered everywhere! Mission accomplished right?  SOOOO....we had to go out the "emergency exit."  Which I am pretty sure that the people that designed this camper really didn't think anyone would ever use it because it is extremely inefficient and difficult to squeeze through a dinky little window thats about 9 feet off the ground.  I volunteered to pull some ninja moves and had Elder Mclaren hold my ankles as I "gracefully fell" out the window onto the nice hard rocks and goat heads.  It went well, really and didn't hurt that bad.  Felt kinda cool pulling some James Bond moves.  I busted Elder Mclaren out the front door and we are all good to go!  Who needs a working door right?  My trainee is gonna start for a wild ride:)  So we will be sleeping with no door for the next few days until it is fixed.  Welcome to the Rez :)  Well I got to go clean our camper up a bit and get ready to go to Farmington..at least I get top bunk now so I'm happy!  Thanks for everything! I heard about the BSU game....whatever....I say we will go 8-4 this year...anyways I will probably write some more tomorrow because my trainee will need to write home.  Toodles! 

Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs. White Mesa

Maik!!! 

New language?  Yep.  New everything?  Yep.  So my last companion went home last Friday, that was pretty rough but I agree that it was needed.  Sad to see someone go home.  He will be back out in 6 months hopefully though.  In the meantime we had interviews with President Batt last Tuesday and after he told me Elder Brown was going home he told me that he was probably going to keep me and the other Blanding elders together til the end of the transfer or move me to a rez area.....he asked me if I was alright with going back to the rez.....I couldn't hold myself back and I said HECK YA! YOU KIDDIN ME!?  I'm sure he doesn't get that response every time he asks that question.  I felt kinda stupid cause that was a little disrespectful the way I said it just blurted outta my mouth but he just laughed and gave me a hug and sent me out.  Well, Tuesday night I wasn't expecting a phone call but President told me that I was being moved tooooo......White Mesa!  That was completely unexpected.  White Mesa is like 10 miles south of Blanding on the UTE reservation.  There are a lot of Navajo's we teach as well.  Wednesday mornin I had a new area and a new companion.  Crazy.  

I am with the Ute now and its pretty fun so far, they are very funny people they love to laugh a lot and joke around.  Extremely idle though....a lot more then Hopi.  There are about 100-150 people in White mesa...so uber small and then we cover a huge amount of land that basically is just random little housing communities of 3 or 4 in the middle of nowhere and the rest of it is just random trailers on the sides of cliffs and whatnot.  Its pretty fun not gonna lie.  We have a 2013 Toyota Tacoma, its really nice.  I am driving and I think my off road skills have gotten way better over my mission I should be a rally car driver.  Don't worry though I'm not doing anything stupid, I am being safe.  We have like 2500 miles a month so we can go wherever we want and not runout basically.  My new companion is Elder Taylor Mclaren from Ketchikan, Alaska.  Go from Hawaii to Alaska..sweet.  I will take an Alaskan any day, respect.  He is a ton of fun and we get along great.   He just happened to get hooked on BSU during the 2005 fiesta bowl and he is basically a native Boisean when it comes to bronco football so we have a lot of good conversations.  He looks a lot like Llyr in a way its funny.  Yep, I am back to living in a dinky little camper again with no room to move around or put anything.  The church building can fit inside our gym at the Boise Stake Center, and I am back to defending myself from demon pitbulls and being the only people in the community that you can trust.   Sounds like home to me:)

