Obedience and its blessings!

We had an awesome week down here in Capesterre! We set goals and we achieved them! Of course there were some goals we didn't meet but we improved a lot! Jean was interviewed this week and he is ready for baptism! I love him so much and I am so happy that he has made this choice to be baptized! In church on Sunday, he bore a little testimony in Priesthood and it was so powerful. It is amazing to see the impact of the gospel in the lives of others! He has come a long ways I think and I think that it has been pretty cool that I have been a part of his story from the beginning! He makes a laugh and we love being around him! Of course all of this success has been coming from the lord! We can see that our obedience and our desires to work hard have been paying off! It is easy to be lazy and to be lax about rules but it is definitely more worth it to work hard and to be obedient! I have noticed the past couple months that my attitude towards being obedient has grown so much! I contribute that to my own conversion to the gospel! The Book of Mormon talks about how when we become closer to Christ, we begin to have an abhorrence for sin! It has been a blessing so far in my mission!

We have been a little stressed about our branch here because all of the members are leaving on vacation and there won't be many member here on sunday's! In fact I was called to be the temporary secretary for the Branch until the secretary gets back from france haha! Elder Ehlert received a calling too as aaronic priesthood teacher! The funny thing is we aren't supposed to hold callings but we have no other option! It will all work out and things will work out like they are supposed too!

That is about all for this week! I hope everyone has a fantastic week! Happy fourth of July! I am going to miss that! Ammeerrica! I love you all!! Love elder peterson!

 Pancakes for a friend

 Jean is getting Baptized

 Went to the Zoo

Awesome Week

Dear Family!

I am not really sure where to begin this letter so this may be bad news haha! Just kidding! We had an awesome week and we found so many people and we have been really working on talking to everyone that we come in contact with! On Friday we decided to go up every city that was in a hill and oh man I was dead tired after word and my clothes felt like I jumped in a pool! But coming down all of the hills was a blast! I switched my bike seat to a different one that we had at the apartment and I was regretting that! It is a lot smaller and a lot harder seat! Great new though, we have a lot of hope about Jean getting baptized here on the 5th of July! I love that guy and he is always making us laugh! We went the other day to see him and the first thing he told us was that he bought a tie! So on sunday he was at church in a white shirt and tie and it was so awesome! He really feels like he is progressing to be baptized and we can see it too! Such a huge blessing!This sunday we were really worried that we weren't going to have very many people at church because they made Basseterre a group and that took a lot of our members from our branch. Miraculously we had a good number of people at church and we were all so happy about that! I really don't have a lot of stories for this week!

I am running out of time today so I need to go, sorry about the short letter! I hope that everyone has a fantastic week! I send my love and prayers your way! :) Thank you for all support! Can't believe it is almost July! Love you all!

Love elder peterson!

Elder Peterson and Elder Lewis

 Elder Peterson in the Rain

 The food Elder Peterson made

Dear Family and Friends

Well here we are again sending emails haha I will probably never understand how time flies like this but that is life I guess and it seems to only speed up! We had a great week and saw some pretty wonderful miracles as usual! I always try and keep President Uchtdorf's talk on my mind so that I can be thankful for the rain or my trials before I see the rainbow and it seems to be working and helping me out! We just received our transfer calls again and I am staying here in Capesterre for another six weeks and I am looking forward to it! I really want to see what I can do here to progress the work and see what things I can learn! We have been finding a lot of contacts lately because of our desires to find new people haha so we are being blessed! We have been setting the goal to work more with the members so we will see if we can't get some member referrals! :) I can testify that members make all the difference in missionary work!

