PRAY FOR US

So, first off, thank you dad so much for the colored pencils! I have been coloring up a storm all week! Unfortunately, the coloring book hasn't arrived yet but I have bright hopes for the coming weeks!

This week has been kind of interesting… We had some good things happen and some bad things happen… I don't even know where to start. Last Wednesday we had our first ever car conference. It was a huge zone conference but we had to have our cars cleaned and inspected. We also have a new friend in our car! Our new friends name is Tiwi and it is A little black box that sits in the corner of our windshield and monitors our every move. It only ever talks to us if we are going to fast, if we aren't wearing seatbelts, or if we are driving aggressively… Ha! If we are speeding or not wearing seatbelts or anything like that, Tiwi will send a violation report to our mission president and to the missionary department of the church in Salt Lake City. I'll have to send you a video of it because it's pretty funny to listen to!

There was a member of the missionary department who came to our car conference to present to us. He is the chief of the health and safety department and is on the board of the top seven dudes who run the missionary department in Salt Lake City. His name is Brother Edwards and he was super cool! I have more to say about him later… I will send you a video talking about him because something totally crazy happened with him!

Clint and Nicole Yanko have been progressing this week. We had an amazing lesson with them on Wednesday and the spirit was so strong! Clint prayed for the first time ever that night, and it was so

sincere. Nicole didn't even believe in God before we came to their house, and now she talks about how much she loves the plan of salvation and the idea that we lived with God before we came to earth. She also really liked the three kingdoms that we can go to. So yeah all week with them was going really good. Clint found two jobs and he's been doing really well in the addiction recovery program still. Unfortunately, at around 2 o'clock yesterday morning, we received a text from Nicole saying, "we will not be at church today. I have lost my faith in everything and I'm ready to be done." We texted them and tried to go by and see them, but we weren't able to. They haven't replied to our text messages and we are kind of freaking out right now. We are just praying that nothing crazy happened and are hoping that we can see them tonight.

Intermission, we get to go to the temple every 90 days. So, on Saturday, we got to go to the temple with Nanette. We had to wake up at around 5 o'clock in the morning to get there in time for the 6

o'clock session. And what happened? Of course, neither of us woke up to our alarms. So we woke up to Nanette knocking on our door at 5:20! It was crazy but we made it on time and everything was OK. The temple was really beautiful but it was hard for me to pay attention to everything because I was so tired and so hungry. Also, every time I go to one of these bigger temples like the Provo Temple or the Phoenix Temple, it just makes me miss billings that much more because our temple is so small and less formal and I just love it! 

Anyway, things are going well with me and Sister Williams. We are sad because the transfer is happening next week on Tuesday or Wednesday, I think. We are kind of getting stressed out! But I know everything will be fine, and I'm excited to be able to lead my area. Now, we are going to go shopping at the grocery store and go check out some cool outlet stores in our zone! I'm pretty excited for it…

LOVES

We had s'mores for dessert in front of a fireplace! 
Also, who needs a fireplace in Phoenix?

Elder Kannon Evans

Dearest people that will be stuffing their faces with food this Thursday,

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to all! Im grateful for all of you. Thank you for all of your support and prayers, they really have helped me a lot and Im extremely grateful :) So have fun stuffing your faces with pie and turkey, and most importantly take the day to give thanks for your families and for the blessing it is to have the knowledge of the Gospel in our lives, because these 2 things really are the most important :)

This week was a good one! The Derqui Ward now has 5 new members! The other Elders here in Derqui baptized a family of 4, and we baptized one this week. I had the opportunity to carry out the ordinance, and it was an incredible experience baptizing someone for the first time :) Elder Fernandez and I also have 2 more investigators that are going to be baptized this next week as well! So next week, which is the end of the transfer, Derqui will have 8 new members! :) We really are seeing miracles here in Derqui, and Im so excited to see even more! :)

Love you all!