The Branch Presidency is all marigadge (white) from Blanding.  We had a total of 20 people at church yesterday.  We also had a nationally known native flute player come do some songs for us in church it was awesome.  He lives like right by us so he said he will teach us how to make flutes and give us one.  I'm down!  But ya,  People will like you if here if you are lighthearted and are just yourself which I am all good with.  Natives can sniff out someone that is a "fake" so easy.  I love being back and able to testify of the Book of Mormon as a record of "YOUR" people and not "a record of the Native Americans" when talking to white people.  I guess kinda the fun story for the week was while Elder Mclaren was showing me the area we came up to this massive mini looking lake in the middle of our "road" and we didn't know what to do.  Couldn't go around it..can't go over..can't go under....so I got out and went and stuck a stick towards the edge to see how deep it was....a couple feet..no big deal.  We back up the truck about 100 feet and decided to go through it!  Aw man I love this mission thats all I gotta say.  Got some good speed and we went through that sucker...gosh I can just see you mom reading this and shaking your head in disapproval.  On the other side down the "road" and went into some cliff dwellings we found this super old shi'ma that let us in and Mclaren doesn't speak any Navajo really so I said what I could and she told us to sit down and she told us she wanted us to read to her.  She understood English fine but she can only respond in Navajo.  We handed her a Navajo Book of Mormon and asked her if she could read and she said no but you can!  and handed me the book...aw man..I got real nervous cause Navajo is so easy to say offensive things with just a slight change of a syllable.  I opened up to Moroni 10:3-5 and just went for it.  It was a little rough but I took my time and read to her and she was shaking her head in approval a lot and saying words over again that I said.  Then she told me that I read beautifully and she understood!  I was pretty pumped.  Never actually read Navajo to anyone before. I am sure I had a little help there a la Jacob Hamblin and Grandpas and uncle Nephi. She told us she was a member but hadn't been to church in over 10 years.  Hopefully she comes. Fun times!

Thats what she wrote for this week.  I'm sure more adventures to come.  Oh ya forgot to throw this in there.  Elder Mclaren just got his visa to Brazil a few weeks ago and he leaves September 9th.  Transfers are this week.  I have this week to learn my area, this week and then that's it!  It's going to be me and another guy that have no idea where we are driven around on the Rez in the dark...sketchy...very sketchy being in the dark out here.  But they I survived living on the hopi Rez for almost 8 months...pretty sure I got this, bring it on.

Thanks for everything 

Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs. Temple Trip

Loloma!!!

Well sorry for the later email, we just got back from the Monticello temple and the yearly temple trip.  That is a dinky little temple but pretty sweet that it just sits in the middle of a neighborhood.  Not so good a week this week.  I will tell you about it some time in detail when I get home.  Which is in like 5 months....weird.  Im an "old man" in the mission now.  I taught zone training on Thursday on Talking to People and the Book of Mormon.  I try to make my trainings and whatnot as entertain-able as possible because some missionaries think they have to be super serious and whatnot all day all the time.  Really bugs me.  Lighten up a little people! Missions are fun!  But ya I got some good laughs so I think I brightened peoples day hopefully.  It went well and a couple of points that I really emphasized on is just looking at people in the face and especially if your trying to bare testimony.  SO many missionaries just stare at the ground or something.....I want to shake them for not talking to people like a man.  Then next was baring SIMPLE testimony.  I have had to many companions that go on 2 or 3 minute rants and the person just sits there with a blank face and no attention.  We worked on baring simple powerful testimony in about 10-20 seconds.  I hope some good came out of it.  

We did get one new investigator but we weren't able to meet with him last week, so hopefully this week.  It seems that the investigators we do have are just intellectually interested not spiritually.  I'm tired of explaining to people that want to know how someone can write on gold plates or that think they are stumping me by asking where the gold plates are and if they could see them they would believe.  ugh...If someone can believe that Moses just smacked a rock and water gushed out, or that Jesus told someone to go grab a fish with a coin in its mouth then why is it so absurd to say that an angel came to Joseph Smith with a record engraven on golden plates?  Just comes to show that physical evidence will never be able to please the critic.  Ever.  Other then that not to much has happened this week.  The Temple was great and I think I am getting a hint of what I want to do with my life in 5 months....maybe!  I am enjoying it while I can and helping people as much as possible.  Thank you for everything

Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs Zone Training

Loloma!!!

Alrighty well this week went by in a blur.  We were able to have some good come out of this week with a less active family coming to church. They have an 8 year old girl they want to be baptized so we have been teaching them all.  The mother seems really desirous to live the gospel and do whats right but she has absolutely 0 support.  Pretty sure thats what keeps her mostly from being active.  The Father hasn't been active since he was 16 and he has some major word of wisdom problems that he doesn't seem to care to get rid of.  With that in mind, that is what we talked alot about with them this week.  Word of Wisdom.  It made me kinda sick to hear when we asked the father if he wanted to commit to live the word of wisdom he just said straight up he doesn't care.  I saw the mother out of the corner of my eye put her head down....I that hurt her pretty bad to hear that.  I felt obligated to basically rebuke him for that since he "didn't care."  I basically told him that when he came to the realization that he loved his family more then his addictions he would be able to stop.  He didn't have anything to say to that.  Then they all came to church!  Did my heart good to see that, we will see what happens this week.