Saturday we had our Polynesian day and it was super sweet! All of the members on Guadeloupe were there along with a bunch of investigators and friends of members! The Tahitians made a whole bunch of food by heating up a bunch of rocks and burying them in the sand! We watched them dance and had a bunch of activities and it turned out really great! It makes me want to visit Tahiti now! :) 

Also quick little story, Elder Ehlert and I had to out run some gangsters last night on their scooter! We where going down this hill and here comes this scooter head on with its lights off and almost hits us! We didn't really think anything of it till later down the road we heard honking and yelling and I turned and looked back and saw that scooter coming after us so I said that it was time to go and we booked it out of there and basically had to do some evasive maneuvers to escape them and it got our adrenaline pumping! It was pretty funny to think that two white boys out ran some gangsters on their scooter! It was fun :)

Well that is all for this week! I hope fathers day was great and that all the fathers got spoiled ;) I love you all! keep on keeping on!! Love elder Peterson!

Iguanas

I will start off by telling you all that we spent some time this week trying to kill Iguanas and it was a blast haha! The other day, we had four missionaries in total at our apartment and we found an iguana so we got all of the machete in hand and I got like in this bush just waiting to jump on this thing but Elder Ehlert ended up knocking it out of the tree so I had to jump out into the Banana field next to our apartment to chase after this thing and I was sprinting down this hill with my sword in had when I decided that I need to run around this corner but I forgot how steep the hill was and the second I started to slow down my feet flew out from under neath me and the first thing I knew was that I was on my butt sliding down this hill! It didn't feel all to great and the Iguana escaped us haha! It was pretty fun though!

Well that was a pretty awesome week and the weekend was amazing. I don't know where to begin really but I will just start explaining some things. Our teaching pool has been growing quiet a bit and we have been pretty happy to see that! We have been dropping all of the ancient investigators that we had and things seem to progressing. We are still having a hard time in the city of Capesterre but everywhere else seems to be improving quiet a bit! Sunday was awesome and we had two great experiences here in capesterre actually! So we had an appointment set up with our progressing investigator Jean and we invited our Branch President to come while we where at church and he agreed to be there. When it came time to go the the appointment we called President to remind him and he ended up having his daughter tell us he was to tired. Bitter and frustrated we both started the lesson and the spirit wasn't there very strong, about 15 minutes into the lesson President showed up. I felt awful for my unrighteous judgments and for even judging in the first place. I was instantly reminded of laman and lamuel and how quick they were to murmur. Anyways president joined us and we had an awesome lesson and we think he really helped our investigator. Then He invited us to go see our recent convert who is now less active. He hasn't been to church in 3 weeks now so we have been worried about him. We went over with president and we had a fantastic lesson and very spiritual. My respect for president has grown so much and the experience he shared really helped me build a relationship with him. It's really cool how the spirit can bring people together with such an profound love! It was great!

Happy Fathers day out there to all the fathers! I hope everyone has an amazing week and that all is going fantastic! I send my love and prayers to you all! Thanks again!!

love elder Peterson

This little message is from Elder Lewis...

So this week was a good week. Nothing really different than the norm happened; besides the fact that my companion achieved a record number of flat tires this week: 3! It doesn't seem like that much, but when you are on the side of a highway as it is pouring rain, it gets really old really fast. It is ok though, we have probably broken the world record for fastest tire change multiple times this week. But who cares right?! And as the subject line suggests, we hunt Iguanas. We have multiple trees around our house were they like to camp out, including a hollow, 50 ft Avocado tree. So when we spot one, we grab this 20 foot hooked piece or metal that we use to hook the Iguana and pull it down and then we run around scared out of our pants because the Iguanas (not small) run straight at you and then sprint for the Avocado tree. And that is where they hide. It is really awesomely fun. The time we get one, we will take a picture of it and the Iguana soup we will make out of it. ;) Well that is it folks for this week. Love you all and I hope you are having a great summer in where ever you may be; because I am having a great 2 year summer. :)

