Sab qaum teb Highlands

Happy Easter Week, everyone!

I will explain the subject line. Don't you worry.

Good things happened this week. We are working hard and the work is definitely progressing! I am glad I am serving here in North Highlands. It is an awesome place, and it is where I am supposed to be at this point in my mission.

We finally got our bikes this past week, so we aren't walking anymore. We have been able to get around a lot quicker now, so it has been great!

We found a new person to teach this past week, and she is awesome! Her name is Rachel. We met her when we were trying to visit some of our investigators. Elder Inman and I don't know them very well so we wanted to get to know them more. While we were there on the porch Rachel came out and started talking to us. She talked about some of the things that have happened in her life and explained that she wants to start going back to church. She said she was planning on coming to our Church on Sunday, so we offered to give her a tour of the church before she came. She accepted and we gave her the tour on Saturday night. She came on Sunday with her two young boys and she seemed to enjoy it. Unfortunately, her boys got a little rowdy so she took off early. We visited with her yesterday and she said it was nice. We are meeting with her again tonight in a members home, so I hope things continue to go well!

I also wanted to explain something cool about our area. There are a lot of Hmong people who don't speak any English in our area. We have one Hmong Elder down in this part of our mission, and luckily he's in our zone! He has been teaching us a little bit of Hmong so we can train talk to some of the people that don't speak any English. I've picked up on a little bit of it, but it is pretty difficult! The pronunciation of the words is very technical, and there are differences in pronunciations for different words that I don't even hear yet. It is fun though! We kind of stumbled our way through street contacting a Hmong person the other day, and they accepted a Book of Mormon! Definitely a cool experience. That explains the subject line - it means "North Highlands" in Hmong.

I am super pumped for general conference this week. I always look forward to hearing the talks from certain apostles (Christofferson, Bednar, Holland), and then there are always awesome talks from members of the Seventy. We are probably going to watch a few of the sessions in our stake center, which is huge! It has two chapels in one building. Going to be pretty sweet. The church really should rent a movie theater for general conference and sell popcorn, but only on the Saturday sessions. That would be super cool.

I love you all. I hope you have a great week!

Elder Nielsen

North Highlands

{Elder Nielsen didn't sent a group e-mail last week, so let me catch you up before you read this week's update. When he was asked to be an AP, his mission president asked him whether he wanted to finish his mission as an AP, or go back out "into the field" and focus on missionary work again. He said he wanted to serve the last two transfers (12 weeks) of his mission in another area. Last week he was transferred to North Highlands, and his new companion is Elder Inman from Lehi.}

Hello!

There are so many things that occurred this past week that I really don't know where to begin.

North Highlands is definitely one of the most unique places that I have served on my mission. My area is arguably the most southern area in the mission. The border of my ward is also the border between my mission and the California Sacramento Mission. My ward building is about 50 feet from being outside the mission, and the church I go to is where some Sacramento missionaries also go to church. I got to meet some of them this past week, and it was really weird! I have only seen Roseville missionaries for a long time, so it was weird to meet missionaries currently serving from a different mission.

I don't feel like I can do this past week justice in an email, but I will do my best! Our area is actually one of the smallest areas in the mission, so we have just been walking around everywhere. We probably walked about 25-30 miles this past week, but it seems like a lot more! We have had the chance to talk to about 3 million people so far, so that has been awesome! We had a couple neat experiences come from it so far. We talked to a man named Samuel last Wednesday. He is a man in his 80s, and he was standing out on his driveway when we began to talk to him. We got into a conversation with him and found out that his wife of about 60 years passed away about 2 years ago. He began to cry as he told us that he missed her, and it tugged at my heart strings a little bit. We talked to him about how he could live for eternity with his wife. He seemed very receptive to the message. We gave him a Plan of Salvation pamphlet and he said he would love to read over it. It was an awesome experience.

There were a number of funny experiences that we had while walking around too. We were walking home on Saturday night after having tried to contact a referral. As we were walking we saw a lady in her 30s biking the opposite way of us down the street. As we were on the sidewalk she started biking towards us, and we began to wonder what in the world was going to happen. As she got very close she leaned over on her seat and barked "Woof!" right in my face! I walked away more than a little confused at what had just happened. There was another funny experience that we had just yesterday. We were walking towards dinner and we walked right by another lady. As she passed us she looked at Elder Inman and blew him a big kiss! It was very dramatic, which made it hilarious!

