Diligence and Obedience

Dear friends and family!

I am so sorry but this one may be a little short. I have no time! We had a bomb (awesomely amazing) Zone activity day today!!! So it's was way fun!! We played basketball, volleyball and Spikeball!!! It was great!! We also had ice cream and hung out!! So it was great to get the Zone together, get to know each other better (bonding time) and have some fun!! 

So here is a funny story about the new Mission President.  When us missionaries first met him as he came to the area to visit us, he was wearing disobedient socks.  You know the kind- brightly colored and patterned socks.  Well, the rule in the mission here is no wearing those kind of socks!  It is no bueno!   As missionaries we wear solid color socks (I wear black, blue and gray).  Well, at our Zone Conference President Hollingsworth stood up and told us he had repented.  He then asked us missionaries who noticed he was wearing disobedient socks and everyone raised their hand! hahaha  He then said that he was now being obedient and was wearing obedient socks and puts his leg up and pulls up his pants leg to show us his socks!! It was so funny!  I guess he even got an email from an elder asking him if he was going to change the rule so that the missionaries could wear patterned socks.  He said he told the Elder "no" and to keep being obedient because he was going to repent and wear the right socks!  hahaha 

Another story about Elder Hollingsworth:   I was at Zone Conference with President and Sister Hollingsworth and I was able to meet them personally and talk with them for a bit.  I told him that Hannah was my sister-in-law, that she was married to my brother Tyler and that he (Pres. Hollingsworth) was her Stake President growing up!  He loves the Fuller family and was so surprised and excited to hear I was related to Hannah and the Fuller family!  Side note:  Sister Hollingsworth had met Tyler one time when he went back to TX to visit. She didn't remember his last name so my name didn't ring a bell but she felt like I reminded her of someone.  Well, as soon as I said Hannah was my sister-in-law, she said, "Oh that's who you remind me of!  You look just like him!" (referring to Tyler)  It was so funny!! 

Some great, great things this week!!! We had some great miracles!! So Maddie committed to be baptized!!! The sad thing was we couldn't set a date. Some things are busy right now with her moving and college and then she wants to be baptized by someone in the ward and they will be gone for a few weeks so we are trying to figure out a date for her! So totally it's soon!! She has an awesome testimony of the church and she is pretty cool!! She has been telling a ton of her friends about the Gospel and the sharing some of the teachings she has learned!  She is a good missionary!  She has been losing some of her friends because of it (which is kinda sad for her) but she doesn't care and continues to keep the standards!! She is a beast!!   In fact, we are going over to her house for Family Home Evening and playing some games and eating! 

We had a lesson with Ozzy this week and it went great!! He committed to come to church and have a church tour!! So this week we are going to show him around the church and have some good lessons with him about God's Eternal Plan! He has been learning a lot and loves it!! 

A crazy miracle that happen is we had a women come to church that was going to be baptized a year ago!!! But she got cold feet and didn't. And she didn't come back for a whole year but yesterday she came back and wants to be baptized and take the lessons!!!! So we are really excited to get to know her and we have a lesson planned for this Thursday with a recent convert!! So I'm way excited about that!!!!

I had my first Zone Conference training and I think it went really well!  I talked/trained on diligence.  I will have to share more about that a later time cause I have got to go! 

It's been awesome being here and having such great support from the members!!! What a blessing!! I love the work and seeing great miracles from God!!! GOD IS GOOD!!! Love you all and hope you all have a great week!!! 

Elder Cahoon 

 

Another Great Week and Another Baptism!

Hello all family and friends!!

Twas a great week!! Had a lot of fun!! Hope y'all have been doing well! I have been getting all South over here and I have been saying y'all so much lately! Dang southerners and their weird English!!  I have been missing the good ol' weird Tampa people! They say some words super weird! Like for instance, they call the "streets" the "Screets."  The other day we knocked into someone from Tampa and they we telling us about someone down the street and she said "screet."  I was so happy! 😂 Good ol' Tampa!
We had a great great lesson with Ozzy!!! He said he prayed about Joseph Smith and feels good about him and his story. We invited him to read the Book of Mormon more and this next visit we are going to invite him to church!! So we are super excited about him!! 

We also were able to see David and Wendy! We gave David a Priesthood blessing because he has had some health issues. He really appreciated it and was very happy for us doing that! They are moving soon and we invited to help them out.  Hopefully, through all the craziness of moving and health issues, they can find some time to read! They haven't really been able to read and pray because they have been busy but we promised them they would find peace in reading the Book of Mormon. So hopefully they do read! 

