LAST LETTER!

Well this is my last email home and I’m gonna make it short and sweet cause i can tell you when i get back.

Cool to hear that steve  got called into the stake presidency, I wasn’t expecting that to happen at all,  president cannon will be great, his son clark went to pinnacle with me.

So this week was pretty sweet we had an awesome lesson on thursday with (S) and we talked to him about baptism and told him that he is ready, because he doesn’t feel that he is and when we read the baptismal questions with him and we were like you are ready and he even told us he knows that the church is true and that joseph smith is a prophet so that was pretty sweet.  He is getting baptized this saturday the 23rd and he was sad when i told him i was leaving. It was a good week though. Elder Moore is doing great he is ready to lead the area he will be a great missionary, he brings the spirit very well and loves everyone

I might be sending a box home I’m not for sure yet though, cause it might all fit in my suit case under the weight limit.

 I will be leaving my bike here and putting up for sale with the mission.

Well, that’s all i got, see you on thursday at 12

Love Elder Harper:)

ARIZONA HERE I COME!

cool to see picks of eric

Not as Cold !

March 11, 2013

Hey everyone,

 Well this week started out pretty cold, but the past 3 days have been really nice and today its supposed to be in the mid 70s so its gonna be good. This week I don’t know how to describe it, we had a lot of good stuff planned, but a lot fell through. We had another fireside where we invite investigators and less actives and we had (S) coming but he had an emergency so he wasn’t able to make it and we haven’t been able to teach him for a while because he has been busy. We have had a hard time finding people, I don’t know why it’s been so hard, but it has and we haven’t been able to teach much either cause we haven’t really found anyone to teach. We have some possible good stuff happening with the less actives in the ward. We went on an errand for our high priest group leader to go see his less-active grandaughter and we went and talked to her and she said she would love for us to come by and teach her some, so we are pretty excited to do that. So the sisters in our ward have been trying to get in contact with ( R ),my convert here, cause she lives in their area and she left them a message today saying that she had to move up to Columbia cause her daughter has been in the hospital, so I’m bummed that i didn’t get to see her before she left, but hopefully she can go to church up there. So I got my bike cleaned a little bit, Nate in the ward knows how to work on them so he did a little bit for me and yes I’m going to leave it here and sell it to someone. Yes, i will be sending some boxes home I’m not sure how many though but maybe 2, I’ll do it next Monday, cause I didn’t have time today. Yes, next Tuesday will be my last work day with elder moore and i will try to get as many pictures as i can with the other elders. I will be going home with the same 3 elders i came out with and also elder Abankwa cause he got an extension and 3 other sisters

Way cool to see the picture of grant doing shot put, how did he do? Is he the best on the team?. Dude you are so big i can’t wait to see you in person.

We couldn’t really do anything for p-day today cause the other elders went to Charleston with their soon to be convert to play frisbee golf, I wish we could have gone, but oh well. We didn’t get to see the planes last week cause they all were in the air doing training, so that was a bummer but maybe next week we'll see. 

Well, that’s all for this week, crazy to think it’s the last full one, I’m gonna make it the best ever. Keep praying that we will find some cool people.

Love Elder Harper:)

March 4, 2013

March 4, 2013

Wooow that has to be the most new emails in my inbox on my whole mission like 24 of them hahaha took me a while to get through them all.

Well this week was good it was a lot better then the last 2 weeks we've had. Nobody came to church for us, but (S) our investigator who is in the army had to go to Georgia, so that’s why he wasn’t there, but we just don’t have any really solid investigators, we are trying to find them just nothing yet. We taught a lot of people but most of them were just people that wanted to talk and then didn’t really want us to teach them more, it was good still though. We didn’t get to take a tour of the plane last week cause it was pouring rain all day, but we did go to a Mexican food stand with the Spanish elders and get some real Mexican food, I got some cow tongue quesadilla’s, mmmm those were goood! We are going to get the tour of the planes today because its not raining, hopefully I can take pictures. We went to a member’s house early in the week and they are an older couple, the (G’s). They are really nice and the wife is Japanese, haha she is funny, but she got baptized 3 years ago and they still haven’t gone to the temple and so we talked to them and the hold up is because she doesn’t understand what the temple is really for and so we are gonna help them get on the path to get sealed. It has been so stinkin cold this week ha I don’t know why cause it’s March, but it is just still in the mid 40's and the wind is blowing hard and the humidity makes it feel colder. We had dinner last night with a young member couple who just moved into the ward and he is an air force fire fighter, it’s pretty cool and he also is a 3 year convert. It was cool to hear their story, and they are both younger then me, it feels so weird for there to be married couples younger then me that I could be friends with back home. We had a mission tour with Elder Marcus B. Nash of the Seventy, he came and it was so cool the stuff he talked about, about how to help people gain a desire to become active in the church again or to do missionary work.

 He also taught us how to help others receive revelation, even in a teaching setting by asking them questions.  He is now one of my favorite general authorities

Well cool to see all the pictures of dad driving through Boiling Springs, it was weird to see you at the same place I road my bike past every day.

I didn’t know Jordan was getting home already, ha tell him hi for me.

