Tooth Talk and Cool New Convert

Hi everybody!

A few things first before my week: First, I had no idea that JB (Elder Engler) got engaged, that's awesome! I must tell you though that Elder Engler is one of the slowest ones to get engaged after they get home from this mission. There are a few missionaries that I know that have gotten home recently and been engaged within the first 3 weeks of them being home, so I don't really know what to tell you there, haha. 

So I got permission from President Fenn to go to the baptism in Bourbonnais on Saturday, but I didn't end up going, because I felt like we should try to find some more people to teach here in our area. We aren't teaching anyone solid, or really anyone at all right now, it's been a couple of weeks since we've had a lesson with an investigator. We might end up dropping more of the people we have. The thing that has been going well for us is that we've been teaching a recent convert named Shante who was baptized just over a month ago. She comes from a really tough background: grew up homeless in the south side of Chicago, pretty much all of her family except for her is really into drugs and have messed their lives up pretty bad. Shante was into that lifestyle for a little bit, but missionaries tracted into her and she wanted to turn her life around. She's awesome though, she has such a strong testimony, and is really sincere in wanting to do everything she can. She has an 8 year old daughter named Dekira that was baptized a week after she was, and a 1 year old named Dejayla who's a real cutie.

About my interview with President Fenn, one of the questions I asked him is why I was chosen to be trained by Elder Engler, who was obviously one of the best missionaries of the entire mission. President told me that he saw a lot of potential in me, and he wanted me to have the best trainer so that I could learn as much as possible in my first six weeks.

I'm excited to hear all about Landon's tournament in Dallas, that should be a good time! I wish I could go with all of you, but that's alright, you'll have a lot of fun! When you see them, will you please tell Marc's family thank you for the cards that they sent me? I don't have their email, but it was great getting letters from different members in their family. Their girls are so cute!

Big news about my tooth: so I went to the dentist's office yesterday, and learned a few different things. The part of my tooth that looks like it has a hole isn't a cavity, WOOOO! I learned that it's actually my gums that are a little receded and a part of the root of my tooth is exposed, which explains why it is a little sensitive, but that's good news! I'm really thankful for the members of the Church out here though, they're truly amazing. He looked over my teeth for me and didn't charge me anything. I don't think I told you this, but there was a member in Kankakee that was a dentist that cleaned our teeth for free too. When I get back from my mission, I want to be the guy that helps the missionaries out like that, that would be sweet!

I can't say anything crazy happened this week in Naperville, although it did snow another 5-6 inches yesterday! We weren't able to teach any lessons to investigators, and we didn't find anyone who was really interested when we were out tracting and contacting people on the streets. But we're working really hard and contacting a lot of people right now, so hopefully we'll find someone who's ready to hear our message soon! We went to the temple for P-Day today, which was a great experience! After that, there is a huge Harley-Davidson store in town, so we went inside and looked at a bunch of different motorcycles that they had. I can't tell my mom that I want to get a bullet-bike at some point when I get home or she'd kill me, but I'm just saying that it got me thinking a little bit, haha!

So that's about it for my week. Here's a picture of Elder Sonzini and me on St. Patrick's Day, hence the green ties. Thanks for that package again, the ties are sweet!

Thanks for writing, I love you! Talk to you again Monday!

Elder Dallas Anderson

#TheChicagoConverter

#Lou-E-ville

#CardsOverCubs

'Nuther Week in Naperville

Elder Anderson keeping Elder Oaks' plants alive.

Hey from Chi-Town!

So to start off with, I did get permission to go to the baptism of James on Saturday back in St. Charles! It was fun seeing past companions and members of the ward I served in. It was such a neat experience, they asked me to be one of the witnesses, so I'm really grateful that I got to be there. I'm asking President Fenn on Tuesday if I can have permission to go to the baptism for the Cannon children this upcoming Saturday. 

