Thailand Week 15, 25 Nov 2013

Hey everyone!  This will be a short email, sorry.
  

This week has been good!  Pretty typical though.  If there's ever such a thing as normal out here.  The highlight was our big Mission Tour meeting as a zone up in Chiang Mai yesterday!  We had Elder Wilson and his wife train us on the Book of Mormon!  He's a member of the Asia Area 70 so it was awesome to get to learn from all his experience.  

That was the main thing.  It was way fun to see Elder Vance and Elder Beatty from the MTC again!  They're in the same house now!  And I got to eat a whole garlic chicken pizza by myself at our zone dinner at this way good American food restaurant haha.  So yeah here we are back in the Daily Grind and I love it.

I think I'll be all set for thanksgiving!  There's a white guy serving in our branch who served here once and married a Thai girl he met at BYU and they're taking care of it all.  So I'm really hoping for some good food.  I've started expanding my diet. I bought oatmeal today and found that we have some cocoa powder so hopefully I can make no bake cookies!!  I'll let you know how it goes! 

Oh and by the way, there's a Thailand Bangkok mission Facebook page now! Go and check it out!!

I'm thankful for emails, for the Book of Mormon, for donuts, and for peanut butter!  Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 

Love Elder Josh Keller

Thailand Week 14, 17 Nov 2013

This week has been so awesome!!!

We had a lot of good things happen this week.  Mostly because of this new training we got. It sounds pretty harsh, and that's how I felt at first, but it really does work.  It involves tons of people, a picture of baptism, and filtering.  We talk to as many people as we can about baptism.  The usual stunt is "Hey do you know what this is?  It's baptism, it's being cleansed from our sins.  We can have eternal life and happiness (other blessings, anything really). The 21st of December we'll be having a baptism service.  Do you want to get baptized on that day?"

Basically we try to find the people who are really prepared by the Lord to hear our message.  We know they're out there and every missionary loves finding them!  But that's usually the hard part.   

Now the goal is to filter through those who aren't interested right now to find those who are.  Obviously about 90% of people aren't interested at all. But that's okay.  We move on!  And move on!  We get rejected so many times but when someone is interested they're really prepared and the Spirit has already been working on them.  We have a lot of new people to meet with this week and are super excited to meet and teach them all!

I know the Lord's work is true!

I heard it's snowing in Alaska!!  Yay!!!  I'm gonna miss a real winter but that's okay, I'm tan.  Well, my arms, face, and the part of my neck that's not covered by a collar and tie....Haha I'm gonna have the darkest farmers tan!

I love everyone and hope you have an awesome week!!

-Love Elder Josh Keller

Thailand Week 13, 10 Nov 2013

Hey everyone!  

This week was good.  We got to go visit the ancient capital of Sukothai on Monday so I'll put some cool pictures up!  

This week we put a lot of focus on planning ahead and saw the fruits from it!  We got some good lessons in with lots of people!

This week we also put a focus on contacting for the whole 2 hours everyday. It was good!  We got a lot of good contacts and some people who are really excited to learn!  On Saturday we went and did some inviting at the crazy Thai market street.  You couldn't move unless the crowd took you. It was ridiculous!  

That's about all the big news from this week.  The Church is still true, Jesus Christ is still our Savior and this is still His work.  That's something that hit me this week. No matter what we do, no matter what results we get, I'm serving Christ and that's what makes me want to put everything I have into this work.  

Love Elder Keller

Thailand Week 12, 3 Nov 2013

So today we're finally getting out and going to see some cool Thai culture stuff in the ancient capital city of Sukothai! It's like an hour bus ride away. Hopefully I'll be able to get some fun things to send home for Christmas. So I'll just give a little wrap up of this week.

Wednesday we had our Halloween activity at the church and the members did a way good job setting everything up!  Halloween here isn't the same as America that's for sure.  American candy is so expensive here, well it's not too bad but it's more than other options. The party was way fun!

Friday we got to give a blessing to a sister in really humble circumstances.  It was an eye opening experience to see so much humbleness and faith in someone who has a lot of reasons to be unhappy about life.  I watched Thomas S Monson's talk on how the Lord will never forsake us, and I know how true that is.

Saturday and Sunday were all pretty normal days!  Well, there's not really anything normal in being a missionary, you've got to be prepared for everything!  We got raged at and flipped off (footed) by someone who was super angry we wrote the word scripture on the ground.  We also had a baptism this week!!  That was awesome.  The water in our font is still coming out green though...

Mom we made food this week!  Elder Lucas had some Au Jus and taco seasoning packets his family sent so we had sandwiches and made up some taco soupish stuff this week.

Next week I'll have some good pictures to send home!

Love Elder Josh Keller