Week of May 29, 2016

Hey yall! I  hope everyone had a great week! Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! This week was a good one! Out here the weather was super nice all this week! Its really weird not being able to wear shorts all the time as most of you know I'm not a big fan of the whole pants thing.  This week had my birthday and I hit my 9 month mark its crazy how fast time fly's when your on a mission at the beginning it feels like 2 years is forever but time is flying on. 

This week was a great one! We have still been doing lots of service with the weather getting good we have been doing lots of yard work for people and working out on the farms and stuff which has been good. It has also allowed us to meet lots of new people service is our main way of finding. It has been working pretty good and has opened up lots of doors for us in the community. 

We have been teaching a less active family and there 9 year old son is wanting to be baptized so we have been teaching them and they have been coming back to church and we are teaching the rest of the lessons to this kid. and he will most likely be baptized by the end of the month which is super exciting!

I hope everyone has a great week! Love you all!

Love Elder Brinkerhoff!

May 12, 2016

Week of May 16, 2016

Hey y'all! I hope that you made this week a great week! Weeks and days really are what you make them. That's really something that I have learned since being on a mission so if you don't like where your at right now change it.

We had a super awesome week out here in South Dakota! This week we were super busy on Tuesday night we went out to Rapid City which is about 3 hours away. We spent the night with some of the Rapid City Elders and the next morning we had our Zone Conference it was really cool because we had the Elder Martino who is part of the Seventy come and he talked to us. He talked mostly about how we need to unite the Members of the church in missionary work and how we need to use the members of the church to find people for us to teach. So that was super awesome!

We had two awesome things happen this week. (1) On Tuesday before we headed out to Rapid City we had a few minutes so we decided to make the best of our time and we went tracking. Which is something we don't have much success with in this area, we tracked 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, and 6th street with 0% success. Then we got to 5th street and apparently that's where all the magic happens in this area. Anyways when we were tracking on Tuesday and we knocked on this girls door name Star, she let us in and we taught her the restoration and it went great!  And she told us we could come back this week! We are super excited to go back and teach her some more this week. (2) On Sunday we took one of the Youth in the ward out with us he is 16 and is planning on going on a mission in a couple years. Anyways we took him to see some less active members and it went really good. After we saw the two less active members we decided to take him tracking so we started where we had finished off on 5th street and we were able to teach 5 more people and hand out 5 Books of Mormon it was super awesome!! Also last week some people from the Methodist Church called us and they want us to go teach them about our church so we are super excited for that. 

We had a crazy awesome lightning storm last night it was super cool!! I guess they had some pretty bad tornado in Valentine Which is like 30 or so minutes from here. I was hoping that we could see it but it never came this way.

I hope y'all have a great week! 

Love,

Elder Brinkerhoff

Week of May 9, 2016

Hey I hope that everyone had a great week the last couple of weeks! Things out here in Winner have been going great! We have been doing tons of service... This week we are going to help the baptist church pour cement on by there church... We want to put a Book of Mormon in the cement so when were done we can tell them that the foundation of there church is built on the Book of Mormon.  Being on a mission really gives you a weird sense of humor lol. 

So this week we had a super awesome lesson about the restoration of the church. Its crazy how much things have changed over the last 9 months. I remember the first time that I was able to teach the restoration ha that lesson was all over the place. I've gotten much better at being able to teach people. Anyways we had the lesson in a Members home and he was a huge help in the lesson! It went really good the investigator (Shandra) was really interested and was asking tons of questions. Lessons where the people are asking questions and participating are the best ones! The Spirit was super strong during the lesson!

This week we have Zone Conference. It is going to be in Rapid City which is awesome because we are going to be able to make a quick trip out to Mount Rushmore. 

I hope that yall have a great week! Love you all!

Elder Brinkerhoff! 

Week of April 11, 2016

Hey Yall!! I hope that everyone had a great week!! Sorry I missed yall last week! We didn't spend very much time emailing because we were fishing again! We caught 33 fish so it was super awesome!! Today we are going to go play golf so I'm super excited for that! 