We also had a great MLC (Missionary Leadership Council)! This is a meeting with all the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders.  I was also able to meet the new Mission President.  He is awesome!  He is from Texas.  In fact, he was Hannah's (my sister-in-law) Stake President when she was growing up!  At MLC, we discussed the mission and what the next step for our mission would be! We are trying to unify our mission more and keep our attitude the same and keep the culture the same! The Florida Tampa Mission has a great culture of obedience and hard work!! We want to keep that for sure!! It was amazing to talk with and discuss missionary work with the legends (the great Zone Leaders of the mission that have been around for awhile and are awesome missionaries)!! Sadly, Elder Hall will be leaving this transfer! I saw him there and we took some pictures! I love Elder Hall and hopefully we hang out after the mission!! I also saw Elder Lewis! I love him too!! Thank goodness he won't be leaving for a while so he and I will see each other often!! 

Elder Dye, my companion, and I had a wonderful Saturday!  We had another baptism!  She was so ready and excited to enter the waters of baptism.  We also met these two great people yesterday that have been searching for the truth and just want to know which Church is right!  How fabulous that they were searching for exactly what we are prepared to teach them!  We shared how there is a prophet on the earth and he speaks for God! They were very excited to hear that and want to learn more!  They are excited to come to church this Sunday!! We are going to try to have a church tour this week with them before they come to church so they will know what to expect and better understand the ordinance of the sacrament. 

As you can see,it's been a great week with some awesome miracles!!  I love serving the Lord and being His servant! I love being able to study the Scriptures and learn more! As you know, I have been reading the Isaiah chapters.  The chapters of Isaiah 11 and 2 Nephi 21 are great!! It's been great to study those in depth!! 

I love you all and hope y'all have a great week!! 

Elder Cahoon

 

A Super Great Week and A Baptism!!

Hello Family and Friends!! 

It has been a super great week!! And I hope all of you

Fun on the 4th!

have been doing great!! Thank you for the letters and emails! I love hearing from all of you and how life is going! Thank you Grandma J for the kind email!  I love you and I appreciate it.  I hope you had a good 4th of July because I did here in Florida! 

 Hope the good ol' Farmington, NM is doing good! It's good ol' brown state! Everyone here bashes on New Mexico and how it looks like Afghanistan but I honestly love NM!  I don't know if I will ever live there. It IS the land of Entrapment so who knows. For you non-New Mexicans, the state slogan is: The Land of Enchantment. 

Well this week was great! We had some really cool miracles!! So to start off we had a lesson with the Veteran man. And something super cool about him is his nickname is Auzi!!!! (For those who don't know, that is also my nickname.) So that was pretty cool to hear!! I can't remember if I said that last week.  He read The Restoration pamphlet we gave him but he didn't understand it super well so we taught the restoration in a lesson and also gave him a Book of Mormon. He thought the first vision of Joseph Smith was awesome! We are going to see him tomorrow.  We are excited for that!  

We also had an amazing miracle this week with a couple. We were riding our bikes down a street and we saw a man working (which if people are working we kinda leave them alone). But I had an impression like I needed to stop and talk to him. So we stopped and talked to him for a little bit. His name is David and he has belief in Christ. (Like everyone else over here😂) and we talked to him about the Book of Mormon and how Christ visited the people of Ancient America! He was astonished! He had never heard about that and loved it. We gave him a Book of Mormon and invited him to read the Introduction. We visited him and his wife yesterday. They are awesome!! We had a wonderful lesson with them! They allowed us inside and we sat down and right as we sat David said "You are not going to like this." And I got scared. I thought maybe he looked at the internet and found some false things about the Restored Church or just he was just plain not interested. But he said they asked their Pastor that Sunday about the Book of Mormon and the Pastor said, "They are a Cult." 😂 That had me laughing! The Pastor did however complement us missionaries on how we are good, young men. We explained how we are not a Cult. We shared several reasons why we were not a cult.  One thing we told them was that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christ's church because He is the head of it. We shared the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's Vision of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. The Spirit was there and it was a great lesson! The wife( her name is Wendy) was so excited to read the Book of Mormon after we explained it more! She is a strong believer in the Bible and knows it's true and she said in her own words "I am curious to see how the Spirit speaks to me about this."  She is excited to ask God about the Book of Mormon and if it is true- which is exactly what we want her to do! So we will be seeing them again this week!! 

We also had a BAPTISM!!!! It went great and she was so 

Baptism in Lecanto

excited and happy to be baptized!! She has been taught for a while and was ready to receive those blessings that come from it!!  There were 2 nonmembers there- one is going to be baptized next week.  We will be going over this week to visit and set a temple date with her.  She is very excited to enter the temple and the House of God. I had the privilege of baptizing her and it was a great spiritual baptismal experience!! 

