The uneventful week of uneventfulness‏

Hey everyone!!

Hope you all had a great week! As you can probably tell by the title, my week has been pretty uneventful. It's been one of those weeks that you can work as hard you want, but things will still go a lot slower that you would hope. I did have a few fun things happen this week, though, so I wasn't absolutely hating life.

So first off, we had Zone Conference this last Thursday and that was awesome! President Felix always does a good job, and this transfer was no exception. It started off kinda rough, though. He spent probably about an hour talking about obedience and reminding everyone what we need to be doing. He's been a little disappointed that some haven't been as obedient as we should be, and so he spared no words in reminding who we are and what we represent. But after that he loosened up and we spent the rest of the conference talking about "The Living Christ" and about the wonderful blessings that come from believing in Christ, His Atonement, and the awesome chance we have now to literally represent Him everyday. I also got to do a musical number! I sang "Because I have Been Given Much", and that was a lot of fun :)

I also got to go on an exchange with Elder Gardner this week, and that was interesting haha! We didn't have the car that day, and we live about 3.5 miles out from his area, so we had to walk everywhere. In total I think we walked a total of like 12-14 miles that day. That was rough. We were able to talk to a lot of very nice and interesting people though! We talked to one guy who was from London, and he was probably the nicest person I've ever met! He wasn't extremely interested, but we had a great talk with him and he said he would definitely check out mormon.org, so that was pretty cool :)

And that's my week haha! Like I said, not much happened. But I've got high hopes for this week!

Now, for a quick spiritual thought. For this week: the importance of humility. This is something that I will admit I have had a lot of trouble with in the past. I still do now haha! But how often do we just talk about humbling ourselves without really thinking about why? I was pondering that in personal study the other day, and I came to the realization that humility is so important because it is the key to our progression. When we are humble, we submit ourselves to empowerment of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. We recognize our shortcomings, and we make goals on how we can improve. Then, as we have faith in Christ and act on those goals, we start to become better and progress into what our Heavenly Father wants us to become. Without humility, we hit a wall. We can't move forward. Humility is what makes it possible for us to reach our divine potential.

I hope you all have a fantastic week! Have faith, do good, and be humble haha! I love you all!

Love,
Elder Brennan Jon Rosenlof


(I stole this off the mission blog so we could have a picture this week. :-P)

1 down!!!!

Hey guys!

I am doing fantastic! It's been an awesome week, but also a pretty hectic one at that. But a lot of awesome stuff happened! So here's the report:

So first off, we met with Kayla at our ward mission leaders house to kind of set up the program for her baptism and to answer any questions on her mind. While we were talking, she started asking questions about the temple. Brother Long (our WML) had the idea that he and his wife could take her down to the LA Temple to walk the grounds and visit the Visitors Center. Kayla liked the idea, but said that she wished that Elder Shields and I could come with them. The temple is not even close to being in our mission boundaries and we're pretty restricted on temple visits while we're here (only for birthdays) so Elder Shields and I told her that wasn't really a possibility. Brother Long thought about that for a second, then pulled out his phone, called President Felix, and the next thing we know we're going to the temple on Thursday! It was awesome, to say the very least. We called ahead of time to set up an appointment with them, and we got a tour of the whole Visitors Center and we got to see Meet the Mormons! We all had an awesome time, and it's definitely up there for the best days of my mission.

However, Saturday was much better :) After a few months of a lot of prayer, fasting, and hard work...Kayla was baptized!! WOOOHOOO!! It was an awesome service. A lot of old friends and members of the ward came out to support her, and I had the opportunity of being the one that actually baptized her. The Spirit was very strong, and she was very nervous haha! But afterwards we were talking to her, and she couldn't stop talking about how happy she felt. The next day, Elder Collard was able to make it to our sacrament meeting and was able to stand in the circle as she received the gift of the Holy Ghost. Not quite everything went as planned, but everything fell into place. Not a bad way to spend Valentines Day as a missionary!!

And that was my week haha! A lot of our time and energy was put into getting everything set up, but it was a very good week. Thank you all for your prayers and support! You have no idea how much they all helped. I hope you all have a wonderful week!!

Love,
Elder Brennan Jon Rosenlof

I smell baptism....

Hey everyone!