This week we had a really great week!! We are starting to get some pretty good movement in the area! We got a couple of new investigators this last week! Things are really starting to move along in the area and I am loving it! 

Last night we went to Molly's and helped her with some things and then we played some games with her little boys! They are all the same ages as my three brothers so I love going over there! Anyways last night we were able to the her and her family about the restoration.  It went really good they were very interested in what we had to say. They are a super awesome family and we are hoping that we will be able to continue teaching them! 

We have still been doing lots of service at the long term care center which has been really good. We have been getting some other investigators form doing that so that has been great!!

I hope everyone has a great week!! Love you all!!

Love,

 Elder Brinkerhoff!

Week of April 4, 2016

Hey Ya'll!! How was everyone's week?? I hope that you were all able to go give some service to someone this week! This week we did lots of service again. We worked at the Long Term Care Center a lot this week again. We also spent some time on the Bartlett's Ranch. (they are members of our ward) They are super cool! They have a whole bunch of horses. We got to shovel poop for about six hours so it was a great time lol! I got super sunburned but hey at least now I don't look like an albino... This week we also went to the Nashville Tribute Concert it was super awesome it was a great time to be around a bunch of other missionary's and to just have a good time. It was really weird not wearing our tags or dress clothes. It was nice to actually feel comfortable for a couple hours haha. 

This week we had transfer calls and I will be staying in Winner for at least another 6 weeks! Elder Hobson is getting transferred to Newtown so I will be here with Elder Musacchia

This week we had the opportunity to speak in church. My talk was about fasting. I based it off of the Mormon Message "The Hope of Gods Light" In the video a guy who was going to end his life decided to fast to know if God was there. After the fast he hadn't received an answer that God was there but he no longer wanted to end his life. Slowly the gospel started coming into his life. At the end of the video he says that he is happy and know that God is there for him. Anyways the talk went pretty good. 

I hope ya'll have a great week!! Love you all!!

Love,

Elder Brinkerhoff

Week of March 27, 2016

Hey Yall! I hope that everyone had a good week and did something exciting this week! This week has been good. On Friday we had ZTM (zone training meeting). Which means we got to go to Pierre! Which also means we were able to hit up a Walmart so we were able to get some shopping in. Its hard to shop here cause everything is like triple the price so its a huge pain. 

I really enjoyed the ZTM that we had this last week. Some one said "God must be up to something good or Satan wouldnt be working this Hard" I really like that. I challange you all to ponder over that this week! 

Also this week while we were volunteering at the Long Term Care Center I was taking this guy back to his room and when we got to his room he had a few pictures of Tiger Woods on his wall in a couple of pictures he was playing with Tiger.  I asked him about the pictures, he couldn't talk very well due to having a stroke but I was able to get that him and Tiger were buddy's when Tiger  was in college at Stanford and they played together a few times. I told him that I played golf in High School and he got the biggest smile on his face. I told him that the Masters tournament was on Friday he told me that he had been to the masters to watch a few times. He showed me some pictures of when he was there. It made him so happy to be able to talk to someone about golf for a couple mins and he said I could come back and talk golf anytime I wanted too.  Later that night one of the nurses told me that I made his whole week by just talking to him for a few minutes.  It feels so good to be able to help people out even if its just something small like this. I challenge all of you to go out and give service to someone, you may even make there week!

Today for P-Day we went fishing at the Curt & Molly Calhoon ranch. One of the other voulnteers from the long term care place invited us to go out to there ranch and go fishing in a pond that they have. We caught 19 fish all together I caught 11 including a 7 lb 26 inch monster! I'll send pics for proof lol. We are trying to build a good relationship with Molly and her family so that we will be able to teach her and her family! So far we are off to a pretty good start!

Also this week we are going to go to Minot to see a concert! Its Nashville Tribute so it should be pretty fun! Minus the 8 hour drive to Minot from here. Presidnet Hess is taking all the missionaries in the mission were not supposed to wear our tags or are mission clothes so its going to be a little different but its going to be awesome!! The reason for this is cause we dont want to scare anyone by having 142 missionaries there haha. 

I hope you all have an exciting week! Love you all!! 

Love, 

Elder Brinkerhoff