Yesterday at church we had the lady that is going to be baptized there along with another, less-active member.  She desires to come back to church and really liked both Sacrament and Sunday School!  We will be visiting her this week as well.  

I have been thinking about repentance lately (probably because we are having these 2 baptisms).  I love being able repent and change everyday! I used to think of repentance as a bad thing and a punishment but it's the exact opposite. It's peace and forgiveness. It brings the joy and spirit back into your life! I love that I have the ability to pray and seek forgiveness because of our Savior Jesus Christ!! I continue to study Isaiah and boy am I loving it!  I am using the Institute Study Guide from the Gospel Library App to aid in my studies.  I love that book/guide!  

Love you all and love hearing from you!!  Hope all of you have a great week!

Elder Cahoon

Lecanto Is Awesome!

Hello all my family and friends!!! 

It's great to hear about how y'all are doing! I am grateful for all of you!! Hope y'all are continuing to do great!! This week has been awesome!! 

So out here in the country is way fun!! All the folks out here are sweet!! Especially the members!! We have met some super cool people! They are all country and love their property!! I have never seen so many "No Trespassing" signs and "Private Property" signs! I love it!! It makes me smile when I see them posted all along the fence and the front door! Even though they have these signs, the people are all pretty nice! 

We met the super cool veteran guy this week!! He had a bunch of American flags everywhere and he had a goat in his yard!!! I don't know why he had a goat but he did!! It was fun to talk with the goat a little bit!! I will send a picture of the goat!  Well, the guy answered the door and asked who we were and we said "We are messengers of Jesus Christ the missionaries!" He allowed us in right away! He gave us water and then began to ask questions about who we were. We told him about us and where we were from and why we are now here in Florida! He became pretty interested and has always had a belief in God but doesn't really know how to build on that. We explained how Christ has called a prophet again and His church has been restored! He was pretty interested and told us to come back! We will be seeing him this week!

We also met a wonderful lady that lived across the street from a member's home. She has been coming to church for a while but hasn't been meeting with the missionaries. We introduced ourselves and we will be going this week to her house to help her out in her yard. She is super kind and we are going to try to teach her!! 

We also had an amazing lesson with the lady that is preparing for baptism!! She kinda got cold feet and wasn't sure about the baptism.  We met with her and had a super spiritual lesson.  I truly felt the Spirit teach through me.  As she felt the Spirit, she began to receive courage and strength.  In the lesson, we talked about how we don't need to be perfect for baptism because God doesn't ask us to be perfect.  It was awesome!  Tithing was another area of concern for her.  It was hard for her to think about paying a full tithe (10% of her income which is what the Bible also states).  A member friend of hers talked about her finances with her and now she feels confident that she will be able to pay a full tithe.  She has been doing great!! She is super excited for Saturday!! So are we!  

We rode our bikes a couple of times this past week even though we have a car.  We thought it would be fun.  The bike paths here are dirt. We go in between trees because the paths aren't really marked. It was fun!  I love my bike- a lot of the missionaries here have one similar to mine.    

Elder Dye and I have been having fun! He is super funny and has some great stories!! He is a country boy from Idaho and loves it here in Lecanto!!  We are enjoying teaching and finding together!

I got to hear Elder Anderson (one of the 12 Apostles) speak in the Stake Sacrament meeting and I shook his hand afterwards!  I still haven't washed my hand. hahaha  The 2 women that are going to be baptized came to the Sacrament meeting so they got to hear him speak as well!  They also went to hear President Nelson (the Prophet)  and Elder Uchtdorf (one of the 12 Apostles) a couple of weeks ago.  How lucky are they??!!  At the Stake Sacrament meeting, I was able to see my new Mission President but I haven't been able to meet him personally yet.  It was so sad to see President Cooper leave (he is so loving and personable and spiritual) but I am sure my new Mission President will be awesome.   

Life has been great and I absolutely love the calling of being a

Elders Cahoon and Dye

full-time missionary!! I am studying right now in the Isaiah chapters of the Book of Mormon and I absolutely love them! I have never really understood them (and never really tried) but they have been some of my most favorite chapters to study!!  I know we read and talked about them in family scripture study and I studied them in Seminary but my desire and personal studies now are so different!  

Love you all and hope you have a great week!! Thank you for all you have done for me and for your prayers!! I promise they are not going to waste!! 

Elder Cahoon 

Lecanto Spider