For our week, we actually dropped a couple of our investigators (in all reality, two of them dropped us--they told us they were no longer interested), but we did find a couple of people that we hope to start teaching in the upcoming week! We didn't see Bob or Domingo this week, so hopefully we'll have better luck next week. 

We had a great zone meeting on Friday, where I had a really good one on one interview with President Fenn. There is a new missionary training meeting this Tuesday, which means that I get to hear more from President Fenn! Next Tuesday will be our P-Day, because we are headed to the Chicago Temple. 

The "funny-looking-back-on-it-but-not-so-funny-at-the-time" moment of the week: on Tuesday, the fire alarm went off at 2:30 in the morning, and we had to evacuate the building for half an hour... This is the third time that it has gone off in the past two weeks, all because someone is smoking in the stairwell...Word of wisdom kids, keep it real.

The other "funny-for-us-but-not-so-funny-for-them" moment of the week: our district leaders had their car towed and had to pay a $218 fine. Ouch.

Thank you very much for the St. Patrick's Day package, I appreciate it! The ties are especially cool! Elder Sonzini and I will be sure to send a photo or two on St. Patrick's Day!

So that's pretty much how the week went here, thanks to all of you for your emails! 

Love,

Elder Dallas Anderson

#BRBConvertingDRose

Our Naperville apartment. It's newer in the mission; 
it's nice, but doesn't have a lot of furnishings yet.

People Who are Gold, Plants that are Still Green

Hey from Chicago!

We had a full session of church yesterday, and the weather finally hit above 35 degrees this week, so you can say life is treating us pretty well! We dealt with a bunch of adversity yesterday when finding: a man bashed on us for a couple minutes about how we can't tell others to read our book if we aren't willing to read the Quran and other books of scripture, another man went on and on (and on and on and on...) about how Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are one God, and how wrong we are, and another lady drove by us screaming profanity and threw a ripped up pass-along card at us. It's funny how Satan thinks he can get us down by throwing all these bad things at us, but it doesn't phase us. Call me Macklemore, because you Can't Hold Us (OHHHHHHH! *EPIC RAP BATTLE CROWD GOES NUTS*).

We were able to teach Bob again this week about the Restoration, and it went pretty well! We explained priesthood authority the best that we possibly could, with analogies and everything, but we don't know how well he really understood it. We also are teaching a high school student named Domingo! He actually came to the church tour a couple of weeks ago (more on that in a minute). He seemed really interested, and accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon after we taught him about the Restoration. We also taught a man named Roy this week about the Plan of Salvation. He was very curious, but had a few concerns about life after death because we don't have any proof of that. We're planning on teaching him more this week and teaching him that he has faith in a lot of things that he doesn't have physical proof of.

To answer your question about the church tour a couple of weeks ago, we taught two ten minute lessons on the Plan of Salvation (the kids were split up into two groups). The other Elders that were there to help taught their sessions on the Restoration. We got a lot of good questions about baptism, such as: "Is it possible to make it to the celestial kingdom without baptism?" and "What things do you have to do before you get baptized?"

Anyways, that's about it for the week. I'm still a slacker, I forgot photos of the apartment again (we do our emails at the church building, otherwise I'd just go take them right now). I'll get them to you next week (unless I forget again).

Love,

Elder Dallas Anderson
#BRBConvertingDRose

P.S. Here is a picture of our chapel. Just sayin' those plants look good! This is our last week watering them though, we don't have to do it anymore (probably because if it looks too good when we're transferred, the new elders won't be able to compete). 

Not so fast, Sunday...

Hey everybody!

News report for the week: Church lasted all of 20 minutes Sunday. Right after the sacrament, we were informed that there was a report of a gas leak in the building, so everyone had to evacuate. That makes 2 fast Sundays in a row for me where there has been no testimonies shared (last month, church was cancelled on fast Sunday because of all the snow). 

On Wednesday, we taught a group of about 100 students from Naperville North High School about the Plan of Salvation. They were all in a world religion class, so they had a field trip to come to our church and learn more about what we believe in.