Elder Evans 

Ground: 1  

Elder Evans: 0

Melissa's Hunt

Melissa drew a big horn sheep tag this year.

6:20 am. Opening morning. 145 yard shot from the road.

Congrats!!

Spartan Race

Andre Solomon with friend Matt Nielsen

October 17, 2015

Welcome to Saraland, Alabama. Spartans, prepare to enter the swampy South. This 90 acre venue has a dynamic landscape riddled with challenging terrain the Spartan course designers are sure to use to slow you down. From sandy highlands to swampy bogs, prairie land to forest, this course has a little bit of everything. Be prepared to get mucky and dirty as Spartan transforms this southern location into the ultimate obstacle course race.

Click HERE for Andre's race results!!

Elder Kannon Evans

Dearest people that have probably never used a bidet,

Yes. Bidet´s exist in Argentina.

Wow what a week! First of all. Our entire mission had the oppurtunity to go to the temple this week! So amazing. The temple really is such a special place, and there is always so much peace. Plus the session was all in spanish and I could understand everything so thats awesome :)

Also.. rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain. Ive never seen so much water in my life... Okay I lied Ive been to beach theres a lot of water there. But still. I didnt think it was going to rain or anything, so I left with a short sleave shirt and no jacket or nothing. Yeah it rained. Hard. I was completely drenched in about 2 minutes. Thank you Argentina for your bipolar weather. 

Rain. Makes my future wife that much hotter.

Lastly, Derqui is exploding right now! In case you didnt know there are two sets of missionaries here in Derqui. We have 3 investigators with a baptismal date that are going to be batized sí o sí, and its very likely that we will have a 4th tonight. One of them quit smoking in 3 days. 3 days. AND WE HADNT EVEN TAUGHT HER THE WORD OF WISDOM YET. She told us that she had no idea what happened.. All of a sudden she just didnt have a desire to smoke. She has a baptismal date for 29 and her mom for this coming Sunday. And the other missionaries found a family of 4 that will be baptized this coming week as well! So in the next 2 weeks, Derqui will have 8 new members. God is directing the work here, and is definitely leading us to the peole prepared to learn the gospel. 

Lastly lastly, Elder Fernandez went to a restaraunt called Siga la vaca today.. It literally means follow the cow.. yeah I dont know. But.. this restaraunt is a freaking ARGENTINE BBQ BUFFET.  Oh my goodness Ive never eaten so much meat in my life. Pretty sure I tore something in my stomach.. Days like these make me grateful to be serving in the beef capital of the world.

Peace. Blessings. Meat.

Love you all!

Elder Evans

4 months have happened.....

Sister Alex Solomon:

This week has been kind of long and frustrating but some good things have happened as well...first of all, thank you mom and dad for my amazing Amazon package! I use that blender every single day! I have also been using the mini boom speaker in our lessons for videos andthings. I'm really excited for my new pencil sharpener but I just need to get a set of colored pencils now. I've been using crayons but there's no finesse there so I haven't done anything detailed yet. I'll work on it. 

I've been doing pretty good with Eat to Live whenever I feed myself.This week that was only for breakfast and most lunches though. We had SO many dinner appointments and lunch appointments, it was crazy. So I'm not expecting anything miraculous to happen with this because other people feed me a lot!

We did a TON of service this week for this non member lady who is not interested in Jesus whatsoever. But she's still really cool and nice to us. Her name is Carol and she collects and sells sewing patterns on eBay. She literally has thousands of sewing patterns in her garage that we have spent hours organizing. And when we get done with that, she has a whole storage unit in Prescott full of them that she's going to bring down. The fun part is, if we see something we like, she will let us keep it. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for you, mom! What kind of patterns do you like? Another project we did for her was organize her cookbooks. She has over 600 cookbooks but the weirder part is that she doesn't sell those. Nope. She keeps those for herself. Who needs all those cookbooks?! The Internet is totally a thing now!! Anyway, Carol is kind of crazy but it's fun getting to go through her stuff.

