2 months in the field!!

hello family!

how are you all doing? this has been a good week! we have gotten two referrals, one from a member and one from the sisters who serve in the south half of this ward. we have tracted into a family that shows a lot of potential. the father grew up as a member of the rlds church and left with a really bad experience so hopefully we can steer clear of that and make sure he knows there's a difference between the lds and rlds church.

ive almost finished the book of mormon! i am halfway through mormon. its taken me a while to read it because I'm making sure i understand whats happening.

we've had a lot of meetings this last week, zone conference and district meetings and stuff like that. I'm getting to know a lot of the missionaries here. a lot of them are super weird. in district
meeting, elder adams the district leader, was talking about hard work and one Spanish sister was saying something and at the end she was bearing her testimony and said "i know working hard is true". we tried not to, but all the elders were holding back laughs cause she kinda sounded like an idiot. haha but it was still good. 

 we have been meeting with the slabber family the last couple weeks. they are really awesome people. their grandson lives with them and he has been who we are focusing on. his parents are divorced and his dad, who is a baptized member, has gotten into a lot of anti-mormon literature and harasses him about going to church and all. we are trying to make sure he has friend and that we are being friends with him. he's going to be turning 16 in march. he has like adhd and a little bit of autism, but really if no one told me that i wouldn't be able to tell. hes pretty normal to me and i think he's cool. he's super into rubiks cubes and stake boarding and finger boarding. me and
him have that in common because i like riding penny boards and i had a couple rubiks cubes and i had a bunch of tech deck finger stake boards. so that has been good to have something in common with him. he just doesn't have regular tech decks, he has some that he buys from a company in Germany. anyways they cost $140 just for the little tiny stake board. he's spent like $700 on all his stuff!

 on Thursday night we ate dinner at the millers home and then had our weekly mcm meeting with the ward mission leader. on the way home after the meeting it was raining pretty hard.. we were on our bikes and it was really cold. there was ice on the knuckles of my gloves when we got back to the apartment. my shoes were pretty gross looking after riding home that night too. ill try to send a picture of them. 

 we had a training on Facebook from the tech elders. they explained how Facebook works and how people see what you post. they said the more likes and comments and shares you get on your posts, the more likely it will be that people see it. and that's the vision of online proselyting. we want to spread the word of the gospel through our friends, family, and members where we are serving. so if you want to, go ahead and feel free to like, comment, and share my posts and any other missionary or church things you see. there's a talk given by elder bednar about how we need to "flood the earth" with the gospel by use of social media.

i got the packages you sent! haha i laughed at the greenie one you sent me, mom. I'm almost done being a "greenie"! at the end of this transfer ill be done with my training and ill get "greenie busted" which is what you call your third transfer since you spend the first two in the 12 week training program. i liked the other one too and thank you for the letters! i liked the shirt you sent me too, but i will probably never get a chance to wear it since i only wear white shirts every day and on p-day i try to wear a t-shirt as much as possible to get a break! thank you for thinking about me and praying for me. i love you and hope you have a great week! 
Love,
Elder Scherer

Naperville 1.19.15

Dear family,

How are you guys? Thank you for all the support and prayers. I really appreciate them. This has been a better week. 

We have been meeting with members and trying to get them excited about talking to people. We've been showing a clip from one of elder ballards talks about following up and asking members to invite someone to hear from the missionaries once a quarter. Hopefully we will start seeing some referrals come from that.

Some cool things that happened this week, we went out to lunch with brother ranchero to a Chicago pizza place. He's Filipino and probably the worlds best member. He spends at least 5+ hours going out with us each week. He's a ward missionary and he really helps us a lot, especially when we don't have a car. Anyways he ordered fried calamari for an appetizer. So I ate squid this week. And we went to the church one day for something and there are always cops there cause our church is on a pretty busy street, we went over and gave the cops a Mormon.org card! 

I came across a great talk by Elder Holland. He, along with Elder Bednar, is my favorite apostle. It was his talk from the 2009 October general conference, Safety For The Soul. It's good when you read it, but if you listen to it, it makes it that much better. I love that talk and the testimony he bears in it. I, along with him, want it perfectly clear when I stand before the judgement bar of God that I told the world of the truth of the Book of Mormon.

Just want to remind you that it is in our mission rules to have parents, family, and friends send letters and packages to the mission office and not to our apartment. It's not that big of a deal, but it's just in our rules and I want to make sure I'm following them. I appreciate the card you sent me, mom. It was great.

I'm writing this in the waiting room of a hair cut place. We are with the Spanish elders on our way down to Joliet to play some basketball with the zone leaders. We didn't have any money on our laundry cards this morning and no cash to put on them but we went to Walmart to do our shopping and got some cash back. But I don't know when we are going to get around to doing laundry today. Maybe we'll just have to go a week without it. Haha we just ate at Taco Bell. 

Love and miss all of you! Have a good week and look for opportunities to share the gospel. Remember Elder Ballard reminds us to replace our fear with real faith. 

Love,

Elder Scherer

Naperville 1.12.15

Hello Family and Friends,

First of all those are beautiful (Nike Kobe 9 High). That's just torture that I can't go buy those shoes. This is just a cruel joke to play on me (; I'll make you a deal, if you buy these and those other blue Kobe IX shoes and just save them for when I get back, you'll never have to buy me another pair of shoes. Sounds like a great deal to me!

 This was a really boring week. We had to stay indoors on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.. Those days were all well below zero and we couldn't go out unless we had appointments or to do stop by's. But we didn't have a car this last week so we couldn't even do that. We didn't have any appointments really besides dinner ones and a couple regularly scheduled visits we make to recent converts. I was looking forward to Friday because it was supposed to be zone conference, but since it was snowing so bad and the roads were so bad they cancelled that. So it's been really slow, but the last couple days have been alright.