Our records (known as the Areabook) were really messy, so we spent a lot of time this week trying to see potential investigators and figure out if they were still interested in being taught or not. We ended up dropping about 15 people this week from our Areabook. Some of the records were so outdated that when we stopped by, we learned that the
people we were looking for had moved over five years ago... 

Anyways, we did see one miracle come out of it: on Wednesday, we stopped by a man named Bob, who told us he wasn't interested, but that we could check back with him in a month or so. We felt like we needed to leave him with a Book of Mormon, so we asked if that would be okay, and he said that was fine. We immediately because giving him a bit of a background about the book, and it turned into a 30 minute lesson on the Book of Mormon and the Restoration, so that was pretty neat!

Other than that, nothing too crazy this week. Although we did get a few more inches of snow, and we found these awesome snow creations (it's two snowmen fishing on a boat, and they caught a whale! Pretty sweet!)!

Elder Dallas Anderson

#BRBConvertingDRose

Caring for People, Caring for Plants

Hey everybody!

Well I'm in Naperville now -- so long to St. Charles. My new companion's name is Elder Sonzini, and he's from Kaysville, UT. He went to Davis High. He's pretty cool, it should be a fun transfer working with him! 

Our new apartment is super nice! The sisters that we whitewashed moved in about a month and a half ago, so it doesn't have a lot of the furnishings that other apartments do, but it's a lot bigger, and a lot nicer. I will send pictures of it next week! And you better believe that I'm one of the cleanest missionaries, I've got to do everything I can to keep the #WifeMe status up, haha.

Elders Sonzini and Anderson

The ward here is fantastic! At transfer meeting, President Fenn told us that he thinks it's the ward that's the closest thing you can get to a Utah ward, and I would say that's probably true! There are a ton of active members, and the ward has the smallest boundaries in the mission (about 5-7 square miles), but it is one of the strongest wards in the mission as well. Our bishop is Bishop Boswell, and he and Brother Gutierrez, our ward mission leader, are both awesome! It was a little hard to leave the last area just because there were a lot of great members there.

I feel like I did okay with Elder Sonzini on his first day here, especially because neither of us knew anything about the area or knew any members of the ward. We were able to attend the baptism of four 8-year-olds on his first day here, which gave us a chance to introduce ourselves and meet a lot of the ward members, which was really good! I took him shopping to get bedding and a few more basic supplies, but there weren't any good stories that came out of that.

So the interesting things that have happened this week: 

1) On the first door that Elder Sonzini took the lead on for the door approach, and I'm not even kidding, it was the VERY FIRST DOOR, the lady let us come right into the house to share a message. HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN!? 

2) We have a super nice ward building that we meet in, it's actually the Naperville stake center (I'll try to send pictures of it too), but the chapel is spectacular, because there are live plants up on the stand, behind all of the seats (and it's not just a few, there are a lot). The history behind the plants is that Elder Oaks from the Quorum of the Twelve served in this area either in the stake presidency or as an area authority, and he had the idea to put these plants in. Now this was before the Church came out and said not to have live plants in the buildings any more, so nowadays you can't just put plants in the church, but since these plants were in place before that rule was made, we are allowed to keep them in the church building. But if they die, we can't replace them. Our assignment from the ward is to make sure that Elder Oaks' plants don't die, so once a week, we have to water and take care of them, so that's pretty cool!

Anyways, we're working hard, and we've been able to set up a few appointments over the next weeks, so we're excited to teach those! I'll let you know how it goes!

I hope that everything is going well for you at home, I love you guys!

Love,

Elder Dallas Anderson
#BRBConvertingDRose

Whitewashing and Greenies: The Missionary Color Code

 So thank you for all of the winter stuff, it's really coming in handy. There hasn't been any snow lately (I don't count 5-10 minute flurries), but it has been brutally cold. I'll attach a picture with the temperature from last night. (See that 2 degree mark?) It's currently about three degrees outside, and we've received severe wind chill warnings for the past few days. The boots I have are fantastic, and they must be like the best boots that you can buy, because people from the ward are always telling me things like, "Those are some sweet boots!" so thank you for those!

