This Week

This week has been trying, but we have seen the rewards as well. After weeks of trying to find people to teach, we finally had tons and tons of lessons set up to teach people. And then almost all of them got cancelled or dropped. Four cancelled Wednesday, three Thursday, one Friday, another three Saturday.

On the upside, we were able to begin teaching Alex (the little blonde kid in the picture of the castle last week) and his mother, and Alex came to church! That was the first time we had an investigator at church since I've been here - so awesome.  He is a super bright kid too. The Young Men’s president was telling us afterward that he was way good in the young men's class (he's almost 13), even answering questions. So the Lord is definitely richly blessing us and rewarding us for the hard work we have put in. It is so awesome. God is so good to us. We see miracles all the time. Llanelli is still beautiful too. I love it every day. Keep practicing saying Llanelli. Maybe you'll get it some day.

Love,

Elder Poulsen

Just so you know how awesome my life is...

I thought I'd run you through a day of mine. Last Tuesday, to be exact. I would say it was an average day, but it wasn't really. It was actually really awesome. But actually its fairly normal for days to be really awesome. So I guess maybe it was average. 

After studying in the morning, we stopped by an investigator named Andrew and set up an appointment to teach him the next day. Then we stopped by another investigator, and set up an appointment with him as well. We probably talked to some random people along the way, but nothing much came of it that morning. 

After lunch, we went to knock some doors on a street that we had picked on the map. It turned out to be a really posh street. So everyone was at work and people weren't home (in less posh areas, tracting during the day is fine because a lot of people either aren't working, or work random shifts and so might be home during the day). So we moved on from that. We headed down to the bike path to ride the four miles down to Burry Port, a village that is also part of our area. Its no boring bike path though, it happens to run along the coast. So its absolutely stunningly beautiful. 

On the bike path we met this cool guy named Richard who was a Choir conductor. So I talked to him about choirs and Gloucester Cathedral and also who I should talk to to get to play the pipe organ at the Baptist chapel in town (yes!). Anyway, he has a friend who is a member of the church who has talked to him about it a lot. We were able to testify to him about the truthfulness of the Gospel and leave him with a copy of the Book of Mormon and a pamphlet about the Restoration. 

When we got to Burry Port, we got to help a nice lady carry her shopping home, and set up an appointment to come back and teach her. Then we stopped by and met someone who had been previously taught by the missionaries. Tomorrow we are going to begin helping him fix up his back garden, and hopeful through our service he will open up again to the Gospel. We were then able to go visit a member who we had seen the week before, and told to invite her friends over so we could share a message with them. She had invited a friend over, so we were able to teach him and we are going to be seeing him again tomorrow night. We also met one of her neighbors, who told us we could come back later to share a message with him. 

We had a dinner appointment with a member, which was way good. When we went back to visit the man we had told we would come back, he had already gone to sleep, which was unfortunate, but we'll try again tomorrow. We also talked to some of the cool neighborhood kids. We tried to stop by some other former investigators and some less actives, but with no success. We were about ready to head home, but then we ran across some kids playing cricket in an empty car park (that's parking lot in English), and they let us have a go at bowling and batting cricket style. That was way fun--Elder Gull is a baseball player as well, so we were both thoroughly entertained by it. 

Finally, we took the coastal bike path back home. It was an absolutely beautiful evening. Unfortunately, none of the people we talked to were all that interested in hearing what we had to say. But considering how much success we had in Burry Port, there was no room for complaining about that. We were both pretty dang tired by then. But it was quite the day. 

This is a picture of a castle we saw today. It’s actually more like a really big house (people still live in it too), but I guess it can be called a castle because it has that tower on the left side. (check out those sketchy external stairs). It was built in the 1800s. Pretty cool. The kid in between us is a kid named Alex we met on Saturday. He showed us how to get to the castle. It was quite an adventure. And also today he told us he read the first 20 pages of the Book of Mormon! Pretty awesome!  We'll get to teach him and his mother on Wednesday. It'll be good. 

If you haven't noticed, we run into a lot of people who are interested in listening to the Gospel. Considering that you can find out from just about everybody in the world that not many people are interested in religion anymore, there is no way that this happens by chance. God most definitely the one who places in our paths the people that we need to meet. It is amazing. It is miraculous. And we are so grateful for it. Look for the hand of the Lord more in your life, and you will see it. Have a lovely week. 

Love, 

Elder Poulsen

Kilts

Well this has been a crazy day. We did some shopping and some going to the beach. A guy who was recently baptized here and his wife were nice enough to tote us around. So I don't have much time to write now. But that’s ok. We were at a suit store and they had kilts for rent. We decided against buying them since they were about £380 or something like that (something to do with being handmade out of extremely nice wool). But we tried them on, of course. 

