Sailin' On

Just Elder Andrasko and the boys!

Us and Ricky, Monica, and Daniel

Zone Activity - found some hay!

Found my name in a pamphlet from another church

Hey everyone!

So this week is transfer week, and unfortunately I will be leaving
Colly Creek :( but I am staying in Topeka and am reopening an area in
the Sherwood Ward. So Topeka has 4 wards and this will be the 3rd that
I will serve in! So that's cool. So one of the APs is coming into our
area of Colly Creek to train a new missionary, so all of our
investigators will be in good hands.

We had a good week of progression with our investigators, especially
Ricky and Monica. We gave them a children's Book of Mormon to read and
they finished it within a week! They are just soaking everything in.
Then on exchanges we taught them the plan of salvation and drew it out
for them, the next day when we came back with Elder Thompson they
explained the plan really well! Monica unfortunately wasn't able to
come to church this week because of certain circumstances, but she's
been to church before so it could probably get approved for her to get
baptized on the 5th with Ricky. But Ricky is so excited for his
baptism!

John came to church his week, he really looks forward to priesthood at
the end. He loves studying out of the president Hinkley manual. So he
was sad this week when the lesson was from general conference. But we
really encouraged him to read over the talk they gave him, "perfect
love casteth out fear" by President Uchtdorf.

Sorry for the short email, but things are good. Just a lot to think
about for the coming transfer! My new companions name is Elder
Nathaniel Christianson, just to clarify because there are like 3 other
Elder Christiansons in the mission.

Have a killer week!

- Elder Andrasko

With a Little Help From My Friends

So this week was great! We started working with some pretty elect
people and had a few awesome days out working.

So last week during the APs interview training they challenged us to
have 30 new contacts every day. So that was something that we had been
working on throughout the week. And Wednesday our work started
producing fruit! We found 10 new investigators Wednesday alone! Some
of them are a part member family, named the Crawford's. There is a 9
(soon to be 10) year old, a 15 year old, and an 8 year old. So the 8
year old wouldn't be a convert baptism, but that doesn't matter still
try to help everyone we can!

We met them a few weeks ago but we're never able to sit down and have
a lesson with them until this last week. Their dad told us to come by
sometime when he isn't home and talk to his wife. So we did just that,
and she was 100% on board for working to get the kids baptized! The
dad is the one who is a little hesitant, but they came to church this
week and have been reading from the children's Book of Mormon! So
awesome!

John is still the same. He wasn't able to come to church this week
because he was sick. But he told us that he hasn't felt the spirit in
years, we've told him that he'll feel the Spirit if he quits smoking
but that's something that is hard for him. But we'll continue to work
with him on that.

So Tuesday we had zone conference this week. Which means I got to
see some of my missionary friends! And of course it meant awesome
revelation from 9-5. And the food was pretty good too. But wow our
mission president is an amazing and inspired man.

Another cool thing that happened, not really related to missionary
work, there was a wedding! But not just any wedding, but a Samoan
wedding! So needless to say there was a LOT of food. It's too bad we
only have an hour for dinner, the celebration was awesome and a lot of
fun dancing and stuff. All the guests got a lavalava, too bad I can't
wear it proselyting cause it's pretty awesome.

So crazy thing that happened, we came home one night and there was a
bat in our building!! We walk in and it started swooping down at us,
so we tried chasing it out of the building. But it just wouldn't
leave! It finally perched out above the exit sign. It was an
experience.

There's a new policy in the mission that every 5th week of the
transfer we have to do a "deep clean" so we took a couple hours,
longer than I thought, to clean every inch of our apartment. It was a
good workout, I started sweating!

The mission is awesome. I love every moment!  This is the last week of
the transfer so next week things could be changing up.

Love y'all, have a fantastic week!

- Elder Andrasko

The Circle of Life

Hey! Just another week in paradise!

So this week was July 4th, which was awesome! A member invited us over
for lunch and service. When we got there they had someone that we had
never met before, his name was Jason and he's from Kansas City. Anyway
through certain circumstances his dog ended up in Topeka with these
members and he came to get it. He helped us a ton with our service.
And afterwards we had a killer restoration lesson with him. We got him
referred over to the Missouri Independence Mission, hopefully
something good comes from that.

We saw a couple fireworks over at a members house, they had a few
pretty big ones so it was cool to see those go off. But they had a
couple crazy kids who set a garbage can on fire and threw firecrackers
at each other's faces. So after all that stuff it was time for us to
go home, we saw them later and nobody got hurt too bad.