We had another lesson with the Yankos this week and it was probably the best lesson we have ever had. Our Ward Mission Leader went with us and he was so solid helping us teach the lesson. They had so many questions about everything that was talked about at the regional broadcast but mostly about repentance because of Linda S. Reeves' talk. Anyway, it was great and Clint is now attending the Addiction Recovery Program and is preparing for his court date on the 30th.

I don't know if I have talked about them before but one of my favorite ward member families is the Addams family. The dad, Ryan, is a pilot for Southwest. The mom, Kristina, is super chill and let's us come talk to her anytime. The sons, Rob and Scott, are so awesome and they come tell me about all of their family trips that they go on to like Finland and Iceland and stuff. They also bring me candy from those places! Anyway, we stopped by this week to say hi and finally caught Brother Addams at home. It was great because I got to ask him all these questions about his job. The funniest part though was when he was talking about being a flight attendant and he said, "be prepared for a lot of gay male flight attendants". He then proceeded to do the most amazing impression of this gay flight attendant who flies for southwest and is apparently now a YouTube sensation. It was HILARIOUS. It reminded me of when Grandpa Solomon  does his weird wrist thing and says, "oh pshaw!" Haha anyway, you guys should look up the videos of this guy. Search for Southwest flight attendant Richard or something. I'm sure you'll be able to find him.

Fun facts for this week: Our lesbians are all growed up and are getting married! Ha! They have only invited 26 people to their wedding and my companion and I are both on the list! We felt really honored but also kind of bummed because we can't go. If they weren't lesbians, we could totally go! And I will be honest, if I was not a missionary right now, I would totally hit that up because there is going to be some awesome food. Also, how many times do you get invited to a lesbian wedding in your Mormon lifetime? Not that many, I would assume.

Other "fun" fact for this week: I have been eating VERY healthy food on my own so when members feed me something really greasy or fried, it's only natural that I would get sick. I have been getting sick ALL WEEK. On Friday, a member took us out for pizza and it was good pizza. It was great! But on Saturday, it was not so great....long story short, we were driving along on Saturday and I thought I was going to explode so we stopped at a members house to use their bathroom...I knocked on that door so hard and pretty much yelled an explanation at them as they opened the door while I was already running past them to their bathroom. It was awkward but they're a young med school couple

and they were totally chill about it.

So yeah, it was an interesting week.

LOVES

Grandma Christensen's 90th Birthday Celebration

Saturday, November 28

(click on the invitation to see it bigger)

Hi everyone, Just wanted to let you know about our food assignments.  Brad is picking up meat and cheese and I am picking up everything else and we'll divide up some of the cost.  I'll need help cutting up tomatoes and onions that morning.  It starts at 10:00 and we'll probably eat at 12:30 (Utah Time).  I know it is early but Mom is usually worn out by afternoon.  Send a copy of this to any kids out of your house.  Love you, Mom

ThePianoGuys

Emailed to me from Mom: You have to watch this beautiful video and music by the Piano Guys!
This is Your Fight Song (Rachel Platten Scottish Cover)

Elder Kannon Evans

Dearest people that live where milk is not in a bag,

First of all, I couldnt send anything yesterday, there was a huge storm and the power was cut. So our president gave us permission to write a little bit today. So now its missionary tuesday :)

Second, we had a baptism! She has members her family that are members, and she wanted to get baptized, but she wasnt married so, she couldnt.. But! She got married on thursday so we were able to baptize her! Miracle! Its amazing being able to have a baptism within the first 3 weeks of opening an area! God really has blessed us :)

Also we found 4 others that have baptismal dates for the 22 and 29 of November! God really does direct the work here. Its quick, but thats pretty much what happened this week :) Love you all! Stay awesome!

