Best/Worst/Strangest Week

Dear Family,

So we stopped by the other day at the library and they were having a 75th anniversary party for Batman! We got a goodie bag with a Batman mask, tattoos, bookmark, poster and buttons! lol

It has been a really good week for us, we taught 13 lessons, which is the most Elder Martinez and I have had together, we found 3 new investigators and set two people for baptism. It has also been the hottest week ever. It got up to 115* one day and another day was 120*. It was sooooo hot that we were swimming in our sweat.

To start off our week, we were teaching one of our new investigators the Plan of Salvation, it went really well, then afterwards, my companion and I decided to go up to the top floor of his apartment to look out and see the view. So we took the elevator up and found an exit, we walked out and we were on the fire escape looking out, Martinez followed me out and he closed the door behind us. Well....we looked and there wasn't a door handle on the outside, so we locked ourselves out on a little, tiny fire escape on the 8th floor of this apartment building. We were TOTALLY noticeable and these people at the park, which was right there, were looking and pointing at us. So we slowly made our way down these rusty stairs that seemed to be floating. We finally made it down to the ground and the people at the park started clapping for us....we just jumped in our car and got out of there! It was a good little story to tell at least! :)

Then, we came back another day to to talk to this same investigator the next lesson. He has some water damage in his apartment, so his roof has this big hole in it and little pieces have been falling in. So we were teaching him and we were in the middle of asking him if he would like to be baptized and this huge chunk fell out of that hole and scared the shark out of both of us! Elder Martinez jumped out of his chair it scared him so bad! The guy did somewhat commit, so that's good!

Then on Friday, it was SOOO HOT!! I have never had sweat come from just about everywhere on my body. Our ties were even dripping sweat. We were drinking so much water that it was just crazy. We had people drive by and give us drinks. One dude stopped and gave us Monsters, one guy stopped and gave us these tall cans of Coke and he couldn't believe that we come out and walk on days like these. We also had two other people stop and give us water bottles, so that was good.

One more thing....remember that mouse that we have been trying to catch for like a week now? Yep.....we still can't get that darn thing and we finally gave up. Hopefully it will hurt himself on that sticky glue trap that he somehow got off of and hopefully we killed him with all the food we gave him, but who knows!!

I gotta run!

Love you all!!

Elder Searle

Mouse in the house

Dear Family,

So this week we had something pretty much every day, so that made the week fly by.

Monday was P-day and that always goes by way too fast!

Tuesday we took Artis and Bud to the Trail Center, Artis just turned 86 and Bud is 83, Bud is SOOO funny! The sister that was giving us the tour was trying so hard not to laugh, but my companion and I were. We then watched the hour long Joseph Smith Restoration video with them and then they took us out to eat at the taco house.

Wednesday we had a district meeting and the zone leaders wanted me to go there but we were finally having dinner with this cool family that just moved into our ward and I didn't want to miss it, so I got to stay here, so that was fun.

We got a text that day from a recent convert who was baptized back in October, she wanted to know if we could come to the Omaha Court House at 4pm and be the witnesses for her wedding. I was here on exchanges and we had to ask the AP's if we could go....they wouldn't let us go. I was bummed because that would have been awesome to be a witness at a wedding while on my mission.

That night we were upstairs in our house and I was eating my super expensive, over priced grapes and this mouse comes running out and ran under our fridge! We still have the little guy running around! We put out all of these traps and that mouse has eaten all the peanut butter off every one of the traps for THREE NIGHTS NOW!! That little  guy is getting fat off of everything we are feeding him, my comp is sick of it so we are going to go buy a mouse trap that actually goes off when the mouse eats the food off of it!

Thursday we had interviews with President Weston, it went well

Friday we had dinner with this super cool family that has been feeding us a lot lately. They are pretty funny and have 2 kids, the little girl is 4 and the little boy is 3. The little girl has started calling me her "Big Teddy Bear", which is pretty cool. At the end of dinner the little girl said "I love Big Teddy Bear!" They sat behind us at church yesterday and both kids kept poking me and wanted me to play with their toys. :)

Saturday we were outside literally all day, we tilled a garden and weed eated. We then just walked around trying to talk to people. We went and talked to this one dude that we talked to once before. We attempted to teach him the first lesson, but he kept showing us how well he knew the Bible. He also kept asking us if we could see and if the lighting was ok.....it's wasn't...it was pretty dark, but he brought up the lighting like 68412 times.