Well, that’s all for this week

Love,

 Elder Harper :)

pedal pedal pedal....pedal pedal pedal pedal

Monday, February 25, 2013

Hey there fam,

 Well this week was better then last week, even though we didn’t really teach much but we were able to talk to a lot of people and helped a lot of people, like on Thursday night it was about 8:56 and we were at the last intersection before we go into our apartments and its a really busy one where there are a lot of accidents.  This guys big white cargo van ran out of gas right in the intersection so we were just waiting for the light to turn green and I said to elder Moore, quick put your bike on the side, so we chucked our helmets and bikes and helped this guy push his van to the gas station right there, ha that thing was heaaaavy!! then he offered to buy us some drinks but we said know we do this for free and we told him who we were and he said that we could come by and teach him so we are gonna go by some time and teach him. We have been hauling it on our bikes, yesterday we went to this road that took about and hour to bike, elder Moore isn’t as fast as me but that’s okay he does really good for not biking much in his life, but that was a killer ride. We had stake conference yesterday and it was great we had the (R)’s there and they enjoyed it, ha we also had dinner with them this week and they are so awesome, they are like into the doctrine and covenants and they just love to study especially (B) he is loving the pearl of great price and he says a lot of it makes sense, plus he is very knowledgeable when it comes to biblical stuff. He has lots of books that talk about biblical or religious stuff like one about giants, ha that one is interesting. Today we might be taking a tour of the air force base and also get to go into a c-17 carrier plane and we are gonna get some real tacos from a mexican tienda.

Well, Dad  I’m excited that you get to go through Spartanburg today, you should just drive up highway 9 into Boiling Springs for a little bit and you’ll see what I biked for 4 months, i would tell you to go the A’s home (the ones from AZ) but i cant remember their address but you could go see the church or my apartment on, old furnace rd. I really want to go to the Beacon, I never got to eat there.

So it is way crazy to hear about all the new missions and the changes in missions, I think its crazy that they split the mesa mission into 3 missions and created a Scottsdale one, I never even thought we had enough members to do that but I guess we do.  

Thanks for the super TRUNKY package

Well that’s all I got for you guys this week,

Love

 Elder Harper :)

Coooooold

February 18, 2013

Hey fam,

 Well this week has been really hard for me, so we got sisters in our ward now along with us and so we had to give them our car and we got put on bikes full time, which I really don’t mind at all but it doesn’t help that as soon as we did that it has been the coldest week all winter and not just by a little, but a lot. It has normally been 50 at night, and this week, but mostly saturday and sunday it got down to like 38-43 degrees, and it has also been really humid because it rained on Saturday and then that night after we were asleep it snowed, hahah crazy. It was only a little flurry of snow so it didn’t stick but the next morning on top of the cars it froze so there was little specks of white. So yea, we have been freezing our buns off on our bikes. Saturday night we had an interesting experience we talked to this guy who was trying to prove the book of mormon false by saying all this stuff about how the book of mormon says we are saved by grace after all we can do and that the bible in Ephesians 2 says that its not our works but grace alone that saves us and then trying to tell us that Joseph smith wasn’t a prophet because some of the things he prophesied didn’t happen, and he was good he knew a lot of stuff,  and after 30 minutes of listening to him and trying to tactfully end the conversation, I just boldly told him he is wrong and that I know the book of mormon is true and a couple other things and I was like you have a nice day. I also said something to him  and he like didn’t know what to say he was baffled, ha I felt way good cause then he came up with a response that wasn’t very good and the whole time we were freezing cause we were trying to get into Wal-Mart to buy some gloves and beanies. It’s just been hard for me this week having to deal with all this stuff, trying to get our biking figured out. But it was cool at church everything that the guy argued with us about was talked about at church and it just strengthened my faith,

     Cool story though, last night on our way back home last night we had a 25 minute bike ride to do, but I knew since elder moore is not as fast and since it was really cold that it would take about 45 minutes so we left in time to get there a little after 9 and 8 minutes later my back tire goes flat. So I pump it up fast and we start riding again and then it goes flat 6 minutes later, I do the same and 4 minutes later it goes flat, so I got off and ran the bike to the next stop light and I was praying that it would stay inflated the rest of the ride which was longer then what we had just gone and I pumped it up as fast as I could and the tire was as hard as a rock and we rode the whole way in 20 minutes and it stayed pumped up the whole time, and we got back right at 9 so I could get numbers in. coincidence? I think not.  Oh yeah, and I got called to be a district leader again and my whole district is sisters, ha I’ve never had that before and it doesn’t happen that often

  For my birthday, me and elder moore went to chipotle for dinner, it was good.

 Wooow dad you are like really skinny now you have like no belly anymore, (elder Brown says you look like you just got out of the holocaust) haha at least that’s what the picture make you look like  

Yes, elder brown is in my apartment and the apartment stayed the same the whole zone pretty much stayed the same except for those who went home which was only 2 elders so no companionship change other then the 2 new sister in our ward

Yes, I got my package okay, got it today it came a little late.

I will send thank you notes to people, ps, try to keep as much stuff at home as you can so I don’t have to lug it home with me

Those are some cool mission calls they got.

Well, that’s all I have this week

Love Elder Harper:)

Gators in South Carolina