Hey Everybody!

This last week was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo good!!!

We had another lesson with Austin, and it was a pretty typical lesson.  He sometimes tries to get off topic and talk about video games and what-not, but this week he didn't do that at all!  It was awesome, because then after the lesson he volunteered to give the prayer!!  It was the first time he's prayed in front of missionaries and it was so strong and just awesome!  The lesson we had with him was reading from Alma chapter 32, which is the one that talks all about faith being a seed and how faith isn't a perfect knowledge (We chose this because he had a question of why can't we just see Christ and know he's there) So yeah it was awesome, and he even invited his little brother Gage to sit in on the lesson!  Usually Gage just goes to the other room and plays video games, but this time he wanted to read with us!  It was just pretty much and awesome day!!

Last Friday we had our Christmas zone conference!  It was so cool and at first we talked about 8 gifts Heavenly Father has given us and it was an awesome training!  The gifts were:
1. Christ and the Atonement   John 3:16
2. The Gift of the Holy Ghost   1 Nephi 10: 17

3. The Plan of Happiness   Alma 12: 25 

4. Angels   Alma 13: 24

5. Agency   2 Nephi 2:  27

6. Assurance   D&C 84:88

7. The Temple   D&C 109: 22

8. Assurance that our offerings are acceptable    D&C 126

It was just like the BEST THING EVER!!!  It was great, got to see a lot of friends and it was all good!  Then as the WKM (Washington Kennewick Mission) Christmas tradition we watched Brave, the Pixar movie about the Scottish princess!  It was way good too!!

I hope you all have a merry Christmas!!
Love,
Elder Pickett 

Hey everybody!

So this is transfer week!  Elder Shuman will be going all the way over to the tri-cities!  He's going to a ward called Candy Mountain ward!  It's so cool!!  I am staying here and getting Elder Stucki to be my comp!  He's a great guy from Ogden area I believe!  I've served around him, but now I get to serve with him!  It's looking to be an exciting transfer!

So this week we had an awesome visit with a man who was in the army!  He is a member of the church but lost his faith due to some tragedies he saw in the war.  He was an awesome guy and has sincere desires to find his faith again, but it's hard for him to get past what he saw over in Iraq.  We have a return appt. with him in a couple of weeks and I am super excited to see this man again.

A cool experience we had this week was being able to help set up our Christmas lights!  We got to go up to the top roof and hang off the edge to put the lights into their places!  It was a pretty scary but really fun experience!

I hope you all have an awesome week!
Love,
Elder Pickett

12-3-12

Hey everybody!

We have had a totally insane week!!  I'll start with the craziness and end with the good stuff!

So there is an apartment complex in our area that we do a ton of work in, it's called The Fisher's Mill.  Well on Friday we go there and see a cop driving around (which isn't too unusual) but when we turn the corner, there are 12 cop cars all lined up!  We walk past them and there are a bunch of cops chillin with their helmets on and big guns out!  So it turns out there was a lady hiding in her apartment, but they couldn’t just go get her because she had her kids in there or something!  So we get outa there for our dinner appointment, but as we're leaving this giant truck pulls around the corner, and turns out they needed to call in the swat team!  Well we had an appointment a couple hours later, and we go to the Mill and the situation is still going on!  It eventually got resolved after our appointment and all is good!

On Saturday we got called to help with a move, and the people who called said there was a non-member there who they wanted us to see.  To be honest we thought they may have just been baiting us into helping with the move, but we helped out anyway, it is kind of our job.  The lady moving in came over from Portland, and she had a friend who has been down on his luck and has been staying with her for a little bit, and he is SUUUUUPER interested in the gospel!!!  We taught him the Plan of Salvation last night and everything was awesome!  It was an amazing experience and we definitely felt the spirit!

I hope you all have an awesome week!
Love,
Elder Pickett

11-27-12

Hey everybody!!

We had a wonderful spectacular Thanksgiving Day!!  It was super chill, and we only had 1 dinner (Which is rare for missionaries, last thanksgiving I had 3 dinners and a desert!)  It was overall a wonderful day!  The members who we live with had their 3 boys in town and 2 of the 3 stayed in the house, one is single and the other has a wife and 2 year old son, so we had a big full house for the week!  It was exciting, and a little like being home! 

We had an awesome week with the work too!  Lately me and my companion have stopped tracting as much, but this week we set that as our main goal (Because our teaching pool is kiddy sized, and we want Olympic sized pools) So we set off the week with an awesome 23 OYMs (we keep track of how many people we talk to, and call it an OYM) which is really high!  Especially since the week before we got about 30ish, so eventually at the end of the week we ended up with 84 of them!  It was a really awesome week and we got that goal!  We had a good amount of people tell us to come on back, so we're excited for the new teaching opportunities that we have, and definitely thankful for the blessings we saw from the hard work this week!