We had dinner with an older lady this night and we catch a ride with an older guy who comes and eats with us. He used to be a truck driver, but now he's just older and shouldn't be driving anymore...but he does. If we weren't missionaries, we would have died at least 12 times now. We at dinner but there was hardly any food, so on the way home the guy asked if we were still hungry, because he was! We stopped and he bought us dinner at Village Inn, so we had 2 meals that night...pretty awesome! :)

The temp is starting to get up there, it's 105 with the humidity today...so that's fun.

I love you all!

Love Elder Searle

Temple Trip

Dear Family,

To start off my week, I got sick, so that's always a blast. My companion got a cold from a member that gave us a ride on Saturday and he got sick on Sunday. Then I got sick towards the end of Monday, I'm still full of snot but that's about it.

On Tuesday, the family that fed us decided to just bring dinner to us and we could eat at a park. So we ate at Baylis Park which is always interesting. You have to scout the place out first because strange stuff happens there sometimes. So anyways, we had a really good dinner and at the end of it, this dude just came up and hugged us and was all shaking our hands and we had no clue who he was. He had on no shirt, but he had a leather biker vest on and torn up pants. He was all on us and was like "What's up my brothers!" I guess the sisters met him walking to their apartment and talked to him for a bit, we got talking to him and he is King of the Park. He also said he has ran this block for 48 years now and he was King of Everything! We gave him some leftover food and then he just took off, so that was interesting.

We also had exchanges this week, I had Elder A come here with me. He is from the Philippines and he brought all his food with him for exchanges....like ALL his food. I guess he wanted to make sure he had food?? He was only with me half the day, we went over and saw M and he wanted us to help clean up his place...like clean the toilets and scrub the floors...let me tell you, that was a blast!

On Friday we were able to go to the temple, so you can tell already that this day was awesome. We decided to go down to Omaha and eat lunch with some of the other Elders. We ate at Pepper Jax's and I got to talk to Elder Schofield the whole time, which was awesome! It was good to see him again.

By the way, I hate driving in Omaha, scares the crap out of me! There were 5 of us that tried to fit in our little Barbie car we drive, but at least we were smart enough to put the two bigger guys in the front and I had to drive! City driving sucks!

After the temple, our ward was having a ward pool party, so we decided to show up, since they had food and that was our dinner. The only missionary from this ward came home early because he and 3 others had been sick for months. He was serving in Russia so we talked to him and compared how things were done there to here. We are actually having dinner with him tonight so we will get to talk to him some more.

On Saturday we helped a family move all their big stuff, since they weren't moving far, we just loaded up the truck they had. Guess what we moved......yep...a piano! I think that's all we do is move pianos. My companion and I did most of the work, there was the coolest black kid I've ever met named Omar there. He's 12 and has The Coolest Name Ever!! We just yelled OMAR like the whole time and he'd come over and help, super cool kid!

Sunday night I got a call from Elder Herde...my MTC companion and we got to talk. It was super cool to hear from him, we have both have been in our same areas the whole time and it was good to talk to him.

Today we went and had breakfast with my companions grandparents..yep,  his grandparents are on their way to their mission to Missouri and they asked our mission pres if they could come and see us. It was really good for my companion to see them. At the end I was taking pictures of them and his grandma was like "OH, COME HERE!" and gave me a big ol' hug...so that was really nice.  :)

So there's my week, gotta go!

Love, Elder Searle

4th of July Week

Dear Family,

So this week we didn't see as many people as last week but it was still a good week. We did a lot of walking in this humidity that just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's fun, let me tell you..and you don't dry out...once you get wet you stay wet...but it's all good. I've lost more weight which I'm pretty sure is because of all the sweat that just runs off my body. I'm just glad my companion sweats like a mad man too!