Haven't been able to meet with our recent convert this week due to more health stuff with his daughter going to SLC a lot.  Hopefully everything will work out and he can progress.  The man that hadn't come to church for over 40 years has been active for about 2 months now so thats awesome to see. I broke the 110 copy mark for Book of Mormons handed out this week.  I don't have an exact count cause frankly I don't really care about the numbers but I know its somewhere around there.  I was asked to do a zone training on talking to people with the Book of Mormon, dangit....whatever it will be fun.  We are also speaking in 8th ward this week on "clean speech" so that should be interesting.  Got about 5 months left, going by quick...I suspect that I will be here til towards the end of October then I will move on to my last area.  Those last 12 weeks are going to go by so fast...especially if I get moved soon.  Oh ya mom, I remember one sunday at church you leaned over and told me that I had 23 weeks left til I came out....well I have like 22 weeks left til I come home.  Weird.  Well that's all she wrote folks!  Thanks for everything



Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs. Fancy Cars

Ya'aat'eeh!!!

I got my new companion from Hawaii this week.  Elder Brown.   Definitely a mix up from the usual Idaho/Utah companions.  I feel kinda dumb when people ask me where I'm from now when he tells them he is from Hawaii.  But hey whatever nothing can beat Boise.  We get along great and work well.  It was a bit rough the first couple of days but its all good now.  We have had a couple of great lessons this week and I am excited to actually have a companion that can talk to people.  Its weird we are extremely similar when it comes to likes and dislikes and whatnot, he's like my brother from Hawaii.  That tourist group I talked about last week was actually a pretty good car show and its awesome that they let us sit in all of those super fancy cars.  I think my favorite is that Chrome Lamborghini.  I don't have anything to report on really.  We've just been handing out a good number of Book of Mormons and doing services here and there.  I am enjoying Blanding and I am expecting to be here for another 3 months so I better just get as much out of it while I can. 

Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs. Tourist Groups

 A member took us out last Pday drivin around lookin at the Valley of the Gods and whatnot..pretty cool....I call this my cowgirl pose.

 I was burning up hardcore when we were unloading the food truck....

 Me trying to eat a peach as weird as possible....

A wall of Calypso lemonade 

We were all doing service and not 30 seconds when we stepped put of the car Elder Maupin in the grey stepped on a huge rusty nail and so we had to go to the hospital so he could get a Tetnis shot

Howdy Howdy!!!

I will be in Blanding for another 6 weeks!  I wasn't and am not expecitng to be moved anytime soon....probably my 2nd to last transfer maybe.  Our Mission President had a big conference to go to and for some reason that made this transfer only a 5 week transfer, so it will go by in a blur.....and this is random but for some reason there is a young man behind me swearing up a storm while talking on the phone and I couldn't take it anymore so I told him to watch his mouth and oh boy....ya I'm just going to turn around and keep emailing.  Great day!:)  Pretty sure if all 4 of us just stood up and walked over there since we are all quite larger then he is he would have an accident in his pants.He is like the little chihuahua that will only charge you if your back is turned like a coward.  

Anyways Elder Provard is going to Toadelena!  Jealousy!  Its a little mountain town about 45 mins southwest of Shiprock.  He has never been on the rez and the other 3 of us have spent a lot of time there and we have loaded him up with stories so hopefully he feels uncomfortable haha.  I'm so mean.  My new companion is Elder Brown.  Never met the kid and he hasn't even been out 6 months yet.  I think he just barely finished training.  This will be interesting and I'm sure slightly intimidating for him living with 3 other elders that have all hit their 18 month mark.  Hopefully I can show him a good time in Blanding and we get along well.  I have to be in Farmington tomorrow morning at 830 so we have to leave at 6 am.  Lots of driving tomorrow.  Love it.  Sometimes.

