6.6.16

Hey Y'all!

Life is great! We had an awesome rainstorm last night. That is one thing I love about Florida, the rain and lightning storms. They are incredible. Makes me happy. Apparently there is a tropical storm headed our way. Which seems to meean nothing more then a lot of rain. They said 6 inches of rain between today and tomorrow. Kinda excited.
Anyways, this week was good. We have been making a big focus on talking with everyone because Elder Oxborrow and I decided we have fallen out of the habit of talking with everyone. So we are getting back into it! Even before we started making that push I had continued the thought about joy in a missionaries life, and if we want to be happy as missionaries the thing to do is talk with everyone. I have officially decided that a missionary that talks with everyone and teaches everyone is a happy missionary. It feels great!
Last night I decided there is a difference between the fun times and the happy times. Before it just made sense that they would be the same, if you were having fun, you would be happy. I found out that they are different. When something is fun it means that activity is enjoyable, it is about a specific thing and how you feel while you do it. Being happy is about a state of mind, a state of being. Two different, but still related things. Over my mission I have had times when I was happy and I have had times when I was having fun. Sometimes they were both happening at the same time, but a majority of the time they were happening without the other. In my experience on the mission the things that are fun are often things you do outside of missionary work, for example p-day activities. Where as things that make you happy and happier over all is the missionary work itself. When I, as a missionary, am quality work and a lot of it, I am happier. Even though I may or may not be engaged in other "fun" activities. When you are happy the actual activity seems to matter less at which point most activities become "fun". Whereas if you are not happy it is hard to make any activity "fun". Hopefully that makes sense. This whole idea is changing how I think about a lot of things.
One neat thing that happened from talking with everyone happened yesterday. We were going up to a door looking for a former investigator. Right as we were knocking on the door somebody was walking down the street. The house looked like nobody was home, so I shouted out to the guy that was walking down the street in front of the house and asked him if he knew who lived there (because we were not sure if the former investigator even lived there anymore) and he said he did not know. So I asked if we could share a message about Christ, he said sure. So we walked down the street and started talking to him. We talked about how when Christ was here he set up a church and how after him and his apostles died that church did not continue on. We talked about how it has been restored today and that we have a prophet here on the earth today. We asked him what he thought about it all and he said "sounds good to me". He continued "some of my family are Mormons and so I have been to church a few times. We were able to set a return appointment with him this weekend and when we went to report the lesson we found out he was already in our areabook because he has been taught before. The amazing thing is we didn't have a good way to get a hold of him before, so it really was a miracle to make contact.

That's all folks!
Elder Dane Olsen