First off, I've got some big transfer news! I am whitewashing an area in the Naperville 1st Ward (if you don't know what whitewashing is, it's where they take both missionaries out of an area and put in two new missionaries, rather than only swapping out a single companion), because I was called to train a new missionary! I don't know who it is yet, I'll find out tomorrow at transfer meeting, but I'm super excited! This is really crazy though, because this is my 4th transfer, and it will be my 4th companion, 3rd area, and 2nd time whitewashing. I guess I'm just to much for President Fenn to handle, LOL.

The Smith family in St. Charles ward

We had a really good week here in St. Charles! Elder Morgan and I have been working very well together, and he taught some of our best lessons over the last few days. Last night, we were able to put James Minerly on date for baptism on March 7th, and we're working with Barbara to get her on date as well. She is a little hesitant on being baptized, but James has definitely received an answer to his prayers, and is super excited to move forward, so that's great! We weren't able to teach Tim, because he is out of town for the next couple of weeks, but we did email him a list of scriptures to read, because he wanted to learn more about the apostasy. We had a great lesson with Brother Weber on Sunday, where we had to be really bold with him and tell him that if he wants to learn, it's going to take effort on his part, he's going to have to study the scriptures on his own. He told us that the Spirit hit him really hard, and so he'll work on being better at studying.

Also, another cool side note: the Cannon family from Bourbonnais that Elder Olsen and I reactivated has two kids I taught that were put on date to be baptized on March 21, so hopefully I will be able to attend that as well as the baptism for James!

So I'm pretty sure I told you that St. Charles is a pretty wealthy area. Well, last Monday I had my first real experience where I saw money come into play. So a lot of the members of the ward own companies of some kind (some own real-estate agencies, there is a couple that owns a restaurant chain, some own their own health care practices, etc.). There is a member of the ward, his name is Brother Temple, and he's so cool, I love the guy. Brother Temple is the owner of a hearing aid company that has over 200 locations across the country, and his company is worth over $65 million (we learned that from our ward mission leader, because Brother Temple is too humble to say anything about it). They had us over for dinner last Monday, and it was EASILY the nicest house that I have ever been in: it has an entrance room with a curved staircase like you see in the mansions in movies, the house has about 25-30 foot ceilings, it's just incredible. He has a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Range Rover, and at least one other car, and he's pre-ordered next year's Ferrari already! I guess owning a business is the way to do it, because he says he pretty much stays home all day and makes a few phone calls and texts, so maybe I can do that someday!

I love you guys, and I really hope that everything back at home is going well. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you or for anybody else at home.

Much love,

Elder Dallas Anderson

#TheChicagoConverter

Short on Message, But Not on Snow

So we had another pretty good week this week! We were finally able to sit down with Barbara and share a lesson with her. She's about 40 years old, and she lives with her brother James, who came into the lesson at the end and told us that he wants to start being taught as well, and we have an appointment this next week! 

We weren't able to meet with Tim this week, because he was busy all week, but we have an appointment set up with him on Wednesday, so it will be good to see him again! 

We had a really good lesson with a less-active member in our ward yesterday. He's a really nice guy, but he doesn't have very good self-confidence. He has a real desire to learn the gospel, and to learn deep doctrine, but he gets frustrated at himself a lot, so we're trying to teach him really simply, and we hope to start getting him to seminary classes over the course of the next week or so. 

It snowed some more this week, so Elder Morgan and I were able to shovel some snow for service. We ended up shoveling like 6-7 driveways over the course of a few days, so that was good!

I hope that things are going well for you back at home. I pray for you every day. I love you! Talk to you next week!

Elder Dallas Anderson
#TheChicagoConverter