On Wednesday we had our district meeting out in Bellevue and it went pretty well. We then went to this taco truck because the owners really like the missionaries. They aren't members and are happy where they are right now, but they really like missionaries and they give us free burritos the size of a baby! So we are going to go there every other Wed and get free food! They were super good and the couple that ran the truck are pretty chill.

On Thursday we went and visited some people with our ward mission leader as the team-up. The couple we visited went really well and they seem to be doing really well. The other guy we went and saw was drunk and he was really mean to us. We're pretty sure he was mean because he was drunk so we just shared a simple message and then we left.

On Friday, the 4th we did our weekly planning and then we do what we do every Fri. and we went to get our free papa murphy's pizza, which I'm kinda tired of now. We knew the guy that was working at this store and he let us in and got our pizza. We can get a free family size one topping pizza, but this dude hooked us up and loaded everything on it so that was a nice change. We then went home and saw some people we knew that were doing fireworks so we watched those. We went back to weekly planning and then walked around until about 5:30pm. We then went to the bishop's house and they were grilling and there were 5 other families that came so that was really cool.

I was just sitting there after eating outside and was like...I've been here long enough that just about everyone here I would consider my family, so that was really cool. The kids really like me too, so that's cool. :) We played flag football and were just all talking with everyone until it got dark. They then started to do fireworks, which are like 20 times better than ours, we were only there for the start of them, then we had to go...so that was sad. It was like a war zone here with all the fireworks, so we just watched all the fireworks around our place.

Saturday, the day after the 4th, the town was like a ghost town and everyone that was out were either higher than a kite or drunker than drunk, so that was interesting. We started counting how many cops and bunnies we saw, I saw 5 cops and my companion counted 35 bunnies...so that was our joy! :P

We are helping a lady out that has cancer, she was in the hospital for 11 days and her surgery didn't go as planned, so we're helping her out.

So that was pretty much my week..

Love Elder Searle

Transfer #6

Dear Family,

So...I am staying in Council Bluffs, there is now a 95% chance of me leaving after this transfer. Missionaries usually stay in their first area for 8 1/2 months. This week has been different, pretty much a first time for just about everything this week. Here are some of the things that happened...

To start off, Elder Schofield got transferred out. He has been in Kanesville since I came to Greenview. It was really weird seeing him go. I pretty much consider him my mission mom since he has seen me grow up out here. Your mom is usually the person that takes you out your first day, but I didn't have one since I got here on Thanksgiving, so I consider Elder Schofield my mom. He is a District Leader out in Omaha now so that will be cool for him. I got some pics before he took off that I was going to upload, but I forgot to bring my bag in the library. We also don't have much time today because we just spent a while at Longhorn Steak House, the stake pres paid for the 10 elders here that go play volleyball on P-days...he paid for our lunch there. :)

I think it was Thursday, we had two strange things happen, one was a lady that seemed kinda crazy, she was telling us all about something personal her son needed surgery on...they tell you EVERYTHING here! That night we had a cop come up to us and rip us a good one. We thought he was going to ask us who was setting off the fireworks, since they are illegal here, but he just went on how he was going to arrest us if he sees us in that area again, he swore like no other too. Being arrested on a mission would make a great story!! :P

Another day, Elder Martinez was driving, since he is suppose to learn the area and we got stuck in a huge mud puddle. He couldn't get us out so he climbed in the back seat of the car and I scooted over to the driver's side and I got us out. I got a pic of the car...Travis would be proud how much mud we got on the car! We had to go wash the car first with the self-wash, then we went to the car wash and washed it.

I didn't talk much about the people that we are working with...one family did come to church so that was cool. We also had the most lessons since Elder Martinez came here so that was also cool!

I think we will have to be in early on the 4th of July, unless a super cool family keeps us and we get to do fireworks with them. :D

We have had a few rainstorms, nothing too bad here. You will get to see how AWESOME the weather here looks, especially the lightening!! I have some great videos on my SD card for you guys.

Anyway, I got to go, hopefully you guys have a good 4th!!

I love it here!!
Love yall!!