We decided to try and catch up on all the photo's Elder Winters has been sending...Enjoy!!!

 



Looking out our Front Window

This is a random one of our calender that my companion likes to write stuff on sometimes.

Our desks. Guess which one is mine! The slightly less messy one. ;)

Our pin board. The orange ones on the top are blank and the yellow ones on top are recent converts and the row on the bottom are people that we have dropped, but other than that they are all investigators. It is nuts! 

My Companion

PRINGLES!!!!

Monday June 9, 2014

Crazy week this week! (Aren't they all?) 

We are now teaching a guy from Uganda which is so cool because that is where my brother Brandon served his mission!  He wanted to give us his number to call him, although apparently he gave us the number for his shop which he never answers :) Anyway, when we met him again last week he invited us into his little convenience store, gave us some juice, and we talked for a bit. We taught him a bit more formally on Saturday, and he was so excited to learn what we taught him about prayer! He has a Hindu background and he has looked a bit into Christianity since then, so it was so good for him! He came to church yesterday and loved it! We are so excited to be teaching him!

One other cool miracle this week happened just yesterday. There is a guy we met at the library a little while ago who just goes to the library and studies the Bible all day long! On Sunday when we saw him again I was really praying and asking Heavenly Father to guide us in what we said. We ended up having a wonderful, spiritual lesson with him! We learned that he is searching for something, and he thinks that somehow he is missing the baptism of fire described in the scriptures. He is so cool! Sadly he doesn't live in our area so we are going to have to try and pass him to some other missionaries, but the experience was great! 

Have an awesome week! Remember that the answers to our biggest questions in life can always be found by reading the scriptures, praying, and going to church! The words on the page or the things said at church may not answer your question, but as you do these things you put yourself in a position to receive revelation from God, and you will get your answer! 

-Kyle

June 2, 2014

Crazy week this week! (Aren't they all?)

We are now teaching a guy from Uganda which is so cool because that is where my brother Brandon served his mission! It was interesting how we met as well! The first time we met him was a few weeks ago, and at that point he was very drunk. Nothing really came of that. He wanted to give us his number to call him though, although apparently he gave us the number for his shop which he never answers :) Anyway, we met him again last week totally sober, and he invited us into his little convenience store, gave us some juice, and we talked for a bit. We taught him a bit more formally on Saturday, and he was so excited to learn what we taught him about prayer! He has a Hindu background and he has looked a bit into Christianity since then, so it was so good for him! He came to church yesterday and loved it! We are so excited to be teaching him!

One other cool miracle this week happened just yesterday. There is a guy we met at the library a little while ago who just goes to the library and studies the Bible all day long! The first time we taught him he just bible bashed us. Then on Sunday when we saw him again I was really praying and asking Heavenly Father to guide us in what we said. We ended up having a wonderful, spiritual lesson with him! We learned that he is searching for something, and he thinks that somehow he is missing the baptism of fire described in the scriptures. He is so cool! Sadly he doesn't live in our area so we are going to have to try and pass him to some other missionaries, but the experience was great!

Have an awesome week! Remember that the answers to our biggest questions in life can always be found by reading the scriptures, praying, and going to church! The words on the page or the things said at church may not answer your question, but as you do these things you put yourself in a position to receive revelation from God, and you will get your answer!

-Kyle

April 14, 2014

Hello everybody! What a week! There were a load of our investigators who couldn't meet with us this week, so a lot of our lessons were with new people. A couple of them are pretty cool, and I just pray that they will keep their commitments! 

 We had a pretty crazy lesson this week with two new people. The lesson was crazy because it was completely in Portuguese! I don't know if I just haven't noticed it before or if the Lord is just arranging everything that way, but since my new companion from Brazil got here we have been running into quite a few Portuguese speakers! This is the first time that we have been able to teach an actual lesson to someone in Portuguese. I admit in the back of my mind was the possibility that I would suddenly receive the gift of tongues and be able to help teach the lesson, but it didn't happen :) My companion and I have taught people about the Restoration many times and so I always knew about where we were in the lesson, but I felt pretty powerless and out of the loop! I was able to bare my testimony at the end of the lesson while my companion translated for me though, so that was really good. We have a second appointment scheduled with these two investigators this evening! 

 This week we were also able to do some service for a part member family which was really good. They were filling in an old fish pond with old bricks and dirt so that they could plant a vegetable garden on top of it. We made quite a few trips with a heavy wheel barrow and I am still feeling it a couple of days later! 

I love you all and have a wonderful week! 