So this week has been a good week! Elder Shields and I have been working hard and we're seeing a lot of success. The work has been a little bit slow, but that's okay because....

Kayla's getting baptized on Saturday!!! WOOOOOOO!!!! She's stayed super solid this last week and she feels ready!! I'm so excited. It's been so awesome to work with her since the very beginning and to be able to see the change that the Savior has made in her life. It's been very frustrating at times and there have been times when I was an inch away from dropping her, but there has been miracle after miracle with her and it's truly so awesome to see her ready to take this step. She's also asked that I baptize her, so that's cool too! But if you all would keep her in your prayers, that would be awesome. She's so close and she's going to need as much help as she can get.

Aside from all that excitement, I'm doing really good. We've had a really fun week and things are going really well for us. Elder Shields is starting to get more trunky by the day, but I'm going to drag him by his tie if I have to. He's still working really hard though, he just sometimes needs a swift kick in the butt to get moving haha!

So this week I had a bit of an epiphany about the Atonement. We were having a lesson with Kayla, and she was telling us about some of the trials that she's going through right now. She expressed to us that she feels that God is making her pay for her past mistakes. When she said that, the Spirit brought a few things to my mind that had me reach a conclusion that I'd never really considered before: We aren't required to pay anything, because Christ has already payed it all. He didn't pay half, and now we're required to pay for the rest. He didn't even pay most of it. He payed for it ALL. He payed the full price of our sins and mistakes so we don't have to. And what's even better, he doesn't require us to pay Him back. He does, however, ask us to do our best to become better. He wants us to not only be saved by His grace, but to be changed by it. There's an awesome talk by Brad Wilcox that talks a lot about this if you want to look it up. It's called "His Grace is Sufficient."

Hope you all have a great week!! Sorry that this email is kinda short, but hopefully next week I'll have some fun stories and some awesome pictures from the baptism! Love you all!!

Love,
Elder Brennan Jon Rosenlof

New transfer, new comp

Hey everyone!!

So this week has been full of a lot of fun and exciting misadventures of Elder Rosenlof and Elder Shields. I've got some fun stories for y'all, but I'll get to that in a moment. First off, I'm doing very well! This week has been really good! Elder Shields is awesome. Like seriously. We've had a lot of fun so far, and we're just finishing up the first week. He's pretty trunky, not gonna lie. But he still is determined to work hard, he just needs that extra push, and I'm more than happy to provide said push! But really, I can already tell this transfer is gonna rock.

So as for investigators, things are going pretty well! My only complaint is I wish we had more haha! But Kayla is doing well overall. She was a little upset that Elder Collard was leaving, but she's fine now. She's still set to be baptized on the 14th, so that's awesome! We also are having very high hopes for Naomi as well. We're planning on inviting her to be baptized on March 7th the next time we meet with her, so stay tuned for the update on that!

So as for marvelous misadventures, let it first be said that Elder Shields is a huge fan of tracting. And since the work is slowing down a bit in these parts, we've done a lot of it. That always makes for some good stories. So for one, we went and knocked on this one guys door, and he answered and just completely layed into us. Like I've never been so scared in my life. We started to slowly back away, and then he burst into laughter and told us he was just messing with us. Apparently he's an aspiring actor researching for a roll at the community college and thought he'd try it out on us. He's good. The other high point of this week happened as we were coming back to the apartment for lunch, and we saw something hanging out of our mailbox. We walk up and see that it's a pamphlet from RBC ministries entitled "Was Jesus God?" I laughed so hard. It was awesome.

Spiritual though this week: For one, I'll actually include the link I said I would last week. (oops https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/place-no-more-for-the-enemy-of-my-soul?lang=eng ) Second, don't doubt the power of faith. Faith brings miracles. Christ said that if we have faith even as a mustard seed, we have faith sufficient to move a mountain. That's powerful stuff. Faith is powerful, and if we continue to nurture and strengthen we'll be able to come to a knowledge of all these things. (Alma 32 for more information.)

Hope that you all have a great week!! Do some good and remember the Lord at all times. Love you all!

Much love,
Elder Brennan Jon Rosenlof



Last picture of me and Papa Collard



My sick new tag given to me by a member in 4th ward.



40 ties. Aw yes.



Me being sad because no one can spell my name right.



Us sitting on a curb after knocking on like 20 houses.