Beach Baptism

 

   Woah what a last couple of weeks it has been. I've had a lot of stuff happen since I've got to this area, I think it's safe to say we have (for the most part) successfully defeated the white wash. The first week we were so lost since there wasn't many notes written down for the people the old Elders were teaching so we had to start basically from scratch. Our goal was to try and put as many people on date for baptism as possible to see if they are solid people or not, and right now we have 3 people on date. Let me give you some details of lit things that have been going on. 

   

   We had Zone Conference and since I'm still a Zone Leader, I had to give a training in front of everybody. Our Zone has been struggling with putting people on baptismal date, so our entire training was based on that. We challenged them all to attempt to put 2 people on date in 1 week and now our numbers for baptismal dates is the highest it has been. Zone Conference made me feel super old in the mission. The mission president kept telling stories that he's told in the past and I had heard them all and it seems like I was the only one who had. I'm actually the oldest missionary in my zone currently which is kinda weird since I ain't THAT old. It was super intense though, President seperated the Elders and the Sisters into different rooms and wrecked us about the Law of Chastity. We have a lot of new missionaries so he wanted to scare them to make sure they don't get sent home for stupid reasons. Immediately after Zone Conference, we had interviews and it was super awesome because President just hyped me up the whole time. He said he was super proud of who I have become. He says that I know what my potential is and that I am living in a way to achieve it. That was very nice to hear for sure. 

   In my interview with President, I asked him if I could make a special request to go to one of my old area's baptisms and he said he'd let me choose. It was 3 hours away in Pensacola, but we made that long haul. The baptism of Jared and Scarlett was such a memorable experience. They requested to be baptized in the ocean and that's exactly what happened. If you don't remember who these two people are getting baptized, they were apart of the solar summer sales team that wanted to learn more about our church. Both of them had to give up so much to be ready to be baptized, but them and Nate all held eachother accountable. The thing that made me the happiest about all of this was that Nate, a less active YSA, was able to become worthy to baptize Jared. It was so surreal. He also had to drop a lot of bad habits, but he did it and was about to perform the ordinance. Since it was a baptism of people doing summer sales, a lot of other summer sales people showed up so there was like 60 people at this beach baptism. Many of them were nonmembers and thought it was super cool. I perceive this is going to be a missionary referral machine pretty soon here. Definitely one of the highlights of my mission was being apart of this baptism. It doesn't get much better than this.

   That's basically the last couple of weeks. We've been finding a lot of new people to teach, but the biggest success we are seeing is with the Part-Member families. There's A LOT of them in our ward, many of them are ready and willing. We'll see how that turns out. 

Love y'all, Have a blessed one. 

Elder Jackson Batman 🦇 

   

Prattville

 

   Well, I got transferred again after only 1 month in the Pensacola Area. I was pretty ticked to hear the news, not going to lie. It's frustrating after you learn an area and all the people you served there, you even set people up for baptism, but then you just get ripped out. Jared and Scarlett are set up for the 24th for their baptisms and they told me to beg my mission president so I could make the long drive and be in attendance. We'll see how lenient the mission president will be. Any who, I'm now serving in Prattville! My last companion, Elder Johnson, served in this area for 7 and a half months so I was able to get a lot of inside info on the area before I even got here which was sick. I did get white washed into Prattville as Zone Leader 1 (white washed just means they take out a whole companionship out of an area and add a completely new one), but I am serving with another Zone Leader which is always nice. His name is Elder Boswell and he's from Independence, Missouri. He was just in my other last area, Daphne, serving with my old companion, Elder Hulet so that's sweet. 

   Whitewashing is annoying because we know nothing about any of the members and it doesn't help that the last Elders in the area wrote little-to-nothing down for notes to help us out with the people they were teaching. Basically just going in completely blind. Ohhhh yeah, and just to add salt to the wound some more, we are in a car share with a set of sister missionaries and we can't get in the car with them because it's against the rules! 😁 We basically just switch off the car every single day and do a lot of walking on our car free days. But, on the flip side, they had a lot of people they were teaching so our pool is pretty big. We just have no idea who the frick the people are. 

   I figure I should tell some sort of story from my new area so here it goes; there's a part-member family in this area that was taught a while ago in the past. The husband, Shaun, is the nonmember and we randomly called him up and asked if we could come over and share a spiritual thought and get to know him better. He said, "You know, it has been a while... Sure!" We pull up, the dude has like 6 dogs that we had to run through to get to the spot we were going to sit down and talk at. He put the dogs away and we just got to know the guy and learn his past experiences with missionaries. He's a scary guy, retired military, gives you a death scare that brings the chills fast. Anyway, we got to talking and he said he's had some rough experiences with certain members in the past that's kinda hindered his progression, but eventually we got to the topic of having the 5 discussions and he said he had never had them in an organized manner like that before. He said he'd love to hear them and they'd probably fill in a lot of blanks that he has with the doctrine. He grew to like us a lot through that discussion and if we get to him, we get to his 9 year old daughter. Heaps of potential there.