The Lord blessed us with three new investigators this week. That was lovely. We still didn't get anyone to come to church though, which was sad. But we hope that the Lord will continue to pour out His blessings upon us as we continue to work hard. We're trying to lighten up and have some fun at the same time though, or else we may just end up miserable. We'll have to find a good balance, I suppose. 

Here's a cool scripture I shared with some members this week as we encouraged them to keep up their missionary efforts: 

 12 For there are many yet on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations, who are ablinded by the subtle bcraftiness of men, whereby they lie in wait to cdeceive, and who are only kept from the truth because they dknow not where to find it—

 13 Therefore, that we should waste and awear out our lives in bringing to light all the bhidden things of darkness, wherein we know them; and they are truly manifest from heaven—

D&C 123:12-13

There are so many people who need the truth and want the truth--and these are people that we know--we just need to open our mouths and share it with them. 

I hope you all have a lovely day and an amazing week. 

Love, 

Elder Seth Poulsen

llanelli

I'm in Llanelli! I bet you're wondering where that is. Well, its in Wales. Just down the road from Swansea. And right next to the beach. Not a ton of missionaries get to serve in multiple countries on their mission or on the coast, but I am getting to do both. Its pretty awesome. Now you should know how to pronounce Llanelli properly. Suprisingly enough, it is even less intuitive to pronounce than Gloucester. The pronunciation for Gloucester doesn't make much sense becasue it comes from Olde English. The pronunciation for Llanelli isn't English at all. Its Welsh. To be able to pronounce it properly, you need to know how to make the double L sound in welsh. Here's how you do it: put your teeth together and open your lips a little bit. Then push some saliva out of the sides of your teeth. Now you know how to pronounce "Ll" in welsh. And now you should be able to pronounce Llanelli properly. I'm sure you feel really ridiculous doing it, but I promise that really is how you pronounce it. You can youtube it or something if you don't believe me. The accent down here is crazy. Its absolutely hilarious though, I love it. Especially when two welsh people are going at each other. Thats when it gets really hilarious.

My companion here is a kid from Spanish Fork, Utah named Elder Gull. I'll get you a picture of him eventually. Probably. He's a way cool kid and excited to do the work. We're gonna tear it up. He has been in the mission field for 5 weeks less than me (my first transfer was a 5 week transfer). So that's a bit crazy. But that is what is happening all over the mission because about 100 of the 260 missionaries in our mission came out with me or after me. So our mission is extremely young. Some other people from my group are with people from the group after me, like I am, some are training, and some are district leaders all ready. Its crazy! But its so exciting because the work is pressing forward. So I guess I technically have that "senior companion" title now, which is a bit scary because it means I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Which I don't feel like I do. But with the Lord on our side we'll be all right. So we'll have to make sure we stay on His side and give him the credit that He deserves for everything that ever happens in the mission field.

A few weeks ago an awesome guy was baptized here, so we are going to be making sure he and his wife (who was already a member) are on the road to temple marriage! Its way cool. Other than that, there are not a whole lot of investigators here, so we are going to be doing a lot of finding new people to teach. We'll have to get creative--some ideas we will be pressing forward with are setting up a booth in town centre and drawing the Plan of Salvation somewhere with sidewalk chalk. Aside from that, we'll just need to talk to absolutely everyone we can. This is a new challenge for me (and I am a bit scared, to be sure) because in Gloucester we always had plenty of people to teach. But we'll just have to rely on the Lord a lot. We'll do our best and know that whatever happens is his will. Being a missionary is great. I highly recommend it.

Love,

Elder Seth Poulsen

Tonight is Dodge Night!

Another week of missionary work done. I can't say that anything terribly out of the ordinary has happened, but we have certainly been blessed by the Lord every single day, as always. We had an excellent Zone Conference on Tuesday. My favorite part was probably when my mission President said that we can keep using backpacks even though the new dress and grooming guidelines for missionaries say no backpacks. His reasoning was that though backpacks might make us look like schoolchildren, shoulder bags make us look like Jehovah's Witnesses. Also backpacks are much safer for biking with. Anyway, he sent in a request that we be able to continue to use backpacks. In all seriousness though, He taught us some amazing stuff about how to let Jesus Christ become even more the center of our lives. Mission Presidents are so inspired. It is so cool to learn from people who have the Priesthood keys for the revelation that will help us progress (i.e. the Prophet for all of us, as well as our Stake Presidents, Bishops, and Mission Presidents for missionaries). God really inspires those men to say what we need to hear. And as missionaries, we get to be that person for our investigators. We get to be that portal to God--he gives us the revelation of what these people need to hear and what they need to do to be able to come closer to Jesus Christ. Joseph Smith said, "Salvation cannot come without revelation; it is in vain for anyone to minister without it." Its so true. We are so reliant upon the Lord for what we need to say and do to help the people here. And it is so awesome because He gives it to us when we are humble, and we are able to do His work. 

