Thanksgiving Day

Hello there! I hope that you are all having an amazing thanksgiving! I love this holiday. It is so good to look back and remember how many things we really should be grateful for. Our Mission president challenged us in our prayers today to only express gratitude and not ask for anything. So far it has actually been very rewarding. I overlook so many blessings that I have and it's giving me a chance to refocus on what I should be grateful for.

This last week and a half has been intense! I was starting to get really tired by tuesday and wednesday this week because we hadn't had a P-Day. It's amazing to me how much I really need my P Day to rest. Missionary work is hard work!

I LOVE the ward that I serve in. The single adults here are SO GOOD at fellowshipping our investigators and making them feel loved and welcome. Maybe it's because a lot of them aren't too far home from their missions and they know how much it means to a nonmember when they have a friend at church other than the missionaries. Our investigator _________ is doing amazing. Some of the members call her and invite her to all the activities without us even knowing. It was so cool! She asked Elder Mumford to Baptize her and it was so exciting. He is pumped!! Her baptisimal date is set for December 17th and it's really solid. We're hoping all goes well! And it should.

Two mondays ago we met with ____________ and set some goals for things he wants to do before he gets baptized to find out it is true and we challenged him to pray to know if he should be baptized and what day it should happen on. We met later in the week and taught him Lehi's dream and it was really good. He also came to church. And then yesterday it was amazing! We met with him and he just seemed a lot happier. After talking for a while and getting into the lesson for a bit, he told us that he believes the Book of Mormon is true. He's been praying about when to be baptized and he thinks around Christmas time would be good for him! So we talked about December 17th also and he's going to check his schedule and let us know. It was another miracle! We're really excited for him. He also is very integrated into the ward. It's great!

We actually haven't met with ________________ for a few weeks, but we've talked to him on the phone several times. We're just going to pray really hard that we see a miracle with him! His testimony is crazy strong.

Cool Miracle!!!! Last week, we got a random call from a girl saying that she is less active and wants to come back to church and she wants us to visit her. That does not happen every day! So last week we met with her and had a great lesson about the atonement. And then this week we invited her to bring a friend with her to the lesson and she totally did! So we got her friend as a new investigator. So cool! Miracles!

Oh Yeah! Do you remember my buddy ______________? We just got a new investigator that is EXACTLY him. He looks, talks, and acts like him. It freaks me out because it seems like I'm just teaching my friend who is acting to be a nonmember. It's weird. Actually, it is kind of a miracle that we found him in the first place. We were out talking to people on campus and he was walking towards me. I was about to walk right past him and talk to the person behind him but he kept looking at me funny and so I quickly jumped over and started talking to him. I still can't explain how it happened. I know that the Spirit was pushing me to talk to him instead. We had a great conversation and then finally met up on Monday. It was a great lesson and we're meeting him again next week. I hope he gets baptized. Either way I really need to introduce him to ____________ someday. They are long lost twins.

We really have been so blessed here. We have some amazing things going on. This is the best ward! I love it.
I hope that I can stay here next transfer too but I feel like I'm probably going to be transfered. It's crazy. Oh and there is a chance that we might go to the temple next week for fun. If we do, then our P-Day will not be on monday. So expect am email on wednesday or thursday next week if you don't get one on monday.

I loved the pictures of beauty and the beast! It sounds like it was a hit! I can't wait to see the play on DVD eventually. The pictures looked killer diller awesome! I hope that you guys have an awesome thanksgiving and I love you so much! I'm thankful for you!
The church is totally true and it wont be too long before I get to skype with you again. I'm so pumped!

Love you!

Elder Ruesch

November 14, 2011

Before I forget, I want to mention that our P-day next week is being
changed to Thanksgiving day (Thursday). So don't expect an email next
monday. You'll have to wait even longer in suspense!

It's been another crazy week! They get crazier every week. I love
it. We are getting more and more people to teach and it is really
exciting!

This week we got a referral from a member who walked up to us and
said, "My friend wants to take the lessons." Jump for joy! Her
friend has felt lost for some time and he randomly emailed her and
said he wants to meet with the missionaries. So we called him us and
met with him this week. He's a really great guy and the lesson we
taught was definitely not according to plan. The spirit was really
strong though. It was amazing! We invited him to be baptized on
December 10th and he agreed! Unfortunately, he didn't show up at
church. Getting someone to church for the first time is the hardest
thing in the world. Satan works way to hard to make it not happen!
But we'll be seeing him tonight at FHE.

