Just A Happy Week!

Hello! This week was a delight! I was just so incredibly happy all week long!

Taylor was baptized! It was so great. All the young women in the ward
came to the baptism and supported her. It was so great to see the love
and bond they all had with one another. It was just an amazing
occasion full of lots of joy.

Our relationship with our wards continues to grow. Our Facebook
initiative is going great! Everyone is super excited and very onboard.
It's been so nice to get to know everyone and be able to help them
have missionary opportunities!

The flat tire menace came back around this week. I had a flat on
Tuesday, so I pulled out the tube and patched it. When I did so I
realized that the tube looked pretty worn, but I thought nothing of
it. On Thursday we were riding and the tube ripped open. It decided it
was done being a bike tube and that it wanted to be a flat piece of
rubber instead. It decided this 8 miles from where we needed to be...
Luckily a member came by with a truck and helped us out! It was a
great blessing! Prayers are answered! I was able to buy a new tube and
all is well with my bike now.

This week I had the opportunity to see some of my cousins this week.
My cousin CJ was going through the Phoenix Temple for his first time.
That temple being just a couple blocks from where I'm living, I
stopped on by and was able to tell them hello and take some pictures.
It was great!

Well I love you all and hope you all are doing well. Have a great week!

-Elder Toph Tribe

Free haircut from from the nicest lady on one of our wards. 

Taylor got baptized!

Puppy time

We love these kids and these puppies

I got to see my cousins

CJ is headed out to serve in Philadelphia. He will be a great missionary!

The Roundys/Cunninghams are the best!

There are some trails above the neighborhood that make it easier to get places. Bonus is it adds a little adventure. 

Taylor is getting baptized!

e: Blog

Happy Father's Day to the greatest man I know. He taught me how to love, respect, trust, serve, and work hard. He's my biggest role model and I hope to become half the man he is one day. He has a heart of gold and is always doing things for others. I love you Dad!

Hello family and friends!

Taylor (the girl with Down syndrome) passed her baptismal interview!
She's ready to be baptized on Saturday!!! I am super excited for her!
She goes around and tells everyone that she's going to be baptized so
she can go into the temple. It's so great to see her enthusiasm and
love for the temple.

We got to do service this week! The only down fall was that it was
yard work on the hottest day so far...116 degrees and 3 1/2 hours of
yard work... The man we were doing it for is an elderly man with a
serious foot infection that they believe might take his life. So
that's scary! His neighbor is a member and she informed us that his
pride is in having an up kept yard. It's gotten a little out of
control since he developed the foot infection, so we cleaned it up
while he was at the doctors. We left before he got home, but I hope it
made his day a little brighter.

Our Facebook initiative is in full swing! We're getting our members to
create Mormon.org accounts, and getting them to share them on Facebook
with a picture with the missionaries. This allows them to bare
testimony to multiple people at once and get our faces out to the
people. It's going great so far and we're getting to know more of the
ward.

This week I feel so incredibly blessed. I was having a hard week. A
lot of things weren't going according to plan. This was putting some
added stress and pressure on me to try to make things work they way I
thought they should go. I quickly realized that I needed to stop
fighting and trying to force my will on the situation. I prayed,
stepped back, and miracles happened. It's hard to let go of what you
think is best. It's hard to be willing to take things as they come.
This week my testimony was strengthened that Heavenly Father knows
what needs to happen, and no matter how hard I try, His will will be
accomplished and not mine. Everything worked out better than I
could've hoped. Now Taylor is going to be baptized on time. We were
stressing that it might have to be pushed back. Humility and prayer is
the key to everything. Miracles do happen.

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week!

-Elder Toph Tribe

Oh I got Naked at the store today.... I think I'm funny 😂 But I love
this stuff! Super good. Mom they're turning me healthy! I now get this
and blackberries as a treat from the store.

Picture from the Facebook initiative with an awesome family.

A new transfer

One transfer down in this new area. The first couple of weeks felt like they were dragging on, but these past few weeks blew by. It's hard to fathom that I've been here for 6 weeks! This area is so far different now then when I got here. We're actually teaching people, we have someone on date to be baptized, our wards are asking us to come over, and I'm actually loving it here! It's so great!

This week was a slower one in the way of working with non members. 4 of our investigators couldn't meet with us. There out having too much summer fun. We worked a lot with the members though! We're building good relationships with them and it's been a really good time!

Taylor, our 15 year old investigator with Down Syndrome, had a really sweet experience this week. The young women in her ward did a temple super trip. They went to all 5 Arizona temples in 2 days. They did 507 baptisms and confirmations. They invited Taylor to go with them. She can't go into the temple yet, but the girls took turns being with her and going to the visitor centers, walking the grounds, and chatting with her. All of them told us that she couldn't stop talking about her baptism and how excited she is! All the young women decided that the week after Taylor's baptism, they're going to go back to the temple as a group and do baptisms with Taylor! She's continuing to progress through the lessons. She's incredible and I'm so humbled by this wonderful opportunity I have to teach her.

We continue to teach Paige and Brennan. They're the 2 children who live with they're aunt and uncle. They're so much fun to teach and have a lot of energy! They absorb information like a sponge and love to learn about the gospel! Plus we continue to play with the puppies every time we go over there so it just makes it that much better!