Not to much happened this week unfortunately.  Lots of town gossip and annoying setbacks.  We did have one great lesson though with really our only investigator.  We read 1 nephi 1 with him and he wanted to know how he could know it was true after drilling me with all of these Bible and other random history questions...so of course I directed him to Moroni 10:3-5.  He said okay well lets pray then!  I though he meant like at the end of the lesson or something so I was about to keep talking and then he just leans forward on the couch and lets out a big softy sincere prayer.  It was really good and we didn't even have to ask him.  Right now though he is caught up with like how in the world could the Book of Mormon be written on metal plates and all this junk about the iron age and different metal ages....all I have to say is wait till he reads that Nephi had a steel bow! haha.  It was good though and I know the spirit was in the room and he felt it.  We will hit him up again this week. 

One of the high council members runs a catering business and he has wanted us to come to some meals the last few days with tourist people.  Boy have we been eatin good...no complaints here.  Also this Wednesday he wants us to come to a lunch that he is doing for a massive tourist group thats coming through......the kicker is this.....its a Lamborghini tourist group.  DId I spell that right??? yep Lamborghini's.  Like almost 100 of them.  In Blanding, Utah.  Elder Provard is pretty upset that he aint gonna be here.  Should be fun!  I will defintely take lots of pictures and hopefully hand out a few Book of Mormons. Dont mean to brag a bit here but...what the heck ya I do!  Elder Provard and I have handed out more Book of Mormons to people then almost the entire mission combined!  Nearly 100 in 2 months.  Awesome.  The goal is try and recontact everyone that we handed them out to and see what has happened.  Love the Book of Mormon.  Welp thats pretty much it!!  Thanks for everything! 

Love Elder Christensen

Robert vs. Derek Jeter

Ya'aat'eeh!!!

 

Good to hear from y'all sounds like there has been A LOT happening without me but thats ok I have gotten used to missing out now.  The highlight of the week this week was I was able to back to Cortez for a zone conference.  I got to drive since nobody had any idea where it was or how to get there so I was a happy camper.  When we got back into my 1st area all these memories just overcame me and I may have gotten a little emotional it was so weird.  I love Cortez and I still remember where everything was so that was good.  I was able to see the Balfour family again and that made me really happy to back there.  Weird to think that I left Cortez 13 months ago.  Time flies by.  On our way back to Blanding I went to the loft I lived in and showed the other Elders what it was like.  Good times for sure.

This week went fairly well and we have a new investigator that is a Ute.  Its official!  I have taught my brothers from like 5 or 6 different tribes now, awesome.  My companion just sits and watches me teach natives its hilarious cause I start swinging my arms around and trying to paint pictures in their heads and whatnot...he probably thinks I'm psycho or something but hey it works.  One of the native men we were teaching was trying to use this tree analogy on me and try to confuse me like a pharisee and my companion had like no idea what to say so I tried my best to reverse his tree analogy and oh man long story, it was weird.  Thats how a lot of lessons go, using nature or animal analogies to explain the reasons why things are the way they are.

Our recent convert has been going through a really rough time....I mean rough.  His daughter has the exact same cancer that his wife had before she passed and apparently things went for the worse.  They weren't able to make it to church yesterday because they were in Salt Lake for emergency surgery it sounded like.  Rough.  That man has a lot of faith.  I really hope that his daughter can pull through, she is showing the exact symptoms as her mom.  

We were at a members home for dinner and they knew that I was obsessed with  baseball and they refused to turn theTV off for the all star game...I tried not to watch but I'm not gonna lie I saw  Derek Jeter hit and that was a tender moment.  I despise the yankees....but I gotta respect the 2.  I seriously had a tear well up nearly once I realized that like 20 years down the road if some kid asked me who Derek Jeter was....the only thing I could say would be, lets sit down for a minute and talk this may take awhile.  Over 20 years of shortstop for the Spankees...The MJ of baseball for sure.  I feel that was a tender mercy from the Lord to let me see that, definitely had some prayers of thanks that day:)

Oh ya and we had another less active come to church that hadn't been back in like 4 or 5 years so that made my week.  We are doing some good things here...may not be much but as long as someone is helped and their spirit is lifted then its a success.

Love Elder Christensen