____________ is still doing pretty well. Unfortunately, he just isn't
quite ready to be baptized this saturday. It's a bummer because all
of our baptisms keep getting postponed! He needs a little more time
to sort out his testimony and we also have potential family problems
with him. He told us that he hasn't told his parents yet and he seems
a little afraid to. That tends to be a common concern among the young
single adults. But we work hard and try to make it happen. If the
church really is true it will all work out eventually.

We met with _________ this week again. He is just so solid. We had
our own testimony meeting with him and he bore a powerful testimony.
His new plan is to try and talk with his family more at thanksgiving
and if they wont support him, hopefully he'll just take a leap of faith.

The girl who was taught on skype is doing super amazing! We taught
the Plan of Salvation to her and she liked it. Her Baptism is set for
December 17th. December might be an incredible month for the
dinkytown ward! Well actually, as of next week it will officially be
the Twin Cities YSA ward! But anyway, we have a lot of really great
investigators that could all get baptized very very soon if things
work out. We're hoping to see some amazing stuff happen.

I also forgot to mention, there are a lot of other colleges in St.
Paul that we cover too. A lot of little ones. One is a catholic
university in St. Paul. We also have a couple of members at a private
school called Macalester. Elder Mumford and I are super duper excited
about Macalester. There are about 2,000 Students there and so it is
really small but it has a lot of potential. Our two active members
there are really great at sharing the gospel and living their faith.
The funny thing is that Macalester has actually been rated the #6
least religious college in the U.S. Crazy huh? And so because of
that, there is a club called the interfaith house for all the kids
that are religious. It's cool. And last sunday the interfaith house
had us and the sisters over for dinner and they asked us questions and
we taught the whole restoration. It was cool! And then afterwards we
got talking to one of the girls and got her email and then met with
her again last week! It was most excellent! She has good potential.
Hopefully we see some miracles with her! The other miracle we had
was while we were over at Macalester on another evening, we ran into
an inactive member that is a student there too! We got her phone
number and got her to come to church yesterday. It was awesome! So
we're going to teach her the missionary lessons and hopefully she'll
become a fully active member of the church again. Exciting!

I love love love working in the singles ward. It is so fun and cool
to work with the kids that are your own age. We have a party everyday!

___________is doing good too. We taught him the restoration this week
and it seemed to click pretty well. Unfortunately, he works every
sunday so he can't come to church. It stinks. But we're going to try
to work through that.

Good luck MJ on your play! I'm super excited for you! Opening
night! Word. That is going to be so fun. Don't lose too much sleep!

Have fun this next week and a half and I look forward to telling you
about life on Thanksgiving. It's going to be super great! Thanks for
all your love and support!

Love,

Elder Ruesch

November 7, 2011

Hey hey hey!

So this week has been awesome. We had a lot of great miracles!

Halloween was pretty fun. We had a lesson that went really well. That left us only like a half an hour before we had to be in our apartment because we had to go in early at 8. It was nice to get to relax and go to bed earlier, especially since this week was exhausting. For some reason we kept on having busy stuff happen and we had to cut some of our meals really short or just skip them all together and live off snacks. It's been adventurous!

I definitely realized even more the power of prayer this week. Elder Mumford and I were studying prayer during companion study. One of my favorite passages is the Bible Dictionary section on prayer which basically says that prayer just grants us the blessings that God is already willing to grant but are made conditional on us asking for them. And so Elder Mumford and I decided to take that promise extra seriously and we prayed that we could get a solid new investigator this week. And the Lord SUPER blessed us this week!

We prayed to get a new investigator. And this week we got a call from President Clements and he gave us a referral! it was great! The first thing he said as we started talking gospel is, "I just want to know the purpose of life." BOOM we whipped out the Plan of Salvation in a Millisecond and blew his mind. It was fantastic! The lesson actually went really well and you could tell he liked it a lot. And we have another appointment with him next week! We're excited!