 -Kyle

April 7, 2014

General Conference was incredible!!!! I got to watch all of the sessions other than the Sunday Afternoon session. It may be quite a while before I get the chance to hear or read that one, but I was so happy to be able to watch the other sessions! I felt that one of the themes throughout the entire conference was a focus on how we need to separate ourselves from the world. I am on the streets talking to people every day, and I can testify to the fact that the world is becoming more and more secular and . . . worldly. The standards and laws set up by society just aren't enough to protect us spiritually in the world we live in today. With love we need to be forgiving of people who do not live the Lord's standards, but we can never, never seem to condone their actions or lifestyle. If we are truly Christlike we will not apologize for the standards which our Heavenly Father has set for us, we will encourage and help others to live those standards so that they too can be safe in a spiritually dangerous world! I hope that each of you will take the things you learned personally in General Conference and make the jump to apply them in your lives! The shelf life of a good talk is about two days if you don't write some goals down and decide to make changes!

We were able to see some incredible miracles happen this week! In fact, on Saturday one of the more unlikely miracles actually took place. We had just finished our exchange with the zone leaders and we were walking to where we had locked our bikes in town. A young man in his twenties saw us and walked up. He said "Hi Elders! Um. . . I haven't been able to find the church around here yet, but I need to be baptized!" Just so that you know, that doesn't happen very often! He was taught a few years ago by some missionaries somewhere near London, but from what he told us he just let life get in the way of taking the step of baptism. Then last Wednesday he was on a bus and he realized that he had left the book he was reading at his friends house. He just happened to have a triple combination in his back pack, so he pulled it out and began to read! He described the spiritual experience he had right there on a bus when he realized all of a sudden that he needed to be baptized! Only a few days later he bumped into us! We had to hand his information off to another team of missionaries because he doesn't live in our area, but that was just awesome for us!

Have a wonderful week, talk to you next week!

I am training an Elder from Brazil! He is seriously one of the greatest new missionaries I have ever met. If he needed to I think he could definitely train a new missionary after his first twelve weeks! There are a lot of things I need to teach him still, but I already look up to him so much! 

 

So just to get it all out there in the open, I was dumb and got my bike stolen this week. Didn't lock it up. Wow. We were in a kind of open area with a lot of foot traffic, one of our favorite places to talk to people. We were sitting on a bench with our bikes leaned up beside it making a few phone calls. We saw a guy sitting on a bench 30 feet away so we decided to go and talk to him really quickly, and when we came back my bike was gone. There was a lady standing right there who said she just saw a guy come up, get on the bike, and ride off. She assumed it was his. Man!

 

Other than that, things have been going okay. We have had a few random things we have had to take care of which have made it so that we haven't had as much time as we would have liked to, to do the work, but this next week is going to be sweet! 

 

Love you!

-Kyle

March 3rd 2014

Hello everybody! 

So this week we had HEAPS of appointments fall through, but we had some awesome miracles as well. First off, we had an INTENSE lesson with one of our investigators last week teaching her about the Word of Wisdom. She has a testimony of the restored gospel, but she has a few bumps she needs to get over before she can be baptized, one of them being a problem with smoking. In the lesson she told us that she really wanted to stop smoking, but she wanted to just finish her pack of tobacco in the next couple of days and quit then, but after about 15 minutes of trying different things and encouraging her, she allowed us to confiscate her pouch of tobacco! 

 

After that, the biggest thing keeping her back from getting baptized is that her parents don't like the idea. Even though she is in her 30s she is pretty decided that she doesn't want to get baptized without her parents permission, and she doesn't even want to come to church without their approval. After a lot of praying and a few lessons with her though, we got a phone call on Friday from her saying that she had talked to her parents and they had said they were ok with her coming to church on Sunday! She did, and she loved it! Things are going slowly with her, but I have hope! 

We had another miracle right at the end of the week on Sunday. Like I said we have been having loads of appointments falling through (most of them first appointments) but on Sunday we decided to try just dropping by one of our potential investigators. When we got to the address he had given us we realized that it was a building with several different flats so we just started hitting doorbells for all the flats. The gentleman was in, and he invited us right in to talk to him! We have another appointment to teach him next week, and I think he could go somewhere! 

 

Our flat has been used by missionaries for years, and there are four or five retired bike frames from bygone missionaries. For our P-day activity today we took parts from all the bikes and tried to make a working one :) I think what we came up with is rideable, but the brake pads we found to put on it are pretty much useless! It was the sort of tinkering I enjoy anyway, so it was good. 

I love you all! Talk to you later!

-Kyle