Elder Evans

Sister Alex Solomon

Alex's address: 4545 W Beardsley Rd, Apt 2031, Glendale, AZ 85308

Wow, it has been a stressful week! to start off, we had interviews with the president this week. It was actually really great overall but the first thing he said when I got in there was, "Sister Solomon, how well do you know your area?" I was just kind of like, "um....what...?" And then he asked if I would feel comfortable leading my area and if I knew all our Ward leaders and everything. Sooooo we are pretty sure that Sister Williams will be getting transferred on December 2nd. I know we had kind of a rough start together but I really will miss her. We will have had 4 1/2 months together and she will have been in this area (her first one) for 7 1/2 months.

My companion has been talking a lot lately about how she wants to be healthier and lose some weight so I told her about Eat to Live. She is really excited to do it and we are starting it together today! I found a paper in my journal where I wrote down all of the rules for the 6 week plan...sometimes I'm smart. So yeah, it won't be perfect because members still feed us sometimes but we are going to do our best! Mom, I don't know if you can send my eat to live book or not but if you can't, could you send pictures or screenshots of some recipes that aren't too time consuming? When we were at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, I saw a legit Eat to Live cookbook with tons of recipes but I don't know how much it costs so we are going back to check it out soon.

Now back to why it was a stressful week...I don't know if I told you guys about this when it first started but we have been teaching a lesbian couple and their kids for a couple of months now. They are super great and hilarious and we just love them. Anyway, we were teaching them because one of the moms, Diantha, grew up in the church and knows it's true but was excommunicated in 2001 because of her relationship. It's so weird because they are a lesbian couple but they really want their kids to be baptized and get married in the temple. So we were preparing their daughter, Elainah, for baptism because she is turning 8 next month. I don't know if you guys saw all the hype on Facebook but now Elainah's baptism has been cancelled because of the church's new policy regarding the children of same-sex couples. It was hard for us because the family took it so hard. There were a lot of tears from Diantha but she also understands why the policy is in place and said she is looking forward to starting the 10 year countdown to Elainah's baptism.

It's weird to think that if I was at home right now, that policy would not affect my life at all! But it totally does now!

More stress: our prison dude, Clint, and his wife, Nicole, came to church yesterday! I was glad they were there but it was probably the WORST Sunday ever for them to come. The first time we ever taught them, Nicole was like, "I have really bad social anxiety and I hate being in large groups of people" and Clint said, "we went to that other big church up the road (Christ's Church of the Valley; super anti-Mormon) and we hated it. It wasn't even personal because the pastor wasn't there. He was just on a screen the whole time." Yeah, so what Sunday did they pick for their first time? The one where we had a HUGE regional conference. Everyone in the stake was there AND all of the speakers were on a giant screen in the front. Not only that, but someone turned up the organ really really loud and we had not one but TWO ward members have seizures during the songs. I wanted to scream the entire time. But they did schedule a lesson with us this week so maybe we can get them to come on a normal Sunday.

Fun facts: there's this restaurant nearby called Cafe Rumba. It's a lot like Cafe Rio or Costa Vida but is owned by Mormons. Anyway, the owner gave us free lunch this week and that was super nice! Also, last night we had taco salad at a members house. They put tortillas in these weird bowl shaper things and stuck them in the oven so that the tortillas were just shaped like bowls for the salad to go in. We thought it was really cool so they gave us an extra set of weird taco bowls!

LOVES

So I forgot to tell you guys about one of the best things that happened to me this week! We went to go visit a less active member from one of our ward. We had a good time talking to her and hanging

out with her. She's getting ready to have a baby this week so we're going to go back and help her clean things next week.

Anyway, while we were talking to her, her husband came home. He is not a member. He came in though and was super nice to us and ended up giving us so many chips. He works for Frito-Lay. He did a demo the other day where he had nine boxes of chips to demo but he only opened two of them. So he randomly gave us three huge boxes of Doritos! We're now trying to find ways to pawn them off on our Ward members! Haha, we have been leaving bags of chips on people's doorsteps with notes that say, "thanks for chip-ping in to make this such a great Ward!"