Next miracle! We got a call from some other Elders in St. Paul who gave us a referral. She has family members that are Mormon in California. Her cousin told her to go to mormon.org and chat with the missionaries. And so that's what she did! She kept asking questions and stuff and eventually the Elders in Provo started teaching her lessons over Skype!! How crazy cool is that? By the time she got hooked up with us she already knew the Book of Mormon is true and wants to get baptized. What? Yes, true story! So all the hard work is done and they just passed her to us to get her going to a church, get used to the ward, and to baptize her. It's craziness and super sweet. So we met with her on Saturday and she is awesome. She came to church yesterday and then came to the CES Fireside last night too. She is so golden. The plan as of now is to have her baptism at the end of December because that is when her family that lives in Cali could come to watch. It would be so cool. Hopefully i'll be around by then. No one knows!

So those were two major miracles. _____________ is also doing really good. I forgot to tell you that we had to push his baptism back a week because his parents are going out of town.

____________ is doing okay. We've kinda layed back and stopped pushing the baptism and have put it more in his hands. Still teach him every week and he always comes to church and all the activities and stuff. He is just kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. He loves his family SO much and that's a great thing. But he's affraid to disappoint them and wants their support before he moves on. He is such a respectable guy. I have learned many great lessons from him. I really think he'll be going on a mission someday. He would be killer diller missionary.

Holy smokes. Cool story! It was crazy! So we started talking to a girl on campus. We had a good conversation going and we taught pretty much the whole restoration as we walked with her. We ended up talking for about 15 minutes and walked her all the way to her house. She was grateful for the conversation but wasn't interested in learning more, which stunk for us because it was a good conversation. And then she told us that she lives with 9 other Christian girls and asked us if we would come in and let her and her roomates pray over us. Oh man... we went in the house and met everyone and then us and 10 girls stand in a circle and have a prayer. And you got to remember that most people don't pray like us. They pray to Jesus and and anyone can join in and say anything in the pray and if someone says something you really like you say, "yes Lord!" or "thank you Jesus!" Elder Mumford is used to prayers like that being from texas but I had no idea what was going on! And it doesn't help that all these girls were beautiful! Oh man it was an experience. Maybe one of them will read the Book of Mormon we left and convert the rest of them. 10 baptisms! And since they are all very pretty the singles ward may gain 10 members at first but would lose 20 in the end because all the fellas here would start dating like crazy! It would result in many souls saved :) Ha ha. Just kidding.

The final news of the week is that the stakes here in the Twin Cities got together and reorganized the Singles ward. They combined the Dinkytown, Uptown, and St. Croix singles wards all into one and made it the Twin Cities YSA ward. So we now officially cover a HUGE area. It is all of Minneapolis and St. Paul and their suburbs and goes over into Wisconsin even. We have a lot of work to do, but we're gonna see some miracles!

Well, I love you guys. I better get headed out. It was sad to hear that the suburban is gone. but those things happen. Things change so much in two years! i'm gonna get back and everything is going to be super different! Weird...

Love you!

Elder Ruesch

October 31, 2011

Take the derivative of x^2 and multiply it by the hypotenuse of a 45
degree triangle and then add 1.34543 and finish by taking the
integral. Woo! It looks like that halloween party was so fun. I am
sad I had to miss it! I didn't even think about it until today when I
got your pictures. Everyone looks so nerdy! I would have just gone
as my unique little self. Ha ha.

Thanks for the package! I forgot to mention that last week. It is
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo awesome! It was perfect. I haven't
had cheeto's my whole mission I think. I scarfed them down in 2
seconds. I forgot how good they really were. He he. Plus I always
love getting those mini cereal boxes and the email updates for my
friends. Thanks mom! And the best part of all was the coconut
cranola bars!!! Woo! By the way, where is Trevis serving on his
mission? I can't remember.

