Elder Jesse Kissell: The Sweet Life of Elder Kissell

Dear Family and friends-

Howdy! Well, this week was planned to be an eventful one, but unfortunately, it was not. :( Martin wasn't baptized and neither was Donnette. Martin was supposed to look for an online job this week and our lesson with him last Saturday was SUPER good and all who were present felt the confirmation that he would be able to find a job this week IF he looked for one. Well, there's that IF. He spent like 2 hours looking for a job the entire week. So that was a pretty huge bummer. And through talking to him, it seems as if he expects a job to fall right into his lap but it unfortunately won't happen that way. Things like this especially you have to work for. And right now, he isn't really exuding any effort. So that was a crusher for sure. It would be awesome if we could just spend an entire day with him looking with him, but we have other work to do and Pres. Barrett and ourselves agree that there is more work to be done elsewhere in Madison and it would be unreasonable to spend a whole day or two with him looking. So keep Martin in your prayers that he will get that motivation to look and be able to get a job.

Donnette wasn't swayed either by us bringing the fact up that her family was going to be here for Stake Conference and that she should be baptized then. She REALLY wants to be baptized in a river. And not just any river, she wants the Mississippi. AHHH!!!! And still on July 17. She's one focused woman. And Pres. Barrett was there for Stake Conference and was able to talk to her about baptism and that it is just as good, maybe even better, to be baptized in a font rather than a river. Donnette just looked at him and nodded her head and just kept talking about rivers. So, I guess it'll be the river unless something miraculous happens!

Our contact with Bo is very minimal. We see him once or twice a week. He is really bad at keeping appointments now for one reason or another and he won't committ to finding a place of residency. So that seems to be on hold as of now. He's a good guy, strong testimony and all, I just wish that him and Martin would come to realize that they need to do just one more thing before they are baptized and ALL these other super great blessings will come as a result of doing just one more thing. So keep these people in your prayers, they're oh so close!

So needless to say, these events throughout the week have been trying my patience and I thought that my patience had been tested to the max when Martin disappeared a couple months ago. Ahh! But with every test, you learn something. It's just like working out! It hurts sometimes, but you come out stronger and by the end, you're super buff! So right now, and throughout the rest of the mission, I imagine I'll be getting tested and learning and growing lots and lots and having my testimony strengthened and fortified. Awesome!

But some other things that happened this week were zone conference and an All Campus Party! Zone conference was good. And guess what? I played piano for it! That was scary, but surprisingly, I didn't make any mistakes. But now my secret is out in the mission, I can play piano! That's no good... So now I'll have to play at everything. But it's cool because I started out in Marquette being a really bad piano player who hadn't played in 4-5 years and now I'm able to play fairly decently. Cool. Zone conferences was really good though. The theme this time was on prayer. And strangely enough, the focus at stake conference was on prayer too! So I had a prayer filled week/weekened. Prayer is super awesome and can indeed work miracles. Just think about it. When we pray, we talk to our Heavenly Father, the father of not only us, but the father of Jesus Christ, the creator of worlds! We get to talk to him whenever we want! And when we pray, we are able to ask him questions of the soul (truthfulness of the gospel, Book of Mormon, etc.), we can ask him for help and guidance in our lives, and we are able to repent through prayer. So many great things. Repentance is especially amazing because think of how great it feels to truly repent and feel clean and feel that burden taken off your chest. It feels great! Only through sincere prayer can that happen. And it's just so special because Heavenly Father knows each one of us individually. I'm serving in a city of 210,000, Blake is in a town of 25,000, and Clark is in a city of millions of people and Heavenly Father knows each and every one of those people individually. How special! Prayer is awesome. Elder Bradley Foster of the Seventy, he spoke at General Conference as well, was the general authority at the Stake conference and he had some really great words on prayer. It was super!

The All Campus Party was pretty exciting. It was a week long thing put on by the University since the semester is coming to a close and one day the main event was an obstacle course throughout all the churches on campus in Madison! It started out looking like there was going to be 150-200 people participating but rapidly dropped for some reason and we ended up with around 30 people participating. But the students would all go through the various churches and have to do an obstacle and then run to the next church and do something there. So the Institute building is a really long ways away from all the other churches but technically still on campus, so it was funny because all these college kids are huffing and puffing by the time they get to the church. The obstacle at our church was launching water balloons at gophers! Wisconsins rivals are the Minnesota Golden Gophers, so we had these gopher things that they had to hit with water balloons, it was sweet. Working on campus is so cool!!

Well, I'm out of news folks. I think this is an average sized letter, maybe, hopefully I'll have some more exciting news next week! Hopefully Martin finds a job or something awesome like that. Thanks for being the best family and friends ever!

Love

Elder Jesse Kissell

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