Manifestation Monday

This week has been incredible, especially this last Monday. On Monday we taught in the Dickson's home again. We taught Sandra Yescas the Restoration of the Gospel. During the lesson we just finished reciting the Joseph Smith experience and we were letting it soak in when Brother Dickson spoke up. He started bearing a really powerful testimony about when he finally came to know the truth for himself of what we were saying. Right when he finished Sister Dickson started bearing her testimony on how amazing the gospel of Jesus Christ is and how it has help her. Sandra during this time was crying and we knew she was feeling the spirit. It was amazing, we will be teaching her again today and we hope the spirit will be as powerful as it was last time. By the way, Sandra is Brother and Sister Dickson's niece.

Something funny that happened this week was when we went on exchanges. I went up to Firgrove with Elder Nelson, while Elder Clauson stayed in Orting with Elder Sanders. Anyways, me and Elder Nelson were going around during our finding hour talking to people. We ran into this person who was carrying in groceries. So we, of course, offered to help her. She said that she was fine so Elder Nelson asked if she would like to hear about how God has called a prophet on the earth today. She rejected us saying "No thank you, I have to go pee." and I replied saying, "Ok, let us know if you need help." (We then rode away.) I didn't think anything about what I said until Elder Nelson asked me, while he was laughing, why I had offered to help her go to the bathroom. I just looked at him for a second and then I too started laughing so hard. 

We have found a new way to study preach my gospel this week. Instead of just studying the principles we sing them, while Elder Nelson plays some tunes on the Guitar. It has been a lot more fun learning this way.

Elder R. K. Northrup

P.S. Forgot my camera today to upload pictures.  Will get some to you next week.

Spiritual Promptings

I am going to take a pic of my name tag in all of my areas.

Here's ORTING!

Well this week has been interesting. On Wednesday we had Zone meeting and got to meet all of the new missionaries. These are the people Training missionaries... Elder Lee-wen is training Elder Latimer, which is flippin' awesome because Elder Latimer went to high School with me. Elder Caputo is training Elder Duffin. They are both new to Graham zone and seem pretty cool. Sister Linker is training Sister Gafa. Sister Gafa apparently knows Talmage. When I found that out, I just was like "that is so cool".

We haven't done much this week because we still don't have very many investigators. Those sisters I told you about last week all but 1 has continued learning about the gospel. Keep praying for Ashley Carrick to continue to learn of the gospel and the spirit and blessings it can bring her.

My goal this transfer is to follow every single spiritual prompting that I recieve. The incredible thing about it is in doing this we were able to get a lot more potentials this week than usual. One of the times I received a prompting was when we were finding. We got to a three way stop and we were trying to figure if we should go left or if we should go right. We sat there for a couple seconds and I just got this feeling to go left. We started trudging our way in that direction and we ran into this lady. We started talking to her and she sounded like she really wanted to learn about the gospel. She accepted a restoration pamphlet and said she would start reading it and that we could come back and teach her on Wednesday. Wahoooo thank you spiritual prompting! I hope that I will be continuely worthy of those promptings. 

People who need prayers: Alysha, Ashley Carrick, Sandra Yescas, Casey, and I forgot the last guys name.

Thanks everyone for your support the church is true. Make sure you know that and never doubt it.

Elder R.K. Northrup

P.S. I met a painter this week named Sister Jones she is older and does amazing paintings. She has also met Tom Selleck and has done a couple paintings of him. She also does paintings on elephant ears.

 A non-member we do service for gave me this briefcase. It was made in Romania.

​I bought these two ties this week. They are pretty sick.

And the Rains came down...

It finally down poured and I was soaking wet as we were riding around contacting and setting up lessons.  

My shelter from the down pour.

Ok so this week has been a filled week. We had Zone Conference and our last exchanges with the Firgrove Elders before Transfers. 

I have been doing better at following inspiration when it comes to listening to my thoughts and following through with them. 

We just got 4 new investigators.  A referral from a member family in the ward. (Sweet Sauce) They are teenage friends and family. (Ashley, Rebecca, Sandra and I forgot the 4th girl's name.) Elder Polson and I taught them while we were on exchanges. They seem pretty interested in what Jesus Christ's Gospel can bring them. We will be teaching them again today. I am super excited about it because they will just be getting closer to their Heavenly Father. 