Elder Peterson, Elder Lewis and Elder Elhert

Mountains

Well that was the first week the bikes have killed me so much! It was great!! And we saw lots of success and lots of blessings! By the time it came time to go back to our apartment we were exhausted and could barely make it up that hill so that was a great feeling, definitely not in the moment, but afterwards! :) This week we saw lots of success with finding people but not with our progressing investigators. There is a little city called St. Marie that we have a lot of great investigators in and we went there twice this week and none of them were there! We did see Jan&alec however and they told us that there are going to Dominica for 3 weeks. So we are probably going to have to push back their baptismal date for a couple weeks. We will see what happens but I think all will turn out well and for the best! Our investigator Jean who lives right by the church has been progressing quiet a bit lately so that has been a huge blessing! We have been having a hard time with him understanding that this church is really the church of Jesus Christ! We know that once he understands that, he will make the steps necessary to be converted to the gospel. We are planning on seeing him a lot more this week and see if we can't help him out! Elder Ehlert has been great and his a great missionary! He is a funny elder so it is good to have a laugh every now and again! He works hard!

On thursday all of the Priesthood holders went on a hike and Elder Gamiette had a bunch of activities set up to strengthen everyone, it was a pretty fun hike! That is until everyone started swimming in the river and all the missionaries sat there and watched happily ;) ha Jokingly we thought it would be funny to ask Elder gamiette for permission but we didn't end up asking!

It was a good week and we are looking forward to this week and we are excited to see what we can make of it! Sounds like everything is going great back home and that everyone is enjoying life! Happy birthday to Grandma Weese this week :) I love you all so much and have an amazing week! Love elder peterson

Elder Peterson on a hike with all the Priesthood Holders

My New Companion

  Well we have gotten settled in here with a new companion and he is great, we have been getting a long great so far! Life is going great here, but unfortunately not a whole lot of stories for this week! Towards the first of this week I decided that most of our investigators are eternal investigators, so Elder Ehlert and I have been thinking about dropping most of our investigators in Capesterre and starting out fresh, and trying to maybe find some new places to work! Since Capesterre is a bike area, the city has been overworked I think and I don't think that the missionaries wanted to adventure off to much. So our plan is to start working up in the hills, it will be a good work out for us haha! We had our investigators Jan & Alec to church yesterday and that was such a huge blessing! She told us that she knows these things are true but that she is going to have a hard time leaving her church because she never really had any problems there and she has calling and things like that. So we are praying that things will fall into place with them! They are so nice and they always give us homemade ice cream when we come by :) We have met some really cool people this past week and we are really hoping things will pick up here, and we have faith that it will! That is really all for this week!

  Congrats to the two in the family who are graduating this week! That is awesome! Congrats to casey and heather as well! I love you all so much and I am so thankful for all your love and support! Have an awesome week!!

Love Elder Peterson

Subject lines are a waste

  This was honestly a fantastic week for me! I felt happy and great the whole week! So that has been a huge blessing I feel like. I made a goal to really be focused this week and it really payed off! I also had some really great studies which I think contributed to that! I love learning about Nephi and his example. I fill like it fits perfectly into my life right now. The way he confronts opposition is such an amazing example! I just read recently where Lehi is complaining because Nephi broke his bow and I think it is so cool when Nephi asks his father where he should go! Obviously nephi had a huge testimony of prayer and he knew that through prayer his father could be humbled again. I also think that Nephi stayed really humble through this whole experience as well!
  We were able to set a baptismal date with one of our investigators whose name is Jean! We still have some issues that we need to help him with. He wanted to set a date for next year but with the spirit, we were able to help him change his thoughts. We have a lot of investigators who really aren't progressing a whole lot and we have decided that is happening because we haven't been teaching towards are commitments. We did a little studying on that and we can already see the improvements in our teaching! I love this gospel! I actually just received a call that   I am getting a new companion tomorrow! That was a surprising call haha! There has been some problems with this recent transfer call and on of the missionaries wasn't able to get on this Island because of customs so Elder savage is going to st.rose and I am getting and elder from st marteen! Super crazy ha, I am a little stressed cause I feel like I don't really know this are that much but we will see! I am glad to hear adam's wedding was an success! Congrats again! It sounds like things are going great back home which I am happy to hear! I hope everyone has a great week and that all goes well for you! I am so so thankful for all of the love, support, and prayers in my behalf! I sincerely appreciate it! I love you all!! :) Love elder peterson!