I hope you all have a wonderful week!"
Love,
Elder Pickett

P.S.  (Thanksgiving moment)  I’m grateful for all the support I've been able to receive while out here!  Thanks for the cards and letters, and candy too!

Hey everybody!

This week has been Wonderful!!!

Wednesday a member of the first quorum of the seventy came to the mission on a tour, and we had a Q&A conference with him!  It was so awesome!!  He asked us all questions at the beginning of the conference and then for about 5 hours went through every single one and answered them, but sometimes it came in a roundabout way that no one was expecting!  The first seventy that came here was a super tall big guy, (He played D-Line for BYU back in college) so I was expecting a big guy, but nope he was a shorter man but his spiritual stature was tremendous!  It was all around a great conference, and I got to see all the missionaries I disappeared on last transfer!

This week was a busy week!  We saw a lot of people but my favorite visit was with a part-member family!  They are the Agees, he is a member but she isn't.  He went less-active at about age 18 due to some circumstances and has never been back in a church since!  We had an awesome visit, and got to know them a little better, but then we shared a Mormon message called The Spirit of Thanksgiving!  I would recommend it to everyone during this awesome thanksgiving season!   It was overall a wonderful visit, and they really loved the lesson on thanksgiving! 

Wonderful things are happening in Washington!
Love,
Elder Pickett 

Hey everybody!

So this week was super awesome!!!

Last Sunday we got a call from a member who said her son’s friend had some questions and he wanted to ask the missionaries!  So we were super stoked to go meet this little guy and answer all his questions, and maybe get his whole family interested or something along those lines!  But turns out that it was the members son who had the questions!  So we were happy to help him out with some things!  His name is Ryan and he's 9 years old.  He has been having a rough time at school with the other kids and stuff like that, and he said that all the bad things that were happening were having a bad effect on his faith and that his faith was about as big as an inchworm!  So we talked a lot with him and had a super spiritual lesson with him, and at the end of it he said his faith was super big!  It was really an awesome experience!  Yesterday we got to have dinner with the family and at the end of it he hugged us and thanked us for the help!  It was a really awesome experience and I love that little guy!!

Tomorrow we are having a mission conference, and Elder Pieper of the presidency of the seventy will be there!  I am super excited for this conference!  Elder Pieper requested that all the missionaries read an article from an ensign in 2007 by Elder Bednar; it’s called "seek learning by faith".  It was a really amazing article!  And the first part is all about what faith is and it made me look at it in a new way!  I thought about how faith is a motor that moves us forward, but he brought up that it is also in the past and we can look back to see when our faith brought great things!  So it’s like a motor, which moves us forward and causes us to act, but also refuels itself because we can look back and get a greater boost of faith!  It was a really awesome article and I am super excited for our conference tomorrow!

Have a wonderful week!
Love,
Elder Pickett

Hey everybody!!

So we had an awesome experience with a guy named Andrew this week!  We were chilling at the door to sacrament meeting, the missionaries are the greeters here, and Brother Marsden from the ward comes over to us with a man in a rain coat and jeans.  He introduces the man as Andrew and we invite him to sit with us through the meeting!  He accepts so we go sit with him and have a goooood sacrament meeting (He LOVED the testimonies given!!) We had 3 baby blessing so there was an abnormally large body of people there, and they ran out of sacrament cups!  So it was about 20 minutes of the sacrament being past, which is a pretty long time to sit quiet when you've never done that before, so I expected him to get restless and start asking questions, but nope he just read about 4 chapters in the Book of Mormon!  It was really awesome! So after the meeting we went and talked a little, and found out he isn't in our ward :(  But we are excited about him because he is definitely ready to hear the gospel!

That was good!  And last night was good too!  Elder Shuman and I were actually having a pretty bad night, our dinner cancelled on us so it was grilled cheese for dinner!  And we just had an abnormal amount of hecklers yell things at us, anyway we were feelin pretty low!  When we decided to go check on a guy named Matt, he is a member and is struggling with life right now.  Anyway we read a chapter in the Book of Mormon with him, and it turns out Jacob 2:8 doesn't lie!  The word of God really does heal the wounded soul!!  So yeah we had a really good night after that!  It was just a great experience and testimony builder!!

Have an awesome week!
Love,
Elder Pickett