June 11th, 2013

Dear Family,

First of all congrats to Aubrey for having another baby while im on my mission ;) That is way exciting! Sounds like most everything is going good back home. Everything is going pretty good on this end. It has been another week of me using facebook and the whatnot. In case some of you have noticed that I am friends with people from back home just know that I am allowed and even encouraged to friend those people and do missionary work to them, so I am. Though I feel as though I am not getting anywhere with facebook. I feel like I should be teaching a bunch of people on there and also getting a bunch of referrals but I am not. I dont understand how I am supposed to use facebook effectively as a missionary work. It has taken some trial and error and a lot of effort into figuring out new things to try. It is a work in progress so far. If you have any ideas I am up to hearing them. I also beleive you can follow me on facebook. Dont friend me, but follow me that way you can see what I post but I dont see what you post and that kind of stuff.

Other than that the tech has been going pretty good. We also had a baptism last saturday for an 11 year old girl named Elisa. It went very well and a bunch of her less active family was there which was good. The work other than that has been a little slow up until yesterday where a few things started picking up.

There was a cool esxperience that happened to me last night. About a week ago we had dinner with these members and they had some friends that they were going to invite to meet with us. So yesterday we went by to follow up with them about that and see how far they have gotten with that. We show up and find that the husband has been very stressed and was really starting to lose it. He wanted a blessing so we gave one to him. It really helped him out and he felt the spirit. A blessing was just what he needed to get through this trial. It is just interesting to think that the Lord used us as tools to help one of His children out. We were needed to see that person at that time. The Lord works in mysterious ways. I am glad to have been apart of his plan.

I am short on time so I will have to end it here. I hope everything goes well for you this week. Dont forget the 23rd! It will be important! See you on the other side!

Elder Connell

June 4th, 2013

Dearest Family,

Hello, my new area is pretty good. We are walking which is a bummer, but the area is small enough that it isnt so bad. There was not much work going on when I got to the area, but we have picked up a date and several new potential people this past week. We have been working hard and putting our faces out there. This saturday we have a baptism for a girl named Elisa. She is 11 and totally solid. She knows everything and is super ready to be baptized. We are also teaching this guy named Kurt who accepted a baptism date for the 29th. He isnt totally commited yet, but he is progressing and I believe he will be ready by that day. He is already recognizing his answers for church which is solid.

We are doing some good work here I am excited! My new companion is Elder Singleton who is from Washington. He is almost exact opposite from Elder Weidner which is kind of funny, but it takes a bit of adjusting to get to used to it. He is very obedient though which is awesome because we are seeing some great success from the work that we are doing.

I dont think that I told you last week what I am now doing. I am serving in Clinton West which is part of the Hooper District which is piloting a new program that the church is going to start in the near future. This is very exciting because I have already seen results from it and I have only been doing it for a week and still trying to figure it out. I am now an online missionary. I have an ipad for myself and an iphone for the companionship. I also have a facebook account that I use regularly. This new technology is being tested and tried by about 45 missionaries total. Which means 45 out of about 70000 missionaries are apart of this trial period and I am one of those. Im so excited! Okay so let me explain more in detail whats going on. With the ipads, we can go online to facebook and lds.org. Facebook is being tried right now and its purpose is to further the work. We do this by friending all the people in the area and also in other areas. We use it for finding and we can also teach lessons on there. Also on the ipads we have our area book and planner all on there. It is pretty cool and very effective when doing work in the area.

Okay so yesterday we actually had a meeting yesterday about the technology, president was there and Bro Donaldson, the head of missionary work skyped in the meeting. We talked about some of the issues and stuff with the ipads and whatnot. It was a basic meeting until the end when Bro Donaldson started talking about this meeting that will be happening on the 23rd that my room will be involved in. This meeting will actually be a lot bigger than you think. It will revolutionize missionary work for this generation. It will be the biggest meeting of this dispensation as quoted by Elder Nelson I believe. I am assuming that the new technology will be introduced during this meeting and it start rolling out into the fields. This is exciting! And we are apart of it! So be sure to watch this meeting and encourage all the members to watch it as well.

So yeah, Im not sure what else to include at this point. I hope all of you have a good week. See you on the other side!

love

Elder Connell