   Oh, I'll say one more thing. There's a woman in this ward named, we'll call her Debbie, that really really loves missionaries I think. The reason I'm assuming that is because she's called us 27 times since we've arrived 3 days ago. She always wants missionaries to come visit her so she'll just keep calling until that happens. It's always at the most unfortunate times when she calls, like mid-lesson we are bearing testimony. It's just something people deal with in the Prattville area. 😂

   Alright I'll shut up. Have a blessed one. 

-Elder Jackson Batman 🦇 

Tropical Storm Clean Up

 

   I just want to get right into things. Do you remember Nate and Jared, the dudes our age that we are teaching? Well there's been a lot that has come from that. Jared decided to go visit home for 10 days in Michigan so before he left we definitely prepared him by talking about opposition potentially from family and friends about what he is doing. He mentioned that right before he left for summer sales, his parents told him, "Just don't come back a Mormon." Anyway, while he was gone, we got a call from another one of the members doing Summer Sales saying that her friend Scarlett wants to be taught. Scarlett spoke with Jared and since he said he loved the lessons, she was mad curious. Well, we go over to teach Scarlett with Nate present, but they want us to go down to the girl's apartment. We head down, open the door, and it's 4 college aged attractive girls sitting there. One of them said "We all wanna hear what y'all have to teach." Elder Johnson and I just looked at eachother in disbelief. But yeah, we taught them the Restoration and they loved it. 2 of them are Catholic born so it's definitely new information, but there is a ton of potential. Scarlett herself is basically asking us to be baptized since she just loves the people in our church. And hey, it's not everyday you get to teach a group of people your age on your mission. And now, when Jared gets back, we plan to put both Jared and Scarlett on baptismal date at the same time. Maybe even have Nate himself baptize them, idk. 👀 

   A huge tropical storm hit Florida recently and for some areas they got wrecked. Well, when the storm initially hit, we had really fast winds and bad downpour in our area, so our mission president had us stay inside for the whole day which was rough. Yeah yeah, I stayed 9 months inside for quarantine, but this is a little different since we were already used to being able to go outside. Back then, we had no choice but to stare at the wall. But anyway, on Saturday our Stake President and Mission President reached out to us saying that we need to organize all the missionaries in the Zone to help out with tropical storm clean up for Sunday morning. There wasn't enough time to organize for Saturday, so they went with Sunday with general seventy approval. Brewton got it the absolute worst and needed the most help. Sooo, we sent us a few other companionships up there and it was pretty bad. I guess I didn't mention, but there was a few tornadoes that came about with this tropical storm and because of that, some of these houses we saw were completely deleted. We did service from 9:00 AM-3:00PM which means we missed church. 😔 It dumped rain on us, and since the south is used to that, no one stopped working even though we were drenched. We did get word that we will probably go up again next week because there were homes that were way worse than the ones we were working on that needed help. You're going to be seeing a lot of pictures of me in a white/yellow shirt so stay tuned. 

   Lastly I'll just mention these two guys we found this week. They were boxing in their garage, these two philipino guys. I was on exchanges with my old companion, Elder Rasmussen, and we just walked up to them. They were so kind and welcoming to us! One of the dudes said that he was a good friend of Manny Pacquiao and has actually sparred with him in the ring a few times. They immediately started asking questions about our faith since they remember seeing people like us in the Philippines. We were able to testify who we truly believe Jesus Christ is and that brought them a lot of comfort knowing we were on the same page. They invited us back and it seems super hopeful. 

That's kinda all I got. We did go to Fort Pickins on pday which is an old war base. That was alright I guess. Anyway, til next week. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇 

 

Aliens

 

   I, once again, apologize for not writing last week. Sometimes I just get lazy and that's how it is. But these last 3 weeks have been one for the books so let me tell you a few stories:

   The first person I baptized in the mission named Kristina came up and visited me in my area. She lives in Foley which is not that far from where I'm at. Her and her husband took us to lunch and I was so proud to hear all of her progress she's made in the gospel. She's almost done with the whole Book of Mormon, she was sealed in the temple in March, and now she's a ward missionary. She goes out with the missionaries all the time. The Foley Ward is a lot of old people so she has been, as she put it, "getting them off their butts" and putting them to work. Oh, and since she is an Uber driver and loves to talk about the church, she's given us 4 different referalls of people interested in the gospel because she drives through Pensacola all the time. I was smiling the whole time, felt like a proud dad. 

