9-18-17
Hey everyone!
Okay so this was such a crazy week! This is probably the busiest week of my mission! So much has happened! I guess I will start with transfers. I am getting transferred to Chugach in the Bear Mountain Ward, Chugach is just a little north of Anchorage. I am excited and sad to leave, I am excited to end my last 2 transfers strong but sad because I love the people here in Kenai. I will really miss my companion Elder Hatch. Training him has been such a fun experience. Watching him grow as a missionary was such a blast. He is a true friend and I'm very proud of him! Okay so now for the biggest news of the week, Andy got baptized!!!!
His baptism was one for the books. Not only was it amazing to see him happy and changed but the baptism set up was nuts! So the story is that we tried to fill the font in Kenai but after letting it run for awhile we checked on it when it was half full and it was straight nasty brown! I guess the city was cleaning out their pipes at that moment so it was gross water. With time ticking we made a mad scramble to change it to the Soldotna chapel which was about 20 minutes away. The font there takes 4 hours to fill but we had less then 2 until the baptism. So we called the Zone Leaders and they started filling it up and dumping big buckets of water to help it go faster. Once we got there we had a train of dumping the buckets.
The water got really cold so we started boiling huge pots of water and dumping them in there! It was nuts! After all said and done we did it! We filled it just in time! The baptism went great and at the end Andy bore his testimony. This was the coolest part! Seeing him after being washed clean and saying he knows this is Gods church on earth, this is something I will never forget. I have truly come to love him! He had been meeting with missionaries for years and I am so thankful that I was here when he got his answer! This is Gods Church! Great day that was! So let's go back to the beginning of this week.
So Monday night to Tuesday night I went on Exchanges with one of my favorite missionaries! Elder Lewis! We had a blast together! We are like the same person so we just crack each other up so much! When we exchanged back we all drove up to Anchorage together for a Zone Conference. The Zone Conference was super awesome! We learned a ton from Elder Foster of the seventy. We also learned that we are getting Facebook on this mission. We will see how that goes but I guess we get it in just a few weeks. We learned a lot of working with member. The biggest things that hit me was when they introduced Facebook they said the greater the agency the greater the growth. I believe that! And also he asked us to think about what we want to say in our last prayer as a full time missionary. I have really been thinking about that. I only have 2 transfers left so the end is just right there so can I say to my Heavenly Father I have done all I can and have given my all to this work?
I sure hope I can when the time comes and I'm determined to do so. Oh! And at Zone Conference my whole posterity of people who I have trained and who they have trained were there so we took a family pic! I just found out though that one of them is training so we are one short now. I am a great grandpa! After Zone Conference we drove back and had a blast. The next day we went to a baptism in the Zone Leaders area but right before the baptism they called and said that there will be a MLC that I need to go to the next morning so I will be trio up with them for the night and tomorrow morning. It was fun to be in a trio with 2 of my best friends in the mission for the night! The MLC was very good. Elder Foster went over a lot and helped us understand more about how to work with the wards. I wish we could of been there in person but since it was 3 hour drive we just Skyped in. Still got a lot out of it so that was good. Well that was my super crazy week! We have been running every which way saying my
goodbyes to Kenai and getting Elder Hatch ready to take over the area. Kenai has been an experience I will never forget! I love the people here so much. Lots of memories have been made here that I will cherish for the rest of my life. All the goodbyes we sad but its not a forever goodbye. One of the good byes was the coolest ever! Brother Ellis has really awesome cars and one of them is a sweet Camaro that he built himself. I told him my last wish is to take a ride in that car and burn some rubber. So we did! I have never been. In a car like that! Holy cow that thing was super fast! He did this super sweet burn out that melted the asphalt in his drive way. Dream come true riding in a car like that! Well Bear Mountain here I come!
Love you guys and hope you have a great week!
-Elder Barney
2 Timothy2:3
Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
