Ice Storm

What's up everybody? 

This past week has been pretty good for us here in Ankeny. We have been working hard to find people to teach after our recent string of baptisms. We have been finding a ton, but it's always fun and good for stories. We do have a few promising investigators that are progressing pretty well. 

I'll just talk a little about each of them real quick. 

Jamie- Jamie is a really nice lady that we found using our area book. She used to be an investigator about a year ago but her husband kind of pushed the missionaries away. We stopped by to try and see if we could get in and teach her, we were able to catch her home and we started teaching her again. She's a heavy smoker but we will be teaching her the stop smoking workshop tomorrow and that thing is straight fire. It works every time! She's super humble and has a date for February 18th. so we will be working hard with her to make sure she can quit smoking before then. 

Osheana- Osheana is a cool young mom, she has the cutest little daughter ever named Brealya. We have been working with her my whole time her in Ankeny. She's got a lot of commandment issues but we are working to help her get through them. Her date is for Feb. 11th :)

Malinda- Malinda is a really nice lady! She is actually our mail woman! We've interacted with her quite a few times and we always know right when she is going to come through our complex. She's super funny, she always teases us when we get letters and knows about what we do as missionaries. She always talks about how cold she gets so we thought we'd leave her a suprise in our mail box to help her get through the day. I noticed we have approximately 37 thermoses in our kitchen so we made her some hot chocolate and left it in there with a note. Later that week we talked to her and she thanked us and we set up a time to teach her. She's now an investigator, I've got really high hopes for her! :)

Some other stuff that happened this week was that we got a crazy big ice storm. It was pretty intense a lot of trees and power lines got taken out cause of all the ice. Our car had like 2 inches of ice all over it that we had to thaw and scrape off. I'll send videos of it haha. But other than the crazy weather not much else has happened. I hit my Year Mark last Friday, can't believe missions go by so fast! Also quick late shout out to everyone who sent me gifts for Christmas! I really appreciated it! You're all the best! 

I love you all! I hope you have a great week!

Last Day With my homie Elder Anitok (Spent the last 4 days of the Transfer on exchanges with him haha)

The final pic of the P-Day Dream Team

My favorite little African boy, Pooki.

Our Liberian squad of recent converts:

Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animals!

Greetings Loved Ones 

This week was pretty much a big party not goona lie. The work was slower this week due to the holidays and the fact President Badger told us to take Christmas Eve and Day off. We also had exchanges for a day and a half. Then we had ZTM from 8 am till about 5 pm. So we were a little crunched for time this week. But it was a lot of fun and we were able to find a few new investigators that have a lot of potential! 

So I'm just goona talk about Christmas and stuff since that's been where most of the excitement has been this week. So Christmas Eve was pretty dope, President Badger told us to take the day off. So we spent most of the day in Des Moines, we got to ball with the Missionaries in the Des Moines zone then we went to the Mission home and the Badgers made us an awesome lunch and we got to hang out with them and play games for the whole afternoon. The Badgers are so great. They love to hang out with us and have fun, they even played "What are the Odds?" with us it was so funny. 

Christmas day was pretty awesome, Chris Brima was confirmed which was great to see another awesome person come into the fold especially on such a sacred day like Christmas! We spent most of the day with members. I got to skype my awesome family as well which was great. I loved it!

I'm grateful for the Christmas Season and all the blessings it brings. 

I love you all!

Merry Christmas!

-30 Degrees and We are Still Baptizing!

What's up everyone? We had another Good and Cold week here in good ole Ankeny!

First thing's first, we had another awesome Baptism this week! Chris Brima was Baptized this Saturday! It was the best! I love Baptisms they are such an awesome moment to be apart of. Especially with people that you have come to know and love like Chris. This past week was super stressful leading up to the Baptism but we were able to overcome a few logistical problems (nightmares actually), but it all worked out in the end. Chris was able to get to the Church and some how is tiny little African body survived the blizzard and -15 degree weather. This baptism was really special because of how the ward came together to help Chris. The Ward has gone through some crazy stuff in the past few months ex: a New Bishop, moving to a new Stake, the formation of a Brand new Stake (Because of member numbers growing so fast (Shout out to all us IDMM Missionaries ;) ) and a ton of weather related emergencies they had to deal with. But despite all the craziness we were still able to get Chris baptized by his awesome fellowshipper Brian! 

