Welcome to Atikokan

Hey everyone, another week has come and gone! Its crazy how fast the time flies bye! 

This week wasn't too exiting. On Tuesday we had a district meeting and then had exchanges.  They went pretty well. I stayed in Fort Frances and Elder Elwood from I Falls came to spend the day with me. We had a good time and were able to do some good work. We talked to an atheist guy on the street... that was interesting haha! 

On Thursday we drove out to Atikokan. It is like an hour and a half drive. We drove there to see one of our investigators and to visit some of the Atikokan branch members  there. It was a little sad... our investigator totally lunched us. But we did get to see some members and things so it was ok! 

The highlight of this week...remember the girl Ashly in Moose Jaw? She got baptized!!!! I talked to Elder Baumann and he said everything went great! She also has a temple recommend already and is going to the temple this week! I am so happy for her. She will be a great member! 

Well everyone have a great week! Love ya all! 

Love Elder Farnsworth

Oh Canada . . . How I love your weather!

HEY! 

Well this week was a pretty typical week. Nothing to exciting. We did have a big zone training meeting on Wednesday so that was pretty exciting. Me and Elder Ringger planned for and then carried out the whole meeting. It took a lot of time to get everything all ready but it went really well so that was good. It was also great to see all of the missionaries in our zone, they are really some great elders and sisters. I remember when I first came out on my mission I was so shy and I would always get nervous when we had big meetings, but now I love them! It is so good to be around other missionaries, to hear from them, to learn from them, and to have a good time with them. I love our zone :) 

Other than that this week we tried to do a lot of finding. We walked around quite a bit and even did quite a bit of tracting. Nothing has come from it yet... but soon!!! The weather this week was definitely not too good. It rained so much!!!! I was so sick of the rain by the end of the week. I wish it would just snow cause the snow isn't as wet and messy. When it rains you just get soaking wet and then your freezing cold on top of it. Oh Canada how I love your weather haha! 

Our area is doing alright, it has definitely been a struggle trying to get people to teach here. A lot of the people have not been keeping their appointments and things so that is kinda rough, but we keep trying! It is so interesting here too, cause our whole branch are recent converts and they have all been baptized within the last 3 years so they all have really new testimonies and there all trying to figure out how things run and work so we work with them a lot and try to help them out. It is good though, I do love this area! 

Well I hope you all have a great week! Love you all! 

Elder Farnsworth

Eli at ZTM

Eli with Elder Ence and Elder Ringger

Eli and his new best friend Smokey

Exchange Week

Well this was a great week! 

On Tuesday we got to drive up to Kenora and do exchanges with the missionaries up there. We had a really good time with them. Kenora is a beautiful place, it is northern Ontario so there are tons of trees and mountains and lakes and its really nice! It was kind of funny, I was on exchanges with a missionary named Elder Hirschi. He has only been out about 3 weeks. Anyways he and I went street contacting and tracting. It rained on us the whole entire time haha! It was fun though, we found some really good people and definitely had some good experiences! 

On Thursday we drove from Kenora to Winnipeg for a MLC, we drove like 2 and a half hours to get there and then we had a GREAT MLC. It was 6 hours long.... so that part kinda stunk but it was great we learned so much! We had two men there from the missionary department in Salt Lake and they taught us a lot of great things. We talked a lot about the proper way to plan and how extremely important it is as missionaries to plan and prepare for our days and weeks. But he explained how important a skill that was for our whole lives, it was really good. We also talked a lot about baptism and the whole gospel of Jesus Christ. It was great what they taught us. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the plain and precious truth that each one of us need. That is why the Book of Mormon is so important. It teaches us those plain and precious truths. We talked about how each step in the gospel of Jesus Christ is helping to prepare us for the next step, and eventually the whole gospel prepares us to live with god in a fullness of joy! 

We also talked about how throughout each of the missionary discussions our main message is centered on how the heavens are open and how we can receive personal revelation for ourselves to know that these things are true! It was a great MLC! 

After the MLC we drove 4 hours home... lots of sitting and driving the first part of this week. Then on Friday we had the assistants come and do exchanges, I was with Elder Joncas. We had a great day! We went out and walked around a ton! We talked to a lot of people and found quite a few potential investigators so that was great! 

Halloween was pretty dumb... we had to be in by 6 and then we were supposed to clean our apartments.  Ours was pretty clean haha but we also had to take KS so really nothing exciting there. 

I hope you all have a great week! I love you all.  Don't forget the gospel is true and it will bless our lives as we continue to faithfully live it! 

Love Elder Farnsworth

Life in Fort Francis

Hello everyone,

Everything here is going ok. We are really just trying to figure out what to do to get things in the area moving forward. We have tried a few things but this week and the rest of this transfer we are going to try and be really creative to find new people and increase our teaching pool. It's a hard town cause there are lots of old people that are stuck in their ways so we have to be creative to peak their interest haha! I guess it's just another new experience to help us get out of our comfort zone and mix things up! 

This week we got to teach a Sunday school lesson on Gerald Causse's conference talk from last April conference. It is about if the gospel is still wonderful to you. I loved this talk and this lesson! We really need to make sure that the gospel is always wonderful to us. We can't let it just become common in our lives and the things that we do. It needs to stick out. We need to be having spiritual experiences always and constantly learning and understanding new things about the gospel. We will never fully understand it. There is always something new to grasp and learn! I love the gospel.  It is something that we have to continue to learn about. It is something that will helps us to continually improve and come closer to our Savior Jesus Christ! Keep studying the gospel and keep finding new ways to make it wonderful to you! 

Love you all!