#goodtimes #somanychips #pringlesarebetter

Halloween & Hiking

Welcome to Halloween in AZ. 

Also, awkward angle of my body.

Well, it has been a pretty good but sort of average week. Nothing too crazy happened at least. We had two Ward trunk or treats that we got to dress up and hand out candy at. Apparently Brother Andersen sent you that picture, mom...? He is our evil Ward mission leader but he has been like eerily nice to us all this past week and we think that our mission president called him or something. Anyway, the activities were fun but I'm so ready to be done with candy and desserts! I have decided I'm not eating any more dessert (unless a member practically forces me after dinner) for the next two weeks. Hopefully once I hit two weeks it will be easier for me to keep it as a habit after that.

We went to Barnes and Noble last week and I just about died of happiness. I was completely surrounded by non-LDS media and I felt no shame. Of course I wasn't allowed to read any of the books but I bought a sweet coloring book and when we had been in there for a few minutes, they started playing a Beatles playlist hat went on for over two hours! Also, I really want a record player and I found an awesome one there! B&N is da best.

Anyway, I was super sick this week, all day on Thursday. I was throwing up all day and it was awful. The worst part was that the new sister in our apartment was also "sick" that day so our companions

made us go lie down while they went and planned together. Anyway, Sister Bauer (newbie) slept ALL day. Literally all day. I tried to sleep and it finally happened at around 10 pm that night which is when I normally get in bed....yeah, that was frustrating. Oh well, I'm fine now and at least I didn't upchuck in a random person's driveway!

I have found that birthdays and holidays are the BOMB on a mission. There's nothing else like 'em to break up the monotony. Halloween was a great day! Sis Williams and I got up a little early and went for an hour and a half long hike while the sun was rising over the valley. It was cool outside and it was glorious. When we got home, we got ready for the day and then just went out looking for people to help. No one wanted to learn anything or let us help but we met some pretty cool people by asking them if we could take pictures with their yard decorations. This one house was INSANE. The lady said she keeps a lot of her Halloween decorations up all year. That's how into it she is. Yeah, I'll send you all the pictures of that place. She even let us take some inside her house.

Such a great idea!

I got my Halloween package that day and I was super happy! Thanks so much mom and dad! You guys are the coolest and I loved that card. The dialogue in there was pure gold. I was also glad that Connor FINALLY wrote me back. I guess nagging for two months can actually pay off.

Fun facts this week:

last night, there was a 4.1 earthquake that hit the Phoenix metropolitan area! Oh no! Yeah, I didn't even wake up. I'll send you a funny pic I found of it. AZ doesn't do daylight saving switches so we are in the same time zone again! Yaaaaay! That doesn't affect us at all! But kind of interesting.

Also, we grilled our new greenie this week and I found out she is super nice but also EXACTLY the opposite type of person that I would ever hang out with. Also, we asked her why she came on a mission and she said, "because my parents wanted me to and I had nothing better to do with my life". Ouch. Let's see how long she lasts.

Anyway, now I have approximately 32,485 pictures to send you so I will get working on that.

LOVES

Hike pics

You can see the temple from the top...or anywhere else on the "mountain" since there are no trees....

Made it to the top

Elder Kannon Evans

Dearest people that still remember the sweet taste of bacon,

Bueno. This week has been a week of miracles. As I told you guys, we opened up the area about two weeks ago, and already we have a baptism planned for this Sunday! Her name is Cintia. She has 2 kids that are members, has a lot of attendance at church, and really has a desire to get baptized. She has had this desire for a long time, but she had to get married first, which has taken about 6 months. And because God is awesome, she gets married thursday and baptized sunday! God directs the work here. We can talk with however many people, but he will always lead us to the people He is preparing if we have faith. 

Other news, we have 2 more baptisms planned for next month as well :)

Sorry it was a little short today. But here is the scripture I pondered this week, 3 Nef 27:27. What little things can we do to become more like Christ?

Love you all!

Elder Evans