Friday we had interviews with our mission president!! Now that is
always super awesome, we talked and he helped me with a few things and
gave me really good advice. We were also able to see John and we
talked a lot about the word of wisdom and he committed to at least try
it for 24 hours from Saturday at 2:30 to Sunday at 2:30. Unfortunately
he wasn't able to completely abstain, but he did better.

During the training that the APs gave during the interviews they
committed us to having 30 contacts a day. So that's something we have
been working to achieve.

We were able to have a good day at church on Sunday; John, Eddie, and
Mequila came to church and stayed for all 3 hours! For John and Eddie
it was their first time staying for priesthood. They went to High
Priests and they loved it! It was an awesome Sunday.

Sorry for the shorter letter, but not too much to talk about this
week. We have zone conference tomorrow and I will be able to see a few
friends from around the mission!

Have a great week!

- Elder Andrasko

God Bless America

Hello everyone!

So I don't have a lot of time to email today, we just got back from a
zone activity. We did a road trip around Topeka and took pictures at
different locations. It was pretty fun, we ended at Lake Shawnee and
had a BBQ and had water balloons and stuff! It was way fun!

We had a cool day this week, it was raining and we ran out of miles so
we were on bikes. But we Skyped a couple people, and had a lesson with
John at the church.

Things have been good here, my birthday was fun. We had a party at the
Strong's house, it was a grand ol' time.

Sorry for the short email, but not a lot of time.

Have a great week and I love y'all!

- Elder Andrasko

Sweet Hour of Prayer

Haircuts courtesy of Elder Ortmann

Things missionaries do...

Hello once more!

This week was pretty awesome! He had people at church, we have people preparing for baptism, and we found some awesome new investigators

So to start with the new investigators. Roy Knisley (nicely), we got a referral and they said he was super prepared and elect and that he wanted to come to church this week! Well we saw that he was already in our area book as a former. Missionaries met with him like 2 years ago and gave him a Book of Mormon, well he read it in a week and said he didn't believe it. Anyways fast forward two years, he was listening to the MOTAB on YouTube and there is a thing that says, "talk to mormons" so he started talking and said he wants to come to our church! Well we went over there that day, we found out that him and his pastor are butting heads a little and that's probably why he wants to check out our church. Side note his pastor is a woman and makes upwards of $90,000 a year! Anyway he committed to coming to church and praying about baptism.

So we currently have two people preparing for baptism. The first is John!! Well John is praying about a date, specifically the 22nd. We shared a quote from President Uchtdorf's talk "The Hope of God's Light" it says, "...spiritual light rarely comes to those who merely sit in darkness waiting for someone to flip a switch. It takes an act of faith to open our eyes to the Light of Christ". And so we invited him to act on his faith and commit to baptism.

The other person preparing for baptism is Danielle, she was also a referral, from the Zone Leaders and before them from her daughter. Her daughter was recently baptized in Wichita and moved back to Topeka because of a bad living situation. Anyways Danielle is a nice lady, but has a bad smoking addiction, so we committed her to living the word of wisdom. We also asked if she was still thinking about baptism, after her affirmative response we invited her to the 22nd of July. She checked her calendar to make sure she was free, then wrote it down! We are still working with her to live the word of wisdom, but she has cut down from 30 cigarettes to 10, so it's awesome progress!!

Hank, we haven't been able to see this week. Which sucks, so we don't know where he is progression-wise. Eddie, we didn't see until Sunday night. I was a little worried because he didn't seem super happy last time we saw him. But he was back to his happy, cheerful, self. He had like 6 people over at his house though, so it wasn't a good time to see him. But we said we'd come back Monday or Tuesday.

We had a really great lesson on the word of wisdom with Makila. She's a pretty heavy smoker, but she knows she needs to live it. We used he whole body is a temple analogy, showed a picture of a temple and compared how you wouldn't want to go in a temple all muddy and tracking dirt all over. Well it's the same with our bodies, when we violate the word of wisdom we are tracking mud into our temple causing it to be dirty. Makila was super committed to church this week, but when her ride came to pick her up she wasn't feeling good. Something about a dizzy spell.

Our district meeting this week we talked about consecration. And that's something that I've been thinking about a lot. We read a great talk called "becoming a consecrated missionary" by Tad R. Callister , so here's a few things I liked about that talk. When we become consecrated to the Lord we are not just changing our behavior but changing our nature. A mission is about what the Lord wants, not what I want. We must do more than tell Book of Mormon stories, we must live them. The Lord will not let us be content with our weaknesses. So there's just a few things that I took from the talk. The mission is such an awesome opportunity to learn and to grow, never again will I have so much of my time dedicated to learning and teaching the gospel. It's crazy how much he Lord help us to grow during these short two years.

Love y'all tons and have an awesome week!

- Elder Andrasko