Elder Farnsworth

Bro Batang and Elder Baumann

 Bro Batang and Family

 Eli by the River in Fort Francis

 Fort Francis River during the day

Crazy Week

Hello everyone,

This week was pretty sad/crazy! I left Moose Jaw on Wednesday afternoon and made the trip to Regina. It was sure hard to leave Moose Jaw. We were able to meet with a lot of the people we were working with so I got to say all of my good byes. It was hard but I know that Elder Baumann will take care of those people. They are in good hands! 

I stayed the night in Regina on Wednesday. That was actually pretty fun. I got to stay with Elder Brown and Elder Hanson so we had a good time talking and being together before they went home. Then Thursday morning we were up at 5 and started to long drive to Winnipeg. We drove about 6 hours. It was a loooooooong drive haha! We finally got to Winnipeg and had a good transfer meeting. It was really sad to say good bye to Elder Hanson and Elder Brown. I will miss those guys a lot, they really helped me and I learned a lot from them. 

After transfer meeting me and Elder Ringger drove down to Warroad and had a mini exchange there. It was actually really fun to be back in my old area and I was able to see quite a few of the members there. It was good to visit with them and see how they were doing. After that we drove back to Fort Frances on Friday afternoon, it was like another 2 hours.... so I think in total I was in the car for like 12 hours.... lots of driving haha! 

I am glad to be in Fort Frances though, it's a small town but its actually really nice. There is a river that runs right along side of it and its really pretty. I like the people here so far too, they are all really nice and welcoming. It was crazy. The Fort Frances building is huge! It is like the size of a stake center. They built it back quite a few years ago when there was ton of members, but the paper mill here ended up closing and all the members moved away. So this week in church we had a huge building but only 8 people were there including us two missionaries. It is a bit of a change but I guess it just means we gotta work really hard to fill the building.

Well I hope you all have a great week, love you all! 

Love Elder Farnsworth

 Moose Jaw District

Moving Again

Hey everyone! 

Sorry this is going to be a short post this week! We had a pretty good week this week. Elder Baumann and I were able to teach quite a few lessons and saw some good things happen. We got to travel out to a small town this week to give a lady a bible. She requested one. We gave it to her and had a neat experience talking with her. We also taught Bro. Batang and Ashly this week, and they are both doing really well.

Sad news for this week. . .after only 6 weeks here in Moose Jaw, I am getting moved :( I am so so so sad to be leaving. This area is so good! I love the members, I love the size of it, and there is so much potential here and so much work going on. I am so sad to be leaving it. I am also so sad to be leaving Bro. Batang and Ashly. They are great investigators. They decided to close down the Moose Jaw zone. They have now just made it one big district and now I am being moved to be a zone leader in Fort Francis Ontario. It will be a good experience there. I will be right on the boarder of Canada and the States, and I am getting a good companion too so it will be good. Fort Francis is really small, only about 6 thousand people, so nothing new I guess haha! I am sad to leave but I guess that is just what the Lord had planned. 

I hope you all have a good week. I love you all and miss you! 

Love Elder Farnsworth

Seriously Great Week -- So Many Blessings

Hey this week! 

What a great week! I loved general conference this weekend. It was sooo good! I am super excited about the new apostles. I think that they will all be great. Especially Elder Renlund. Haha I was so excited to hear he was one of the new apostles. I totally got to shake his hand haha :) 

I loved all of the talks, for some reason I especially liked Saturdays sessions. All of those talks really answered a lot of the question and thoughts that I had going in to conference. I know that our church is in such good hands. The Lord really does know what he is doing and I know he called each and every one of the leaders of the church for a specific reason. They are all amazing. 

This week here in Moose Jaw has seriously been so good! This week we saw so many great blessings. As I talked about a little while ago the mission is starting to implement a new plan to try and increase the baptisms. Part of the plan is to invite people to be baptized in the first discussion and then invite them to a specific date in the 2nd discussion. Its a huge focus in everything that we do to think of what we can do to get baptisms and find those that are prepared. Anyways this week Elder Baumann and I were determined to live the plan to the fullest. We had some great lessons this week. We met with Brother Batang and his family and we had a great talk and invited him to be baptized. He accepted! After the lesson we were just eating and talking with him and I invited him to come to Utah some day and Elder Baumann invited him to Austria one day and he is like, you have to baptize me before you guys leave or I will not come haha! He is so prepared. Now were going to start meeting with him twice a week and hopefully within the next month he will be baptized. He does have a 2 week vacation in October but were really excited for him. He also came to conference on Sunday morning. It was great! 

Then on Friday, we went and met with a potential investigator, her name is Ashley. We started talking with her and her cousin and had a great lesson with them. Her cousin is less active and Ashley has never been baptized. She almost was when she was 11 but chose not to. Anyway we had a really good lesson, and learned a lot about both of them. Then at the end we were pretty much about to get up to leave but out of no where I was just in my head thinking, we have to ask her to be baptized. So we asked her and she said she would love to that its something she has really wanted. So now we will be working with her quite a bit too.

Her story is actually kind of amazing too. She was having a horrible day and everything was going wrong. She said she was just wanting to give up and she prayed to God and asked him that if he was there and if he loved her to send her a sign. She said like two minutes after her prayer she checked Facebook and we had messaged her on there and were trying to reach out to her! Amazing experiences. God is truly preparing people and he will lead them to the truth!

I hope you all have a great week. Pray for missionary opportunities. You never know who needs you to reach out to them and who is being prepared. I love you all! 

Love Elder Farnsworth

Selfie of professional haircut by Sister Neitz

Raking leaves with Sister Bodily

Elder Baumann and Sister Bodily

arnsworth