Ft. Lauderdale West 9-21-2015

Early morning sunrise

FAMILIA!!

Life is good in the hood!! It sounds like life is still going great in Utah as well! I can't wait to bring you all back to Ft. Laud and just show you what it's really like! Haha you're jaws are going to drop! ;) Anyway, Mom, I really appreciate you asking me all of those questions, because sometimes it's hard to know what to write! So when you give me questions it helps me know! So never be afraid to ask a whole bunch of them!

So, about the package! I got it! Thank you so much for sending it! Those Oreo's were delicious! I'm going to have to give some to President because he is obsessed with Oreos! Subway isn't really my favorite place to eat, it's just close and cheap and it doesn't make me feel like complete crap when I eat it so that's why I asked! As far as our living situation goes, we live in a really nice house. It's easily the nicest house that I've lived in on my mission. As far as working goes, it's nice because we do spend a lot of time in our area. We only go into the office if there's a specific task that we have to do, so usually it's only once a week where we're in the office for most of the day. The main thing that takes up our time is exchanges. We go on exchanges all over the mission so we spend a lot of time driving to and from exchanges and dropping and picking people up. It's still great though because I love getting to spend the day with other missionaries and getting to know them better. I'm definitely a wimp when it comes to the cold! I hate the cold now! I don't know what I'm going to do when I get home, but please have some giant coats waiting for me!

This week was a legendary week here in our area. We got to do what are called "greenie exchanges". It's this exchange that President has us do, where we pick up one of the new missionaries and their companion and we bring them both into our area for a full day of work, and then we split and go hard in our area! We got to do 2 of those this week, and they were both amazing. For one of them I went with Elder Pratte. A new missionary who actually graduated from Timp. We had a great time together!

I wanted to share with you one really cool miracle that happened to us this week. So in the mission Saturdays are what we call "Round up" day. It's called round up because it's the day where see all of our investigators and make sure that they are solid and have plans to make it to church the next day. So on Saturday we had a ton of people to go see, and almost all of them dropped off. (Which is pretty typical in the hood) but nonetheless it was still less than desirable. Then at 8:30 at night I got a prompting to call one of our former investigators named Sherronda. She was amazing when we first taught her, but then she had a stroke and was in the hospital and we could never get a hold of her. So it had been about a month and a half since we had last contacted her through the phone. We called her and she answered and said that we could come by right then and teach her and her family! We went and taught her and her family the Restoration, and they committed to come to church the next day! So that next morning Sherronda and her husband and their 2 daughters came rolling into church with her in a wheelchair! It was legendary!

I love you all so much! I'm so grateful for all that you have done for me! I love the people of South Florida so much as well! They're definitely an interesting type of people but they really do love Christ and are trying their best to follow him. I know that the work that I am here doing is God's work. It's been the toughest yet greatest time of my life! I know that if we really want to find ourselves and who God needs us to be all we have to do is lose ourselves for Him! Have a blessed week!

Love,

Elder Nielsen