Dear family and friends,
Happy late Presidents day to all! We should always take a moment to honor those great Presidents of our Nations History. And we should keep in our prayers the current President, and future Presidents to come! The work has really been picking up here in Grand Forks. This week we hit a personal record of receiving 5 referrals (that's what we get when Sisters accidentally "poach" our area." But it was still a personal record for Elder Smith and I! We contacted one of the referrals named Collin. He is in his 20's and studying to become a leader of a Non-Profit organization. He knew members growing up, and he felt he should learn more! So we are excited to continue working with him! It will be awesome! This past week we met with Randall. We have been working with Randall for about 2 months now, and it has been on and off. He contacted the To our surprise he contacted the first Ward Sisters that originally taught him, and told them he "knows the church is true, wants to be taught everything, and get baptized." We were very shocked at this! I think he knows these things our true by the fruits of the Gospel. He has really seen a change in himself for the better. And he feels that God is lining things up for him. It was awesome, and we had a very spiritual lesson with him on Valentines Day. And we were able to set him on date for March 21st! We are so excited!! We even told him that God will help him make that date, but Satan will do everything he can to make it so you can't get baptized. So we warned him in a way. Johnathan's baptism is this upcoming Saturday!! His family confirmed they are flying in from Sunny Florida to Frozen Tundra North Dakota this weekend. So we are very excited it will be an awesome day! His Father is baptizing him, and Elder Smith and I are giving talks. We are really looking forward to it! It will be an awesome week! Were hoping Randall can attend the baptism! Well another Transfer has gone and I am staying in Grand Forks at least until March 31st (That is the next transfer van day.) I get to be with Elder Smith! He is a good missionary, and fun to be around! He is from the Castle Rock, and Parker area of Colorado. So he kind of lives near Cheryl and Glade. But there are a lot of great changes happening in our Zone this time around!
Elder Corey Barber
Dear family and friends,
It has been a great week up here! This transfer has been really fast! And I feel like next transfer will be even faster. I know my time is always running shorter and shorter. Not to be trunky but you only get 18 emails after this one. But that is still plenty of time in the Lords work! Recently Elder Smith and I have been working hard to crack down on our potentials list! It is literally 15 pages long. So it is taking us a while. It is a blessing that our cars get so many miles up here. We are really abundantly blessed with cars that have enough miles for all of us! It keeps us out of the cold ALOT! I can only name a couple of times that we have had to walk in the blistering cold this winter. We have been really blessed. I pray for the weather to continue to stay above 0. I know once we hit March it should stay in the 20s relatively. We had an awesome miracle happen. We were at a less active named Chads house for a lesson. We were just getting Elder Smith acquainted with him. When his girlfriend walked in with a friend that lived nearby. Her name is Chanita. She asked us why we don't stop by her house. We thought she was joking, but she was serious! So this week we plan to make Chanita an investigator! It will be awesome! We are very excited. Johnathan is doing awesome! He is looking great for his baptism on the 21st! We are so excited! This week we had the opportunity to drive out to Bemidji, MN. I believe this is the town where the T.V show "How I met your mother" takes place in. That is what I have heard at least (I wouldn't know I have never really watched that show.) I was able to go on exchanges with Elder Docking for the third time in a row! This time we were in Grand Forks. Elder Docking will be flying home at the end of this transfer. It is kind of weird because I met him when he was a year out. And now he is almost gone. It is crazy how fast the time goes! Every day the mission feels shorter and shorter. But the work is still going forward, and strong. Next Monday I will not be emailing due to President Day. But we got it approved to have two hours of P-Day to go explore the aviation center here in town. It is a museum along with a member pilot will be showing us around the schools airplanes. It will be REALLY cool! As I have been on my mission I keep getting the feeling I should master in aviation. All throughout my mission I have met all different likes of career options. And I have pondered them all deeply. And I really can't find anything I enjoy. I can find careers that could make me "money" in the long run. But I always come back to what will i enjoy doing. And honestly the only thing I truly enjoy and would be actually excited to learn about is aviation and airplanes. I personally would love to say my "office" or my workplace is in the sky. I don't know if I desire the airline industry. But I have been thinking of teaching aviation at a college, and help others learn how to fly. One of these P-Days I hope to meet with somebody over aviation here at UND and talk to him about their program. Well I am happy that all is well at home. I know recently there has been some scares, but it brings me great comfort to know the Lord is over all. And in the end ALL will be well. Well I love you all, and I hope you have a great week!
