Saturday, March 16, 2013

This has been a great day. We began this morning meeting our Branch Presidency and Relief Society President at the Friendship Chapel at 0815. Sister Gowans and Sister Estep left to go visit the Sister Soldiers  who are attending AIT. We had a new female soldier just come in yesterday.Two weeks ago we thought we were going to have, but only one or two here, but then suddenly we have had several come in. Brothers Halford and Marzolf went to visit the soldiers that Elder Gowans assigned to them and the Elder Gowans and President Estep went to find those that he thought would be best for President Estep to visit. We have been trying to minister to those who need to be ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood, and to those who desire to be advanced to the Melchizedek Priesthood; we also are helping those who desire to obtain temple recommends and those who desire Patriarchal blessings.

There is a lot of work to be done, but we have several major stumbling blocks. One is that often the students are assigned duty during church hours. We have asked them to inform their Cadre of their church meeting times so that this scheduling conflict can be avoided. Second, often they do not have a Battle Buddy to escort them to church. We have asked them to text us if this occurs so that we can act as their Battle Buddy. Sometimes the Platoon Sgts. will not allow this to happen. So our soldiers are stuck. If this happens the Platoon Sgt is supposed to take him personally to church, so usually they will allow us to escort them. It is a difficult environment. All of our students need Spiritual nourishment. Often they do not seek it through their own scripture study and personal prayer, because they are not disciplined enough to do it on their own. So they find that they are left vulnerable to temptation and a lot of peer pressure.

This morning and this afternoon we were able to meet with and talk and visit with many of our students. We actually left the Post around 1000 and went home, ate lunch and then left for North Augusta where we attended a baptism of a young lady who is in the Navy. We wanted to be there to support her in this wonderful event. She will deploy in June, so we will meet with her soon and help her learn what she can do to stay Spiritually strong.

After the baptism we went back up to the Post to meet with a couple more soldiers, which we were able to do. They had not been available to meet this morning, so we arranged to meet this afternoon.

Afterwards we headed to the church for our Missionary correlation meeting and to set up for this evening's FRG. After the meeting and after set up we went out to eat with the Brother and Sister Tenny, the ward mission leader. We had a nice evening with them and with the Barrett family out of the Steven's Creek ward. We played a game called, "Ticket to Ride". It was a lot of fun.

So after the evening finished, we returned home and made two "Death by Chocolate Peanut Butter Pies".

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