So this was a crazy cool week. I picked up my new home boy Elder
Cameron Mumford. He is CRAZY! It's hilarious. I really don't know
where his energy comes from. It will be 6:30 in the morning and I'm
trying to not die because I'm tired and he'll just burst out into song
of something random like Into the Woods or "Hide yo kids, hide yo
wife!" He is a thespian 100%. The epitome of thespian. It is
absolutely hilarious! He is from Dallas, Texas. He also went to Utah
State! In fact, he's pretty obsessed with Utah State. I love it. I
think he has at least 3 aggie shirts here with him and a pair of aggie
sweat pants. It's so funny. I thought I was obsessed with USU. I
guess not... Oh! We also have another cool connection. He was in my
friend Taylor Dolbin's ward back at USU. Taylor was his elder's
quorum president actually. I looked at old pictures of Elder Mumford
with long hair before the mission and he looks just vaguely familiar.
We had to have seen each other at one point! Super cool connection to
think about. He also knows a lot of the people that were in Out of
the Blue. Do you remember that group? It is the showchoir I was in
at USU. He wasn't in it but he knew a lot of my friends in it.
There's just connections all over the place! And now we are doing the
best thing ever serving as servants of the Lord together! Word. This
is going to be another fun transfer.

I think it is funny that I have had more companions that went to USU
than went to BYU. Elder Farnsworth is the only companion I had that
went to BYU but Elder Checketts and Mumford both went to USU.
Awesome. Way to represent!

We have had some hilarious experiences in the last 5 days. First off,
Elder Mumford totally BIFFED IT on his bike as he was pulling around
the corner. I have no idea how it happened but the back tire went out
from under him and fortunately he was going pretty slow. After he
fell, since he is an actor, he obviously has to put on a show and he
just naturally flapped his arms out and played dead on the street for
five seconds. It was obviously fake and I'll be honest I was laughing
really hard and this girl who was walking past came running over and
asked Elder Mumford if he was okay. By then he was embarrassed and
said yes and then biked off really fast. Oh man it was glorious.

The other funny story... Our apartment door has two locks. A dead
bolt and then a lock on the handle. Aparently, we don't have a key
for the handle lock and Elder Mumford accidentally locked it on our
way out. And so we came home for lunch after church and couldn't get
in the door. We called our apartment mananger but she didn't want to
answer since it was not office ours and the main office was closed.
Then we called the on call emergency people and they said they'd have
a locksmith guy call us to help us out. Did he call us? No. So how
were we going to get into the apartment? Well, we devised several
plans. We knew that the balcony door was unlocked and so we tried to
call someone in the ward that had a ladder but no one was answering or
getting back to us! The final options were to be spiderman and scale
the wall or get onto the roof and climb down to the balcony. Both
options were awesome. Scaling the wall was impossible and so we found
a hatch in the ceiling and I pushed Elder Mumford onto the roof. He
then pulled me up and we went over to the balconey. Unfortunately, it
was impossible to jump down from the roof. We would have had to swing
from the roof onto the balcony and it wasn't worth risking death. So
basically we were homeless for the whole day... Later that night we
Finally got in touch with a member who has a ladder and we got in. It
was great! But man it was the funnest adventure ever! So good!

So all my letters sound like all we do is have fun and don't actually
do missionary work. I guess I just like telling the highlights. But
I promise we are working hard! We are still working with ________.
His family still isn't supportive, and he really wants their support
in this. He is so solid though. He is just a rock and will be
baptized the second it is right. He's so awesome.

_______________ is doing great too! We'll be meeting with him
tonight. He has been to church three times in a row. He comes to
family home evening and all sorts of other activities. He is still
set for baptism on November 12th. We're excited!

We dropped our friend _____________. He was no longer progressing and
there was no point meeting with him anymore. It was fun while it
lasted though!

We got a new investigator we're teaching from the Uptown ward. He is
really knowlegable in the bible. He is really cool and has a lot of
potential. I think we'll see good stuff with him.

There is a guy that we taught just last week and he is super cool.
His personality reminds me a lot of myself except he's SUPER smart.
And we were walking around campus talking to people and we ran into
him and he invited us to dinner with him! It was cool. He is such a
smart kid and he has A LOT of concerns. It was cool though because
while we were eating with him one of his friends came over and sat
with us and then more friends came. It ended up that I continued the
talk with him and Elder Mumford and all the other kids about the
restoration. It was crazy cool! And now we have potential to keep
teaching a few of them. It was a miracle!

I really need to go. But I'm glad that I could make a longer email.
We are going to have an awesome transfer here in Dinkytown. I am
really excited. Halloween is going to be fun. All the missionaries
have to be in early tonight. Ha ha. It will be fun... It's a good
thing we don't really tract here in dinkytown. All we do is talk to
kids on campus.

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Elder Ruesch