Elder Corey Barber
Dear family and friends,
I am so happy that February is here!! January was a doozie. And I have to be quite honest I'm happy January is over. Mainly because with January brought transfers. And many companionships in the zone got transferred which drove a lot of cars to Fargo at the beginning of the month. And then of course we drove to MLC which is always a fun time. And then we had our Zone Training Meeting which drove a lot of cars to Grand Forks. And then we just had our Zone Conference down in Fargo which drove a lot of cars to Fargo again. You could safely say January taxed a lot of cars with a lot of mile requirements. But we safely squeaked by and stayed under on our mileage cap. So we are doing great! And we welcome February with open arms. This month we won't be driving down to MLC. So we will be able to give more cars more miles for this month. But it feels good to welcome this month because every day we are getting closer and closer to warm weather. This winter has been an awesome winter up here! The temperatures have been really good compared to last winter where there were 100 days straight of temperatures in the negatives. I believe I was here for at least 80 of those days (yes God has a great sense of humor.) But this week was good we had an awesome Zone Conference. I feel like our training went well overall. I could pick out some things I would change and some mistakes I would correct, but overall I feel like it was good and it taught missionaries well. Something cool that we did at the end of the training was we had each district come up with what they are going to work on to help their investigators teach 50% of the lesson. We had them write it down on a blank white puzzle piece. We then gathered the pieces and put them together on the board and taped them. We then flipped over this puzzle and it was a well sketched out picture of the savior. It was really cool! We promised them that as they apply these commitments it will help their investigators come closer to the savior. We met with Johnathan this week! And they are all excited to have this baptism coming up on the 21st. Elder Smith was chosen by Johnathan to give the talk on baptism. And I was chosen to give the talk on the Holy Ghost. This will be the first talk I give on my mission. I'm still striving to go 24 months without talking in sacrament meeting once. So far I'm doing good! We also got a new investigator this week. His name is Jean. He is from Africa! And he had some friends in Africa who were members. He seemed pretty interested when we shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him. The reason we taught that to him was he grew up Muslim, but converted to Christianity not too long ago. So he doesn't really know what the gospel of Jesus Christ is. So it was cool to teach that to him, and we look forward to working with him! We will have to apply our training and use pictures to help teach him! Yesterday we went to another church and it was one of those southern churches with the clapping and the dancing. It was actually really fun! My ears hurt afterwards due to the loud music. But now I can say I have experienced an African American clapping church. The pastor was really funny as well. At one point he was talking about how their trying to pass a law that allows pastors to carry firearms in church. And he shared a story of a guy that would attend his church regularly who was always packing. At one point the pastor said "It was good I was preaching the right thing or I would have been shot!" Coincidentally we were sitting at the exact bench this man sat at every week. He then looked to us and said "I hope you two aint packing!" He was a really nice guy! Well that is about all for this week! I hope you all are doing well! I love you all and have a great week!
Love, Elder Barber
Dear family and friends,
Thank you so much for all of your emails this week! We have had a pretty busy week! Not so much work wise, but we have been planning for our Zone Conference. We had the Assistants in town on Wednesday! That went well! I went on exchanges with Elder Lott. Elder Tidwell is the other assistant (he is in Ron and Anne Thompsons ward in Centerville) It was really great! They brought the movie Meet the Mormons into town, and we had anyone and everyone come watch it. We had a pretty good turn out. Not as big as we were hoping. But it was still pretty good! It was kind of scary Elder Smith and Elder Tidwell took our dinner appointment, so had the sisters schedule us another one. We had thirty minutes until our dinner appointment so we decided to start to set up the projector and microphone. We were having some extreme technical difficulties. The projector worked and hooked up to the DVD, but we could not get ANY sounds to come out. So we had to fiddle with it and get creative, but eventually it produced sound and all was well. We were about twenty minutes late to our appointment. We could NOT find the house at all, but we found it! Like I was saying we have been planning for our Zone Conference training which is getting the investigator to teach 50% of the lesson. The Assistants helped us out by showing us a resource on teaching youth videos on LDS.org. So we are using the video "using pictures" in our training. It is a great video and in the video the youth clearly taught 50% of the lesson. So we will be using this. In our training we will also ask for other ideas that people have seen successful, and have them write it down on a puzzle piece. They will then bring that idea up, and we will have other tables bring there idea up. We will do some role plays of the ideas. At the end of our training we will flip the puzzle pieces over and it will be a sketched drawing of the Savior Jesus Christ that Sister Pohl in our zone sketched! It looks really good! And it should be spiritual. We will be giving this training next Thursday.