Chris will have to wait to be confirmed until next week though because Church was canceled yesterday! Apparently no one wants to go to Church when it's -31 degrees and there is a State Wide Frostbite Warning... so we had to stay in the apartment for 6 hours yesterday. I swear I was about to catch cabin fever. 

Another cool thing that happened on Sunday was we got to drive 45 miles west to Perry, IA so I could interview the Hermana's investigator. She did great and it looks like everyone in our Zone will be baptizing this transfer which was our goal for the Zone! 

Other than that this week has just been a lot of knocking on doors in the frigid tundra. President Badger just came out and said he doesn't want us knocking doors when its below 0 degrees...so I guess we won't be knocking doors from December until March? Lol should be interesting to see what happens with that. I personally am starting to enjoy the cold, everyone lets us in to at least tell us we are insane for being outside! 

We'll I hope you all have a great Christmas (honestly almost forgot that's this week) I love you all! Hope it's a great one!

Elder Milligan

What's up everyone?!

If I could sum up this past week in two words it would be FREEZE-FREAKIN-ING. Literally so cold, it's been so crazy. The weather took a nose dive the past week, Ankeny has turned into a frozen tundra lol. The high on Tuesday was -13 degrees. It was so cold our car radio didn't spazzed out and stopped working, so we had no music for like 5 days. Then our car battery died and we jumped it. (Got to tell the member about my famous "Jumper Cables" story, shout out to Liv D!) and our radio started working again, blessings! We also had our first big snow storm, we got about 5 or 6 inches on Saturday. It was snowing all day it was crazy, but it didn't matter because we were inside the church watching a beautiful BAPTISM!

That's right, our awesome investigator Nicole entered into the waters of Baptism this past Saturday and it was too cool. Nicole is awesome I haven't talked very much about her recently, she's a super busy lady (she's a baker and the holidays are killer for her) so we only get to see her every so often. But she is really nice, her husband Shawn is a less active member and she's been meeting with the Missionaries off and on for the past 12 years. So she's been through a ton of missionaries but about a month ago she reached out to us and we decided to try and help her make the next step towards her savior by being baptized. We just really clicked with her and when we met with her she decided she wanted to finally be baptized and become united with her family. We are so excited for her and family to begin growing closer as a unit and become fully active members in the ward. We have seen a lot of growth in the Sherman family in the past few weeks and it's a true testimony builder to witness. Her baptism was great, even though the hot water went out half way through and she got baptized with half freezing water on a -10 degree day :). 

I've really grown a testimony of working with members and just always having faith that the Lord will provide us with people to teach. Ankeny is such an interesting place to serve, the Ward is so great, and the members are so missionary minded, it's the dream ward. But the Area is just so hard to find people to teach, everyone is either a super rich and thinks they have everything they need, or they live in North DM and are super down trodden and hard to keep up with. But something I've learned is if we keep working hard everyday Heavenly Father is going to bless us for sacrificing our will to align with his. That's probably the most prominent lesson I've learned in my time in Ankeny is that when I want to do things my way, the baptisms and the lessons and the investigators don't come very easy if at all. But if I follow Heavenly Father's game plan the work goes so much better, and my experiences in Ankeny are a good example of that, when I first got here I thought I knew how to be a good missionary and I thought I had all of these great ideas to turn the Ankeny area around. But it wasn't until I scrapped all of those ideas and started relying on the spirit that we were able to baptize these 4 amazing people that we were led to by Heavenly Father. 

More exciting news, we have another baptism this Saturday, my little bro Chris Brima is getting baptized! I'm super pumped for him he's the cutest kid ever, I can't wait to adopt black kids! (and live in Arizona where it's never -13 degrees!)

Pics:

1 Nicole's Baptisim, I swear I was happier than I look. That was right before I sneezed hardcore.

2 Nicole and her Fellowshipper Bro. Black ​