I have also decided I need to learn Russian very quickly! There is an apartment complex in our area that we were proselytizing in the other day, and the amount of people of Russian descent that lived in that complex was insane. Literally about 50-60% of the people in the complex seem to be from Russia or the surrounding countries. We tried talking to some of them, but some only spoke very broken English. However, we did talk to one lady named Raeisa who spoke fairly good English. She said missionaries had come over in the past and she always felt good when they were there. She said we could come back another time too! Luckily we have a lady who spoke Russian on her mission, so we might be using her quite a bit for this particular apartment complex!

I am so grateful for the power of the Gospel to change lives. If we focus on trying to live like the Savior then our lives will be changed for the better.

Overall, this will likely end up being the most eventful area of my mission. It will definitely keep things exciting.

I love you all, and I hope you have a fantastic week!

Elder Nielsen

Rocklin & Rollin'

Hey everybody!

This past week was pretty good. I went on exchange with Elder Gillies and we set a goal to find 2 new investigators. We were trying to go all over the place to find people to teach, but we couldn't talk to any one that wanted to talk to us. We decided we would walk towards the college campus and try and talk to people. We started talking to a guy named Micah (Shoutout to Elder Moore!), so I told him one of my best friends back home is named Micah. We talked to him for about 10 minutes and he said he has really been trying to develop his relationship with God. He seemed so sincere; we gave him a Book of Mormon and promised it would help him develop his relationship with God and he said he would read it! It was such an awesome experience.

We have an all-mission conference tomorrow with Elder Nielson of the Seventy to talk about using technology in a righteous way. I am very excited to see everyone in the mission!

I love you guys and hope you have a great week.

Elder Nielsen

Rock City

This week was very busy with Zone Conferences across the mission. They were pretty enjoyable, but they seemed to get pretty long near the end of the week. We had a meeting from about 8:30-5 for each of Tuesday-Friday, and I thought I was starting to develop "Restless leg" syndrome! The Tuesday meeting was in Anderson, Wednesday in Yuba City, Thursday in Lincoln, and Friday in Antelope. One of the main topics of the meeting was conversion. President Marston had asked everyone to prepare a 5-minute talk on how they had become converted on their mission, and I had the chance to be one of the people to give talks. It was a neat experience to hear the experiences of all the different missionaries and to piece them all together.

I love talking to people on the street, and just wherever they are! This was the thing I disliked most at the beginning of my mission, and I know I enjoy it so much. Yesterday we were having a lesson with a recent convert on the college campus, and we started talking to this guy named Tanner as we were walking out. He said he has never gone to church much but he wanted to check out Mormon.org from the card we gave to him. It is so cool to just do a little bit here and there especially if we aren't able to start teaching someone right away. He said he hadn't heard much about the church other than the musical about the Book of Mormon, so now he gets to learn actual stuff!

We also talked to a guy last night as we went to visit a less-active. He was looking at his car a few parking spots down from us, so we walked up and started talking to him. He has a bunch of LDS friends, and he told us he is searching for truth on his own right now. We shared Moroni 10:4-5, and talked to him about how we can come to know truth through study and prayer. He said he would check it out and add us on Facebook so we can keep in contact with him! He told us he likes doing a bunch of stuff, like slack lining, so we are going to do it with him sometime!

At zone conference, we also had the chance to hear departing testimonies from the missionaries who going home in the next 2 transfers. I love hearing the testimonies of the missionaries who have been through a mission worth of successes and failures. I have even come to enjoy hearing the testimonies of those departing more and more as my mission has grown shorter on the tail end. One of the Elders that bore testimony really touched me a lot. This particular missionary is a very smart guy. He has also had his fair share of trials on his mission. He shared how he has battled with depression and insomnia, so he spends most of his time in the night by himself. He said he has felt very alone at times, and the only comfort he could receive was from the Atonement. His general message was this:

"Sometimes the Atonement only assists us by causing us to know we are not alone in comprehending our suffering since we know Christ knows exactly how we feel. When we pray to our Heavenly Father, if our plea for the removal of our trials is a "not now...not yet." then Christ, because of his Atonement, is still able to comfort us with companionship. As we are in the midst of sorrow or affliction he puts his arm around our shoulders and comfortingly says 'I know...I know.' Sometimes this companionship is the strongest thing we could receive, and it is, in the end, really all we do need." In the words of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "...because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so." I know Christ is here to help is in times of trial and to help us become better through those times.

To finish the week off right I had the opportunity to go to the temple to witness the sealing of this couple, Bob and Lois. I had taught them while I was in my first area, Citrus Heights, and they are the nicest couple ever. The missionary I am with is Elder Zaugg, and he is the one that replaced me in Citrus Heights. It was such an awesome experience to be at the temple with Bob and Lois. I am so grateful I had the chance to work with them, and I am so happy they are now sealed together for eternity. They have so much love for each other, and they are so sweet.

I hope you all have a stupendous week!

Elder Nielsen