Larson, Josh

Hello everyone! Another awesome week has passed in the promised land of Newbury Park California. The biggest highlight of the week was definitely Thanksgiving day with Bishop Johnson and his family. It was super awesome and it was wonderful to be surrounded by friends for Thanksgiving. Besides that we had some awesome exchanges this week, including our exchanges with the Assistants. I learned so much from both of those experiences but I probably learned the most from an interaction with a less active member that me and Elder Hoffman met.  We talked with this brother on the porch for about 45 minutes and he was trying to explain his inactivity. We quickly realized that this man purely had no desire to come back or do anything with the church. I remembered a quote from President Nelson "if you do not yet love going to the temple, do not go less, go more".  Simply put, sometimes living the gospel is hard but putting effort forward and doing the small and simple things leads to i...

Hoooooooly cow it has been quite the exciting and crazy week. Between Transfers, a trio, and a few sleepovers I have been on my toes all week long.  So the mayhem all started on Monday night, when I spent the night with the Los Robles English Elders in order to make transfers work the next morning. The next morning I was at the church from 7 am to about noon, marking baggage, throwing luggage around and trying to figure out all sorts of stuff. Finally I got my companions Elder Hoffman and Elder Martin. We were in a trio until Thursday morning when we had to wake up at 2:30 to get Elder Martin to the senior missionaries. So yeah. I am tired. Amidst all the chaos though I recognized the lord's hand. I thought how crazy it was that a bunch of 18-20 year old kids could possibly be so coordinated and organized. I realized that it was completely impossible without the Lord's hand and power in my life and in missionary work in general. To quote Elder Holland: "It's one of the...

Good morning all! It has been another beautiful, and surprisingly hot week here in Dos Vientos. There are some very important things I would like to share my feelings about this week, but I will start with some other details. First, our friend Natisse is back on Date for baptism! Hopefully it will be December 11th (please pray for her). This time it feels a lot more solid and she seems much more committed this time around.  Secondly, we got our transfer calls and I will be staying here in Dos Vientos and I will be gaining one of my great missionary friends, Elder Hoffman! I am super excited to see how this next transfer goes and what I can learn.  Alright now for the important stuff. I will start with a story. We knocked on the door of a less active sister and she invited us in, we shared a spiritual thought with her, and her kids. She said she disagreed with some of the stuff we shared and we asked her why. We then stood on her front porch with her for the next 40 minutes and...

Hey All! As you can probably guess from the title of this email I was finally able to go to the temple again after over a year. It felt like so long ago and it was wonderful to be back. I will talk a lot about that later on in this email.  Along with the temple trip it has been a very very busy week. We had MLC this Tuesday which was fantastic! Me and Elder Nickle were assigned to give a discussion and it went fairly well! We then had to plan out How we were going to elaborate and share MLC with our missionaries and that meeting went great! So between those three meetings and the temple trip we have had virtually no time to do normal missionary things. But we have made it work nonetheless.  Now to talk about the temple, I had lots of thoughts as I was going through. Going through with 2 zones made for a lot of missionaries and it was awesome to be there with so many of my old friends. As I was in the temple however I was pondering deeply as one does in the temple, and came to ...

Hello everyone! It's me again, I know your not too surprised. I never know how to start these things. Anyway! It's been one of those weeks where the days seem to go forever, but you wake up on Monday like "What the heck It's Monday". We had a lot of awesome things going on this week so I will jump in. The first thing we had this week was Baptismal goal settings! Which is when we meet with each companionship in our Zone, and discuss their goals from October as well as what they want to accomplish in November. We asked all the missionaries to bring something they wanted to improve on, and we would discuss it for about 10 minutes or so. It was a really powerful experience and I learned a lot about receiving revelation on the fly. Some missionaries brought spiritual things they wanted to improve, and others brought more temporal things. A few times I found myself thinking "how in the world are we going to help with that" but as we talked through it with our ...