This week I just want to let you all know that I know I'm suppose to be on a mission. The people I've met, the things I've had to overcome, and the lessons I've learned since I've come out here have reassured me that I'm suppose to be here. This has been an incredibly hard 9 months, but the happiness 9 months of my life. I love being a missionary!

I love you all and hope you all are doing wonderfully! :)

-Elder Toph Tribe

This is where I live, we live in the basement. The couple we live with are great!

I love playing with the he puppies each week 

I participated in Kimmy's wedding by wearing the wedding attire on the day of the wedding. 

 It's still a little rough, but I've only been working on this for a

week. I'm reteaching myself piano! I want to have a few hymns down and
memorized so I can play if needed at a meeting. This is the first one
I've started because I love it ️️

Rain!

Rain! It rained this week! It was a beautiful thunderstorm and was so much fun to ride a bike in!

I have been blessed with a wonderful opportunity. We have the privilege of teaching a young girl with Downs Syndrome. She's gotten permission to be baptized so she can go to the temple with her family to do baptisms for the dead. She loves the gospel and has a sweet testimony. I am so honored that I have this opportunity to get to know her and be able to teach her the missionary lessons. The family is great as well. I really enjoy being in their home and feeling the love that is there. She's getting baptized June 27th and we're all very excited!

We have been trying to get in contact with a less active lady since I got here. She has a non member daughter who's 12, so we were hoping to see if she was interested. We left a card with our number and a little note on it that said,"Missionaries! Give us a call if you ever need help or have any questions! :)" This is just what all of our cards say. We leave it vague to try to attract more people. Well this lady called us! She asked for help moving out of our ward. We got a bunch of people together and helped her move out and got missionaries and members on the other side to help her move in. It was a good team effort. The non member daughter had a lot of questions and we told her that the missionaries at her new house would love to answer them for her. She was very excited to ask them. Hopefully we just set those missionaries up for a golden investigator and helped reactive a family!

We're back on Facebook this week. Instead of the efforts being put forth to talk to everyone everywhere. They want us to focus on the area that we're serving in and helping the members become online missionaries. So we're running a Facebook initiative! We're challenging our members to make Mormon.org profiles, share the url on Facebook with a picture with the missionaries, and then reach out to their non member friends through that. We'll see how it goes. We have high hopes for it!

This week I was thinking about obedience. Mostly obedience to God. If I want to get better at something, I'm going to ask someone who's good at it and then follow their advice. This same thing applies with God. He literally has a perfect body and is a perfect being. If we took advice from him on how to be better, he could give us the formula to be perfect. The beauty is that he has done this for us! It's all spelled out in the scriptures. If we read the scriptures, find those things we need to improve in our lives, ask Him for help in improving those things, then we can begin our journey on the road to becoming perfect like Him!

Well I love you all! Have a dandy week!

-Elder Toph Tribe

Hike this morning with my district. Elder Unasa in the shades, Elder
Vanderplas in the hat, Elder Sultan in the back, Sister Huck is the
closer one, and Sister Williams is the one a little further back.

This is a member. She leaves on her mission today! She's going to Kobe

Japan. She was our Guinea pig for our Facebook initiative. So we got a
picture with her and had her post on Facebook.

Elder Burbank, me, and Elder Peterson. A 3 generation family picture!
Elder Burbank goes home next Monday so he sent me this.

104 and getting hotter!

104. It's starting to get warm down here in the Phoenix valley. Very sweaty.

Sometimes bikes are temperamental. Sometimes they decide they're in charge. So when you go to make a slight adjustment to your course, they let the handle bars turn, but not the bike. Then you end up flying over your handle bars going 15 mph... Not the funnest experience and the first time I've fallen hard on my bike. Luckily I've been highly trained for this very encounter from my years of skateboarding. I kept my arms in, head tucked, and rolled on to my back to slide on. The only damage done was my elbow got a little scrapped up whilst I was flipped from my front to my back. I was up on my feet within a couple of seconds from being flung from my bike. My companion looked at me ah struck and said, "I thought that was going to end a lot worse." Some members happened to be driving by right at that time and were kind enough to give us a ride the rest of the way back home which was a few miles away.

This week I got to hold 1 week old puppies! The members who have the niece and nephew investigators had new puppies at their house! They breed and sell Yorkie puppies. They're super cute. We had our lessons, then held the puppies. It was great :)

We met a man who is trying to reactivate his sister-in-law who hasn't been to church in many years. The only odd thing about the situation is that he's not a member. He is a nondenominational Christian. He knows that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints brings happiness into people's lives. He wants that for her, so he's doing everything he can to try to convince her into coming back. She lives down in Buckeye which is 2 hours from us or we would go over and help! We've sent other missionaries over to her. But now we're meeting with this man. Now he's curious why the church brings so much happiness to people. He's an interesting guy with an interesting past. He's more than willing to listen to us and read the Book of Mormon though, so we're excited to start meeting with him!

We were able to meet a less active family that no one has seen in months. It's a single dad and 3 little kids. There is an 8 year old son who hasn't been baptized yet. They also have a 10 year old and a 5 year old, both girls. So we went over to see if we couldn't meet them. They welcomed us in and we had a great conversation with them! They came to church the next day! We're going to be going over there to help them prepare the son for baptism.

It's been a solid week. We're turning this place around!

I know that Heavenly Father loves His children. I know that we are all His children. I know He is very aware of our current situation. I know He will give us the blessings we need, if we ask and seek to fulfill His will in faith.

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week!

-Elder Toph Tribe