Tonight is dodge night! Chances are that I will be moved from Gloucester. So who knows where I'll be emailing you from next week...

Love, 

Elder Poulsen

Missionary Work is so Exciting!

This is super English. This was my dinner last night. English people like to put beans on their toast. And when you say beans here, it means baked beans. You may be able to see that I threw some eggs in there as well. It was pretty tasty. 

 This is our phone. Until I got here, I didn't even know Nokia still existed. But it does here. They make some smart phones as well, but this certainly isn't one of them. This is basically the cheapest phone ever. For some reason we can receive text messages but can't send them. But that will probably change soon. 

 The Book of Mormon in Farsi! Keep reading to see why we have it. It looks just like the other ones, bound with the same blue cover and everything, but it isn't actually the full book. The translation isn't complete yet, so it just has the excerpts in it that are done. 

So about Paul, the less active guy we ran into a week ago...we started teaching him and his girlfriend! He knows the truth (well, most less actives do I have found) the struggle now will just be getting him back in the doors of the chapel. 

We had another amazing experience finding an awesome person this week. So there are these things called Media Referrals that we never get. Its where people enter on Mormon.org that they want a visit from the missionaries and the message is sent to our mission office and then from there to us. Every week my whole mission when we do our weekly planning we read this part of Preach My Gospel that says we need to make plans to contact media referrals and we think "man, it would be really cool if we actually got those." I hope you've figured out where I'm going with this by now. On Friday we were in our flat having lunch and we got a text message from the mission office. It was a media referral!!! It was pretty exciting. 

So, that evening we stopped by. Halmet (that's his name) let us right in. He was excited to see us. We weren't quite sure what to expect. But it turns out that he is a single father, and he has been looking for the best way to raise his 5 and 8 year old sons. He has been looking at things on the inter-net, and so he requested that we visit him. So we did. We saw him again on Saturday, and he brought his kids with him to church on Sunday. They absolutely loved it!  What a great miracle that we were able to come into contact with him!  He has kind of a crazy story. His family is from Kyrgyzstan, but he grew up in Iran. He had somewhat of a Christian upbringing though. Then he was in Iraq because he was working for the Iranian Democratic Party, which is way not allowed because Iran's gov. is run by Islamic law right now. So he was eventually caught and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. After a year however, he starved himself until he was so sick they had to take him to the hospital. From there, he escaped, and now he is here! That story is straight out of a movie or something - so awesome! Anyway, his English reading is not that good, he prefers to read in Farsi or in Kurdish. But t The Book of Mormon is not in Kurdish (yet--he may be one to help translate it, which is really exciting to think about. He actually already expressed somewhat of a desire to do so as well) and only some of the Book of Mormon is in Farsi. Thankfully, our Zone leaders had  a Farsi one, so we were able to get it from them and will be able to give it to him when we see him tomorrow! Missionary work is so exciting. I love it. 

Love, 

Elder Poulsen

Whhaat? No Rain in England?

The weather here has been CRAZY!!! And by that I mean that it has only rained once, and it was just some evening drizzling, in the whole month of June. That never happens in England. Everyone is kind of freaking out about it. I've been in England over three months now and I still think people's accents are really cool--although I'm definitely more used to it now than I was a few months ago. This week I will hit my four months as a missionary mark. Thats crazy!

We saw some cool miracles this week. One was yesterday afternoon. Elder Baker has a fancy racing bike. But he hit a crack or something and burst his tube. so we pulled over and he set to patching his tube. It took FOREVER because he had to do it three times before it worked properly. So we proceeded on to where we were going I was riding my bike and this guy yelled at me from down the street, "Hey Elder!" So I stopped. Because people don't usually talk to us. It can be hard to get people to talk to us. So if someone decides of their own free will to talk us, we will most certainly stop. I waited for him to walk over to me and for my companions to catch up. As he walked up I could see he was totally covered in tattoos. He said, "I'm a Mormon too, I just haven't been going recently because I have been in the ICU and stuff...But I want to start coming to church again." So he gave us his phone number and we are going to see him on Tuesday. (he was baptised a couple years ago--we were able to find his teaching record in our flat). If Elder Baker hadn't gotten a puncture, we wouldn't have run into him. It sounds cliche, but remember everything happens for a reason...even flat tires.

I love you all.

Elder Poulsen