   We talked to 2 different Atheists at different times will street contacting outside. Both of them went off asking our views on Aliens, who created God, how does science relate to the gospel, what if an Alien told me God wasn't real and he had perfect evidence. It was wild. On both occasions they actually enjoyed our answers and allowed us to come back to talk about the Plan Of Salvation. Who knows what'll happen. 

We had a craaaaazy experience happen with a member in our ward. His name is Nate and he's around my age. He's here in Pensacola for Summer Sales selling Solar so he's originally from Utah. He wanted to get closer with God and the church so asked us to drop him off a Book of Mormon. Nate mentioned that he has a coworker/friend that was interested in learning more about the church so we scheduled a time to come over and talk with them. The friend's name is Jared and when we got to this Solar HQ, it was super nice. Very fancy. Summer Sales is filled with returned missionary so this guy has been hearing a ton about who we are. We taught him the full Restoration and he had a lot of questions. We gave him a Book of Mormon and told him to read and pray about it. When we left, him and Nate continued to talk about the gospel for 2 more hours. Jared was having a bad attitude towards the Book of Mormon because he wasn't fully grasping the idea of more scripture quite yet. He was going off on a rant about it. Well, Nate gave him challenge, "Open up to a random page and read the first verse you see. Let's see if it speaks to you." Jared did and he opened up to Ether 2:8 which says, "And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared, that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them." Jared was shook, it said his name in the verse he opened up to and he started going crazy. The spirit slapped him. He, now more than ever, wanted to read this book and find out if it's true. Then, Nate himself wanted to try this challenge, so he opened up to a verse and it was spot on to his current life predicament. They both were in tears. The way we found about this is Nate called us when he was visited home in Utah. When he finished the story, his father hopped on the phone, in tears, and thanked us for what we were doing. He said he's never seen his son like this ever and was so happy. We'll be meeting with them Tuesday and they have a ton of questions written down for us to answer. So stoked for that. 

I'll just leave it at that for now. We're heading to the beach today so I'm excited for that. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇 

Trial Of Faith

 

I'd like to sincerely apologize for not writing last week, I'm just a lazy bum at times and that's all there is to it. I've had quite the interesting last 3 weeks in the mission, a lot of things have happened that were definitely unexpected. I guess I'll just start... 
   It appears that the Lord is definitely trying our faith right now because we can't seem to catch a break. We had 3 on date for baptism that were looking soooo good, but then all of the sudden they dropped like flies. The MOST surprising was A (remember the woman who bore her testimony in our sacrament meeting?), she just randomly texted us and said she didn't want to join the church anymore. We tried and tried to get her to tell us why but it was to no use. Then the other guy who was on date, M, he is going to go live with his birth mom down in Louisiana which doesn't seem like too big of a problem EXCEPT that the step-dad in that household is super anti-mormon. 

   So because of all of this, we've been changing strategies and doing quite a bit of finding. With a lot of prayer and exercising of faith, we've managed to find 2 more that are on date for baptism. One of them is an 86 year old Jehovah Witness that wasn't super sure about his old faith and loves talking with missionaries. He believes that the Book of Mormon is true and he thinks the lessons make so much sense. One issue that we are running into is that, since he was a JW, he does pray to Jehovah representing Heavenly Father. For those who don't know, we definitely do not do that in our church. Jesus Christ is Jehovah of the Old Testament. So yeah, we've been trying to figure out how to tackle that situation. The other person we have on date is an old black southern lady named F who is just the sweetest. She's had missionaries come to her door many of times but has never agreed to a sit-down discussion... until now. 😉 We took a different approach and offered to do service for her and she said she'd love that. We came over, did like 10 minutes of service because that's all she needed, and then we had a religious discussion for like 45 minutes. She thought we were so wise and knew so much about the gospel that she wanted to learn more. She even came to church and absolutely loved the service. Things are now looking up. 

   Alright, now for the news... I'm being transferred to the Fox Run area in Pensacola, Florida. This was super unexpected, I definitely thought I was staying but it is what it is. I'll be a Zone Leader again as companions to another Zone Leader named Elder Chase Johnson. All I know about him is that he's from Vegas and so was my current companion. I guess I just get the Vegas boys, I don't know. I'm excited to see what the future holds but kinda ticked to leave Daphne since it was so sick. Talk about a blessed area. Oh, and our mission beat the goal of 40 baptisms this last transfer and so now President Allred wants us to beat the goal of 100 baptisms. That's quite the jump if you ask me. No idea how we'll do that but if it's the Lord's will, there is a way. 

