Elder Mason Holman

  I will be fairly brief with my comments for this past week but it was a good one. Elder Jensen and I are working hard and really starting to see the work begin to move forward.  Some cool experiences that we had from this past week was that we had prayed one of the nights on where we needed to go and decided that we should go to this apartment complex and visit some members that we had not been able to visit yet. We had tried about one or two and we saw this woman names Monica and decided to try and visit her next. We knocked the door and she answered and she didn't seem too ready for a contact at the time and seemed a little embarrassed that we had stopped by unannounced but then we started talking with her. She opened up to us about how she had prayed the day before for the first time in over a year and listened to conference and started reading in the book of Mormon again. She told us that in her prayer she had asked that the missionaries would come an...

  Week 1 in east zone. It has been a really good week and I'm already getting along really well with my new companion elder Jensen. It's a very different area than any area I've served in in the past so it's been cool to see the little differences. We are living in what is one of the wealthiest areas of Tucson and the members are really strong here. It seems like everyone in the ward either is a doctor, engineer or own their own business. It has been cool to see how the gospel has influenced their lives.  We had many meeting this past week and one of those meetings was a visit from Elder Soares and a few other general authorities that were in the area and spoke to all the missionaries and they all had a very special and specific message for the missionaries. Elder Soares's message in particular stood out to me. He talked about Faith. He was super straight forward in his talk, in no way did he beat around the Bush but he also showed an increase of love and compassion...

  Dear family and friends, I received news this past saturday that I will be leaving Sahuarita and Elder Mortenson and heading back up to Tucson. We have 4 tucson zones in the mission and this will be the last one I need to serve in, east zone. I'm excited to for the change and am very optimistic about the area! I was only here for 6 weeks in this area and with elder Mortenson during his training so it will be sad to leave it all behind. This has been one of my most challenging transfers of my mission thus far and the Lord really refined and humbled me in the process, he has a way of doing that to us. I have never pleaded more for heavenly help for something beyond my own personal needs than I have in this past transfer. It truly brought me down to the lowest depth of humility and made me stand back multiple times and say, "I dont know what to do, take my hand and guide me." Each time that I was humble enough to utter that phrase the Lord guided everytime, sometimes it wa...

  It is crazy to say that it is already the last week of another transfer. This past transfer with Elder Mortenson has been one of the must humbling and trying of my mission thus far but we made it to the last week and were starting to see success little by little as we put in effort and use creative means to find those that are prepared to receive our message.  Yesterday we had a refreshing discussion with this elderly Spanish man named rusio that we had met this past week. When we first met him he did not seem very interested but said he would let us in if we came over. We sat with him briefly and he turned to me and asked me one question. He asked with his whole soul, "how do you feel the holy ghost?", I bore a brief but true testimony of how I have felt the spirit in my life. It broke my heart that this man well stricken with age responded with, "I've never felt that in my whole life." We then were able to share with him how he could feel that same spirit an...