On Thursday, after Ward Mission Meeting, we accidentally left our phone in the car of one of the ward missionaries. Crap....we decided to bike our way to the closest members house which is the Peck's. They were able to drive us over there. When we were pulling into the general neighborhood area, we were stopped by these two cars. The drivers were yelling at each. They got out of their cars and started yelling and swearing about who was following behind who. Finally they stopped and the first car drove away. We drove past the second car and smelt a terrible smell coming from the guy in the car. I suspect it was weed. As we were following the first guy, he soon took a right and drove his car right into curb. That was kind of funny just because of the confused look the guy had when that happened. After that event we were able to get our phone back and we went straight back to our apartment.

Elder Clauson got an extreme canker sore on the back of his throat and he says it hurts to swallow and to talk so he has been taking a numbing agent. We hope the sore goes away soon. We gave him a blessing so that should help.

Transfers

Well I will be staying in Orting with Elder Clauson for this transfer which is good. I am excited what we can do this transfer to continue the Work of Salvation here. It should be a fun filled week. They only person from our district leaving is Elder Polson. I am a little bit sad to see him leave because he is such a good guy. However, he will be awesome where ever he is getting transferred.

Well Everyone, have a great week and fill it with goals to becoming more Christ like and push yourself to choose the right at all times. I love you all! 

Elder R.K. Northrup

Elder Polson and Me on Exchanges.

We have been playing Ultimate Frisbee catch for exercise every other day.

Elder Northrup:  This is how fast we went in a member's car.

Mom: YIKES... don't ride with that member again.

Elder Northrup: HaHA it's just a joke. His speed ometer thing was broken.

Mom:Thank heavens... the mama bear in me got a little upset that someone was driving you that fast.

Elder Northrup:  HAHAH I knew it would.

Mom:  Do you think you should tell the 10,000 other people you sent the mass letter to that it is broken?

Elder Northrup:  Nope I think they will figure it out eventually. 

 It's Me!

P.S.  We get lucky sometimes and end up online at the same time Reggie is sending his weekly emails.  Here are few tidbits from our back and forth email conversation.

Elder Northrup:  When Karter gets home will you have him write me a letter? I love hearing from him because he makes me laugh. Have him write at least 3 pages.

Mom: A hand-written one?  (You are funny!)  Have you gotten the letters Gretchen and I sent?

Elder Northrup: Yes please. I loved the ones I got from you two. Gretchen's letter made me laugh so hard because of her spelling of things.

Mom:  Hand written letters are DEFINITELY the best.  I will try to do better with those.  Even though they are delayed as far as timing, they are always the best.  We will make that a normal Sunday activity to write real letters.  Dad probably won't do many of those.  He says the reason you get as many as you do from him is because it is easy to type them.  

Elder Northrup:  Well as long as Dad writes me an email then I guess I can't be upset.

Mom:  I am sure he will send a LETTER or two, but yes... be thankful for his emails.  I am sure they are full of wisdom and good.  I love reading the things that dad writes.  

Apparently, Eve never died?

The DISTRICT!

This week has been great!  We went to our second New Missionary Training Meeting and learned what we need to do to continue our learning as new missionaries. That was pretty great.

As we were leaving and getting in the car, our car wouldn't turn over. Everything wasn't working. We had to call Elder Young who is our missions Car coordinator, he then called Pep Boys to come to the Auburn Stake center to check it out.

During this time we decided to go contacting over there.  That's when we found this Lady who was wearing fedora with a ton of feathers in it. As we were talking to her she told us she was 7,000 yrs. old and told us that she was there in history when Rome was a big civilization. I just about did a face-palm. She also told us how the world was Devolving instead of Evolving and all the reasons she had for thinking that.  We decided at that point to just bare our testimonies and get back to the car. Our car was finally fixed around 4ish. When we got back to Orting we made some calls to get our phone fixed as well which took another hour and a half. We should be getting a new phone soon.

