2/22/2021

Hey everyone, I'm so glad this last week is over haha. There was a huge ice winter storm that hit Texas last week and so our preparation day was all jumbled up along with everyone's schedules haha. Along the craziness of everyone's schedules there was no water and electricity. Only a few people had that. Many buildings plumbing was destroyed and flooded lots of people’s places once it started warming up again. The church building on Knights Cross actually flooded hard and many things there were destroyed. 

Although it was super crazy we had many opportunities to serve the people around us and there were many miracles. 

We were able to help a retirement community get water because their pipes busted from the cold weather. We helped them flush their toilets and clean the sidewalks from the ice. It was gross but super awesome because the people were super grateful and there was no one else that was there to help.

Some of the Elders were able to get some snow shovels from some members and we shoveled most of the apartment around us so it wasn't super icy the next day. 

There was an apartment that burnt down from a water heater catching fire and many people lost everything they had. One of the Relief Society presidents from a ward nearby set up a response team. There were so many people that donated clothes, blankets, food, money, etc... to help those people. We helped out one morning and started organizing the donations alongside several different people. It was super cool to see the community working together and helping those who were in need. 

We reached out to several of our members in the Bulverde ward to make sure they were safe and if they needed help. We weren't able to go to many places to find this week but still were able to do the work online through Facebook and our technology we have. It was amazing because the Lord has prepared us and nothing will stop the work from progressing. 

We also had a couple lessons this week. We are teaching a man named Donald and trying to help him gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon. He is having a hard time reading it and accepting it. But we committed him to read it, so we will see. 

I'm so happy to be here in Texas at this time and to be able to help the people here. My testimony has grown this last week and I'm grateful for the gospel in my life. 

I hope that y'all stayed warm this last week and have a super good week this week! Love y'all!

-Elder Portlock 

Here are the pictures for this week

1. This morning we played volleyball with the Elders in our apartment complex. Super fun!!!

2. This is our zone when we went to Emerald Oaks to help them with their water flood problem.

3. We had to do things at the church on last Sunday so we all got bundled up. It was all icy though haha. This is me with my bike. 

4. We went to the store on Tuesday to get food and the lines where so big. 15 minute wait to get in. 45 minutes in line to get out. Things began to disappear from the shelves.

5. A picture of the snow. 

 

 2/15/2021

Hey everyone. This week was pretty good but ended up with us getting stuck inside. Winter hit us super late and strong. Were not allowed to go out and drive anywhere because the road conditions are bad. So it's a snow day for us! Our Mission President changed our Preparation day time from 8 to 4 today and on Tuesday he has us to go get groceries from 2 to 4 if the weather and roads aren't bad still. It's so interesting and kind of an adventure haha. I have basically all my snow gear with me so I'ma make myself a snow man haha. 

Yesterday for Sunday, the 4 of us still had to go to the church and get things done but we couldn't drive and our church was 3 miles away. We all decided that we would bundle up and walk there. We did. And it was FREEZING!!!. We were slipping sliding all over the place because it rained and froze over Saturday night and left a blanket of ice over everything. When we finally got back from the church we were all so cold and went and took warm showers. We all got a little sick too haha. Just a cough though. We ended up spending the rest of Sunday inside finding things we could do like calling investigators or members and sharing a message with them. 

We helped out one of the people we are teaching this week move some things around in her house this week. She needed help moving some bed and some boxes from the top floor of her house to her ground floor and the 4 of us came over and helped. She was super grateful and happy we came because we got it done in like 30 minutes. We had a tiny snack and talked to her for a moment about what we do officially as missionaries and she opened up quite a bit. Hopefully we can go over again and start teaching her more.

We planned on making a video about the 10 commandments this week which was super fun. We also did a live event about the restoration using cups. 

That's it for us this week. I hope you all stay super warm and safe and I'll talk to you more next week.

-Elder Portlock

 

 

 2/8/21

Hi everyone! 

This week was pretty good. We had our zone conferences again so we were in meetings Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. We got to have some more interaction with other missionaries on Wednesday which was super fun. 

On Tuesday and Thursday I got to do some exchanges with some Elders in my district which was super fun. Being district leader is really fun. We get to do exchanges, run district council, get everyone pumped and excited for the week and help our district make goals. 

We had some really good lessons this last week as well. We had another lesson with Nosa yesterday and he is super elect. He basically made his own invitation to read the Book of Mormon for himself after we talked and discussed the latter day part of the Restoration. We also found a person named Donald from our area book. He had been taught in the past by missionaries and was interested in meeting with us after we talked to him for a moment. Sadly he doesn't live in our area so we will have to pass him off.  We did Facebook live on Wednesday and that was super fun. We picked numbers at random and used the gospel art book. We taught about the story depicted in the picture. We plan to do more lives in the future. We made a Facebook video that should be coming out today which is basically about personal growth. We used planes in our video for the example and the video turned out pretty good.  

We went street contacting this last Sunday after Church and ran into a grumpy old man who was pretty angry at us for being there. He believed we were soliciting in his community where you're not allowed to solicit and he almost called the cops on us. Even though we explained to him who we were and what we do, but, he still didn't care. We left pretty quickly and then talked to this other person. He was super friendly and really liked our church and beliefs we had. He actually has lots of friends who are in the church. He told us that we were doing a good job and service. He even told us that he believes that our church is more Christian-like than most churches or people haha. He turned down our invitation for a message but said to say hi to him if we were ever nearby so maybe in the future we will for sure.

Funny Story time:

The 4 of us were driving to the church and we were all brainstorming names that we could call our car. None of us could decide on a name that we all liked, then I got the thought suggesting the name "LaFawnduh" from the movie Napoleon Dynamite. Everyone said no to my idea and then they all changed their minds and thought it was perfect. Elder Merrit didn’t like it at all but we all voted it as the name. Now we all like it and joke about the name haha. 

I hope you all have a super good week! 

-Elder Portlock

 

 

 

 2/1/21

Hey y'all! I hope your week was amazingly awesome. This week even though I'm in an English area now got to use my Spanish quite a bit. We were street contacting a talked to this Hispanic family. Only I could really talk to them but it was pretty fun. We are referring them to the Spanish missionaries now. We also talked to a couple other Hispanics this week too. We had dinner at a member’s house named the Kimball's. They made some super good food. They actually served a couple different missions in South America so I got to talk more Spanish with them. It was really fun. 

We also had a couple different ComeFollowMe lessons with some of the members in our ward this week as well. It went super well and they had lots of insight. I'm so excited to keep learning more from this year’s ComeFollowMe in the Doctrine and Covenants. 

We also did a Bible study this week to which was super fun to do. I'm studying about a lot of different ways the Bible and Book of Mormon connect to each other and it's been super fun because I've learned a lot more scriptures from the bible and some small really cool details in the Book of Mormon. We also had Stake conference this Saturday and Sunday and that was really cool. Elder and Sister Clayton who are general authorities for the church joined the conference and gave some really cool talks. 

One of the stories I really liked was about bears. A super short summed up version of it goes kinda like this. Everyone has bears in their lives and it can be scary sometimes when they come charging at you. But we can always remember to pray to our Heavenly Father and know that he can help us.  

I hope you all keep being great and have a super amazing week. Love yall!

-Elder Portlock 

1. Me and Elder Merritt got haircuts today as well as Rasin Caynes! 😎