Dear family and friends,
How are things going!? It sounds like you all had such a great week! It feels like yesterday I was writing you. So not too much has happened since I last wrote you. Last week we were crazy busy the whole week! Missionary Leadership Council was good! We spent most of last week either on the road, in meetings, or planning. So it was very busy! Zone Training meeting went really well! We trained on a new method of role playing. Which is Explain, Practice, Evaluate, Re-Practice. The only thing that makes it different from the old role playing method is the evaluation. It is a lot more comfortable and easy. And you learn a lot from it. It almost makes role playing a council setting with your companion or district. So we think this will help the mission with teaching skills! It will be awesome to see all the missionaries progression. We had a two and a half hour meeting, which usually those drag on and on. But for everyone there they all said it went by fast, and they learned a lot! Which is awesome to hear! I finally have some good news! On Saturday we were able to set Johnathan (our nine year old part member investigator) on date for February 21st!! His grandparents in Florida were finally able to establish a set date they could be here for! So that is the goal at the time! Hopefully we don't need to push it back. But we know he will make it! We were informed a couple of days ago by the assistants that we will be giving the training in Zone Conference next week! So it will be back to planning a training this week. This time we have a harder subject we have to train on getting the investigator to teach 50% of the lesson. And we don't really know where to start wit that one! We're just going to have to count on the Lord to help us! Well I hope you all have a great week! I love you!
Dear family and friends,
It was such a great week! I am sorry that I am writing late. As you all know we were at Missionary Leadership Council in Rapid City. I love being a Zone Leader up here. When I was serving in Devils Lake I constantly desired to see the mountains. I got to the point where I named the disease as being "mountain sick." It gets tiring looking at flatness. And it is awesome this time around because I get to drive to Rapid City usually once a month, and see something obstruct my view. That always makes things easier. We had a great time at the recent M.L.C! It was a lot of fun to see everyone again. We usually arrive in Rapid City around 12:30 or 1 MST. And we had the opportunity to do service at the Journey Museum. It is a museum of the creation of the black hills, and the history of the hills. It was really interesting. Even though we spent most of our time cleaning it we got to walk through and see it after we were done. While we were doing our first session of M.L.C on Monday night we heard the announcement of the new mission change. Of how the new mission headquarters will be located in Bismarck, ND. That will be really cool. We will also be downsizing our mission. Casper, WY. Will now be a part of the Ft. Collins, Colorado mission. And Gillette, WY will be a part of the Billings, MT mission. And Sioux Falls will be a part of the Nebraska Omaha mission. This will go into affect on July 1st or just a little bit before. But I will be home, so it will not matter to me. I am thankful to be the last of the South Dakota Rapid City mission. It will be good changes for this mission, and will make it a whole lot easier on the new mission President. But as for us now we are currently planning diligently for our Zone Training Meeting that will be held tomorrow. So we will be busy for the rest of the week! We plan to get John on date this Saturday! His parents now know of a time range of the baptism. We just need to set an exact date. It will probably be around the end of February or the beginning of March! Which will be awesome! Well I hope all is well this past week. Elder Smith is doing awesome. It is fun to be companions with someone who was in the M.T.C with you. He is a hard working missionary, and pretty fun to be around! Well I love you all, and I hope you have a great week!
Dear Family and Friends,
It has been a great week! And an awesome end to a transfer! On Sunday I started my final four transfers. I have really enjoyed serving here in Grand Forks for these past 12 weeks! I have to admit it doesn't feel like 12 weeks have passed by at all. But they have and they have been awesome! Well I am sad to say that on Saturday we got a transfer call. Elder Cannon was called to go to Dickinson, ND to finish a training for a new missionary. The reason he is finishing a training is because the New Missionaries trainer got called to be the new Assistant to the President (he was previously a Zone Leader.) It was really sad to get that call. I was hoping Elder Cannon could finish his mission up here (he only had 6 weeks left.) President Anderson told me that Elder Smith will be my new companion. Elder Smith was in the MTC with me when I came out! He is a pretty great missionary and he seems to work hard and be obedient, which is always good! But here is the deal. Usually they have the Senior Zone Leader train the new Zone Leader for two transfers. Which in our case can easily be done. But since we both have 4 transfers left I get to train him for two, and I will pretty much be for sure transferred. And then he will train a new Zone Leader for two transfers and finish his mission. So that means I will probably spend my last 12 weeks in a different area. But that's okay I am going to enjoy the next two transfers! I love Grand Forks! It is a great place, and an awesome Zone! I am very excited for the next two transfers! We did really well this past week with getting members at lessons! We came away this week with 5 member present lessons! Which is usually what we got in the Casper 5th ward. So that is some improvement. Honestly it has been a struggle to get people to progress here. We still haven't set a date with John Larsen because his Grandparents from Fargo who are non-members had him stay down there for the week! So that has been rough trying to meet with him. We had a great new year! It was sad to wave goodbye to 2014, but it was awesome to welcome 2015 and all it will bring! I hope you all are doing well this week! Next week I will not be writing on Monday, but probably Thursday again. Due to MLC next week! Well I love you all!