We have gotten 4 new potentials and 2 of them are brothers and they seem really golden. We hope to visit them some time this week. They both seem really cool and were really open when we were talking to them.

A couple days ago we were able to give one of our members a blessing. She had tripped over one of her dogs and her knee was in a lot of pain. We gave her a blessing. I anointed and Elder Clauson gave the blessing. The spirit that you feel when you are giving people blessings is so amazing and I am happy to be worthy to exercise God's priesthood power.

Yesterday in Church, a member of the Bishopric came up to me and said that he was looking for me. In my mind I thought, "Oh crap I did something wrong!" or "I am going to have to give a talk in church next week." That's when he smiled at me and said,  "Will you go bare your testimony at the end of the passing of the sacrament?"  (Phew) I dodged that bullet. I went up there and just shared my thoughts on D&C 50:24. Luckily the spirit guided me and I was able to speak for about 4 minutes on light and was directed to the verses D&C 88:11-12. It was incredible.

We have been praying so much this week for investigators to teach the word of God to. We hope that our hard work will start to come to fruitation soon.  I love you all and love hearing from anyone!  So have a good week guys and CTR.

Elder R.K. Northrup

 ​We had a redlight and I hadn't taken very many pictures so...yeah

The Drive to Church!

Missionary Food - Exhibit E - Protein Pancakes.

Gotta get Back in Time....

Washington has still been really dry.  It's like Utah stole all of the rain.  They are going to have to change this state from the Evergreen state to the Ever-dry state.

So we did another exchange this week. I went to Spanaway again, but this time I went with Elder Anderton. He is super cool. He taught me how to make the most amazing breakfast...I will tell you what it is later.

Most of the events this week happened on Saturday. We woke up and started doing our Personal Studies. Just as they ended we got a call from the Elk Plain Sisters saying they needed us over at there building asap. They needed one of us to baptize their investigator because the only Priesthood holder there was the bishop and he was already giving a talk on Baptism. We got there and I was thrown pretty much into the white jumpsuit to do the baptism. However, it was a really awesome experience.  I was able to feel the spirit so strongly and baptize this kid who, I believe, was 9 or 10. His name was Allen Holmes. That kid was never not smiling. I knew that he was feeling the spirit so strongly and I was very happy for him.

We quickly went back to our apartment to grab a bite to eat. That is when we got another call from the Zone Leaders. They told us that the child records baptism people drained the font when they were done at our own church building. This was not good because it usually takes about 3 hours to fill the font and we only had about an hour an a half. We started flippin out because it is our job to fill the font when it is our investigator. So there were all of these problems, but thats not the even worst thing. The water that fills the font goes Ice Cold every for every 10 minutes of hot water, so we couldn't keep it on the whole time. Here is what we did to correct the problem. We started boiling water in a big pot to get hot water in there. Plus, I started filling up a bunch of water pitchers, while Elder Clauson grabbed them and ran them from the kitchen to font to dump the water in. Once the water that was boiling was hot enough I grabbed it. As I was lifting it up to dump it into the font my tie decided to take a dip into the hot water (Flabby Divs). This made my shirt and tie completely soaked but we didn't have time to do anything with it so I just kept filling up pitchers and boiling water. The awesome thing was we were able to fill the font in only one hour. VICTORY!! That's when everyone started arriving for Hanna Ognoskie's baptism. As we were there we were talked about how excited for her we were and thought of what an amazing member she was going to be. The spirit was there tenfold.

After we finished the baptism we went to apartment and went out and did some proselyting. 

On Sunday Elder Clauson got sick from heat exhaustion, so we stayed inside after church helping him recover. Well, that's all we have for this week.

Elder R.K. Northrup

P.S.  For service this week we went and washed goats for someone so they could enter them into a goat show.

 Filling pitchers of hot water for Hanna's baptism

 Boiling the water!

 "Po" from Kung Fu Panda

 Hannah Ognoskie baptized August 1, 2015

 My Bear Claw eye patch!

Another edition of MISSIONARY FOOD!  Exhibit D-George Forman grilled Honey Mustard Sandwich!  

(Thanks for the Honey Mustard MOM!)