That's all I can really remember for right now, I'll let you know how the new comp and area goes. I hate packing with a passion. 
--
Elder Batman

Mr. Batman And His Sidekick

 

   Hey guys, I'll just start by saying that we've had a wonderful week. It's been action-packed, a lot of work going on, finding a ton of people...it's just been great. Things are boppin' here in Daphne. I'd first like to tell you a crazy story that happened with us dropping off Elder Olsen so that he could go to his original assignment in Ethiopia. I don't know if you remember, but the first time we tried to do this, he tested positive for COVID right before he was supposed to leave. Because of that, we had to quarantine and all of his hopes and dreams of going to Africa were looking not so great. Just to monitor it, the mission told us to get a weekly COVID test so that we could see when the disease has left his body. Well, we were preparing to go get a new test for the week and we had met this guy who was in the Spanish branch that went to the same church building we went to. He worked at one of the clinics and told Elder Olsen that if he came down to his clinic, he'd help him out so that his insurance would go through and all that jazz. We get a test, it comes up negative. I have no idea if that guy did us a solid and printed out a false test. Who knows. We all went bonkers, maybe just maybe he might be able to go to Africa. So, he packs all his bags and we drive to Birmingham which is like a 4 and a half hour drive from our area. Elder Olsen has to get another COVID test right before he gets on the plane to really make sure he's negative. We do that and guess what... it comes up positive. We were about to blow a fuse until the lady said "no stress, just go blow your nose and maybe go get a nasal spray and we'll retest you." We went ahead and did that, said a lot of prayers, he got retested and it came back NEGATIVE. Boom. We dropped him off at the airport and he is now in the sacred land of Ethiopia living it up. I guess you could say Satan did not want him to go, but Heavenly Father made a way so he could. 

   On to other things, our mission recently release new standards of excellence for every missionary. Basically, these are numbers that we expected to hit in order to be meeting this 'standard'. Anyway, the numbers are very high. We recently had a seventy come speak to our mission and his whole message was about "raising our vision", or "you can do more if you believe you can" and it seems that our mission president really wants to raise our vision so he gave us crazy numbers. Well, our mission has done a lot more praying than usual to meet these goals and we've seen insane success. Our area in Daphne was able to accomplish those numbers. Quick story, and you'll love this one: We needed to put one more person on date for baptism in order to hit the standard but it was the last day and we didn't have a ton of time. Well, we called a random person in our books that requesting missionaries like a year ago and she actually responded to us! She began by calling us out and asking us to explain to her why we did polygamy, what's up with the magic underwear, and why do you care so much about missionary work to get into heaven. We just straight up called her and cleared those things up and she was at peace with our responses. We invited her to church and she said she'd actually be there. And guess what? She actually showed up! It was fast and testimony meeting which can be either really good or really bad for someone who is investigating the church. Fortunate for us, this testimony meeting was amazing. The woman was sitting next to a member family that met her when they were walking in, and the members explained so much to her and answered all of her questions. Any who, the testimony meeting was just about to end, the bishop already stood up and was about to thank the congregation UNTIL the woman stood up last second and walked up to go bear her testimony. I was so terrified what she was going to say. But, she bore the sweetest testimony and thanked us, the missionaries, for inviting her here. In her own words: "thanks to Mr. Batman and his trusty sidekick for getting me here..." and I was dying laughing. She said that she felt God's presence in our church, she then talked about how she knows God hears our prayers and then she concluded. We had a short lesson with her afterwards to answer any other questions she had about the service, and she basically just wanted us to give her a copy of the Book of Mormon so she could read the whole thing. We talked about it, gave her the book and that was that. Later that day, she texted us and said "I'd like to become apart of your ward family. How do I do that?" We put her on baptismal date through text for the 15th of May. Absolutely crazy miracle, and now she's diving right into the Book of Mormon. 