 Last night we stopped by that Dennis guy again. He is a African Methodist and he teaches Sunday school. Our first visit with him we gave him a Book of Mormon. He still hasn't read it, but he has done a lot of research bout our church. He thinks we worship Joseph Smith and we can't convince him otherwise. He has no malice against our church and accepts that we believe in Jesus Christ. He was pretty put out that we don't have crosses on our buildings and we don't wear them. We said we like to focus on the fact that he lives and not just that he died. He didn't rally like that. We just simply explained to him that nothing in this church will ever make sense unless you first obtain a testimony of the Book of Mormon. If you know the Book of Mormon is true then you know that Joseph smith was his prophet and that the priesthood was restored and that all other revelations that have come, have come from God.

 I had to speak in sacrament yesterday. I spoke on the aaronic priesthood. It went pretty well I think. The second counselor called elder Aagard and asked him to speak, but he said that I actually was wanting to, but I really wasn't obviously. So that made me a little mad. 

 We were at the Banez home on Saturday night because their son, J. A., is leaving on his mission this week. He's going to Pocatello mission, Spanish. Tell Jill and Bret and them that they may possibly see him. He's a cool guy. 

 I'm praying for strength and to find that happiness every time I pray. I love sharing the gospel with people and sharing my testimony. Just know that I love all of you so much. I was thinking about the times of watching criminal minds with you, mom, and I miss that so we will have to watch that when I get back!

Love,

Elder Scherer

Naperville 1.5.15

hello family, 

 I want to say thank you for the prayers and keeping me in your thoughts. its been another hard week. we were dropped by 3 of our investigators. so now we literally have no one to teach. we have one last hope i guess. a lady named courtenay, we are having dinner tonight at the ward mission leaders home. she is pretty close, i think she understands and accepts the doctrine, she just doesn't see the need to give up drinking wine occasionally. i hope tonight will have a positive impact on her.

i dont know what i am ding wrong or what i can do to get people to teach. i read a good section in preach my gospel about patience. i think that's what i need, i need to be patient, but i don't know how long i have to be patient. i feel like I've shown enough faith and that i should be seeing some success by now. 

I spent a couple days down in Joliet this week. It's pretty ghetto down there in some parts. I was on exchanges with elder Adams. We got to teach this guy, William, that was a referral from the hermanas. It was cool to teach him. It was way funny tho! He had this big ol gun tattoo on his bicep and he kept pulling up his sleeve and telling us, "I've been out there, I've seen things." His mom was there and she kept interrupting from the other room and asking us questions like do
we use the King James Bible and other stuff like that. One time she asked, "do you believe that Jesus is lord?" And every time we would answer her question, she would just say "Praise the lord!" It was the funniest thing I've ever been a part of. That made my whole week. I think he will be pretty solid. He seems really interested. I hope elder Adams and elder Heiner will be able to continue teaching him.


We also had new missionary training this week. I got to see elder Frehner and elder Heiner for the day so that was cool for us all to be together again. We shared all our experiences and got some good laughs. I see elder Heiner every Wednesday at district meeting, but it was cool for us all to be there at this meeting. I don't know if I've told you, but there are some kids from my MTC district and we became really good friends. It was also good to hear from President Fenn again.

 i did get the card from Alyssa and the one from Keaton and Emilie, and the package from the Taggarts and the one from Jared. the Taggarts sent me a tie, i like it. Jared sent me some jalapeño Cheetos and a jar of cookie butter. that was really nice of him. will you get me the Taggarts address and Jareds so i can send them a thank you letter.

i bought some boots so i will be able to get around this winter without ruining my shoes. its been cold, but nothing i cant handle. we went out and shoveled some people's driveways around our apartment. on the way back we helped one of our neighbors bring in her groceries, that's the second time we've helped her with that. its nice to be able to do service.

If you want to send me anything, you can send me one of those small iPods with some good music on it. anything you put on it has to be uplifting and cant distract from the spirit, but it can still be regular music. a lot of missionaries have like bob Marley on theirs. A Capella stuff is good too, I like it. Keaton could probably help with that since he knows mission rules about music and knows how to get music on an iPod. you don't have to, i don't want you to spend money on me since it was just the holidays. but maybe eventually you could that would be cool. thanks for your
prayers. make sure Alyssa knows i love her. i think about hanging out with her almost every day.

Love,
Elder Scherer

Naperville 12.29.14

Hello family! 

It was so good to see and talk to you last Thursday. It was fun to see
how everyone was doing. I feel like I said some weird things, but
that's okay I guess. Mom I feel like I may have offended you when I
made the joke about your cooking. I love your cooking , well, most of it ;).

I loved being able to share some experiences with you even though I
haven't had many or even very significant ones. Unfortunately we had
to drop our only progressing investigators because they were no longer
progressing and wouldn't keep commitments. So now we literally don't
have anyone to teach. Finding doesn't really get us anywhere. So I
don't know what we are going to go. I hope the 

members will start
doing their job of getting us people to teach.

In elders quorum yesterday they were trying to make assignments to get
us some dinners and find people to go out with us. What we want is for
people to feed us, give them an encouraging message to help them find
people for us, and go teach someone they have been talking to.
Everyone was so concerned with how they were going to feed us
because we share the ward with the sister training leaders. I
eventually got up and just laid down the law and told everyone to not
worry about feeding us because we can feed ourselves and what we need
from them is to get us people to teach and not to feed us. I hope I
didn't offend anyone and that I only made it clear that we need them
to do their member missionary work and find us friends that we can
teach. It was a lot more bold than I've ever been in my life and it
was a pretty cool experience.







Hope you have a fun and safe New Years, love you!







Love,
Elder Scherer