   Alright, I got one more funny story then I'll shut up. I'll summarize because my fingers hurt. We were teaching this guy and it was going real well. We were about to put him on date until his friend who lived with him came out and wanted to speak with us and learn what we teach. We said okay and we restarted our lesson with him present. We begin by talking about the nature of who God is, how He loves us perfectly and all of that wonderful stuff. Well, I guess that was the wrong point to start on because this guy went off on about a 45 minute long dissertation on what he believes God is. This guy must've been high or on some sort of illegal drug because he was speaking utter nonsense that had both of my companion's and I's face going dumb. Keep in mind, this dude was saying the F-word every other sentence. He said A LOT of wack things, but the craziest thing he probably said was when I tried to explain to him agency, the ability to choose for ourselves given by God, and he said that was completely false. Well actually, he definitely used a different set of words but anyway... he goes on and says "Nah man, choice has been gone since God and his concubines Lilith and Eve went into the waterfall..." it was something like that. He was straight NUTS. We ran out of time so we just said that we'd come back and tell him more about what we believe about God, and he was polite and said that he wouldn't talk so much next time. Sooo funny. Those are the stories you remember. 

Well, there's surely was more to this week but I don't want to make this too long. The baptism went really well for Willie, we didn't do squat since we had members fulfilling every role in the baptismal service. Those are always the best baptisms when all the missionaries have to do is show up. It was an unforgettable experience, super spiritual. But yeah, that's my week.

Have a blessed day,

Elder Jackson Q. Batman 🦇 

Freedom

 

   It has been a crazy last two weeks. I think I talked about W last time? Maybe not, but anyway, we are teaching this 18 year old guy who missionaries in the past met at Little Caesars and invited him to church. Normally that never ends up working, but for this guy it worked, he showed up. He had a hard time with the church service though since it was fast and testimony meeting and I guess the ward didn't impress him. I have no idea. Overtime, those missionaries lost contact with Willie and that was that. Well, when Elder Olsen and I were put into quarantine for COVID, we would call soooo many people that it came to a point that we starting looking through people in the ''not interested'' category and that's when we gave him a call. From that call sparked several lessons and invitations, and now W is on course for getting baptized next week on the 24th. He is one of the most genuine and honest guys I've ever met. He is so prepared. We invited him to start reading the Book of Mormon everyday a week and a half ago and he has now read 26 chapters of 1 Nephi and understands exactly what is going on. There's a crazy spiritual experience that we had with W recently that I'll share real quick. We had set up a video chat with him for 7:30 at night, but for some odd reason we missionaries thought it was scheduled for 7:00. We decided to bring a certain member along named J who we thought would relate well with W. We call at 7:00 and W was shocked to see our call but he answered anyways. Joseph in the lesson talked about an experience where he was having a really rough day and was about to break down into a panic attack, but my companion randomly called him and said ''J! We felt impressed to call you, how are you!!'' And with that, J broke down in tears and knew that God knew who he was. Well, after J told this story, W said that had just happened to him with our call. He was at his friend's house when we called and he was feeling really tempted to repeat past poor decisions, but he said that our call was perfectly timed. He was about to give in, but our call saved him. That's when he too realized that this really is the truth and God knows who he is. It was a wonderful experience. 

   Another cool thing that has happened recently is we got approval for any form of finding we can do. There was always this unspoken question in the mission of whether or not we could go outside and talk to random people because of the COVID scare, and to our knowledge, the last council we were given was we could go over to non-members and members houses or just talk to them if they invite us or talk to us first. Well, last conference President said ''The new word is you get 30 contacts a day and I don't care how you do it.'' Our zone went OFF. Our Zone found more than 50 people this last week. I guess we all really missed talking to randoms. I'm in a trio right now so we feel invincible walking up to people, so this week we found 6 people just on the streets. Old ways still work, but we also have new ways like social media that work even when we aren't giving attention to them. It's a wonderful time to be a missionary. 

   Okay, one last story just for my future-kid's sake because they would want to know this. We had a Zone conference this last week and since I'm rocking the Zone Leader life right now, I'm supposed to conduct these conferences and introduce speakers and what not. Well, as we were waiting to go into the chapel to begin the conference, I sat down and my pants split right next to the seam near my right back pocket. It was sooo loud, but for some odd reason no one around me heard it. I just played it cool and continued to sit where I was until it was time to go into the chapel, and that is when I grabbed my companion and told him ''Hey dude, you're conducting because I split my pants''. I was praying real hard on what to do so I don't completely ruin my life. Well, luckily for me, one of the APs is one of my old companions so I ushered him towards me and asked if he had an extra suit in the car. He did, and he let me rock his size 34 waste Grey suit pants that kinda matched my blazer but not really. They didn't fit well, but you get what you get. The best part... Nobody noticed! I walked in a couple minutes late into the chapel and it was smooth sailing from there. RIP my favorite suit pants, but it's whatever. 

Alright I'm done talking. That's basically the jist of the last two weeks, at least the highlights anyways. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Jackson Batman 🦇