Kendall Green San Bernardino Mission

Hey everyone! I can't believe I have made it. For those of you who have been following my emails, you know that it has been an adventure. I've served in three missions, served under four mission presidents, served in two countries, and taught in two languages. I don't think any of us could have seen this coming, but I'm grateful that it all happened. I've had so many special experiences and seen so many miracles I would not have given it up for anything. This week has been an exciting and interesting! I spent most of my week cleaning up my area before I leave. I don't know if I said this already, but because of the loss of missionaries in the mission I will be handing it off to a set of hermanas. The hermanas used to be sharing the ward with me and my companion, but now they will be taking over the entire ward. I've spent most of my time making notes and trying to do pass off lessons. It wasn't the most successful, but I did my best. There we...

Hello everyone, This week has been a good week. Despite the challenges of being stuck inside I've been able to keep teaching a couple of people fairly consistently. It is a great example to me of how the work continues on. Probably the biggest and only miracle this week is that one of the people I'm teaching named Luis really wanted to watch conference so I did a video call with him for one of the sessions. I also sent him the link for the sessions and he forwarded it to a bunch of people. He then sent me a picture back of someone commenting on how much he liked the world wide fast and wanted to participate in it. I don't know what will become of this. I just hope that this will open more hearts to receive the restored gospel. Besides that I really enjoyed conference and am so grateful to have a living prophet. I loved how many of the talks were focused on receiving personal revelation, faith, and repentance. As missionary those are very important principles. They f...

Hello everyone! Well, this week has been almost as interesting as last week's. Not as many changes happened this week, but there still were a lot. I'm still adapting to being in a trio again. It's hard because we cover two separate areas with separate people and languages. We are figuring it out, though. The nice thing is that the Lord always provides a way. One of the Fontana stake missionaries, Elder Dow, who was sent home from Mexico has been helping me out with my areas. He's waiting to be reassigned and hasn't been released so in the meantime he's helping me. We also now have five missionaries in the apartment I'm living in so things are getting crowded. However, it's nice because we used to be picking those missionaries up from their apartment so now we don't have to.  The highlight of the week is that I figured out how to do a conference call so I was able to have Elder Dow and some members help me teach a man named Francisco. ...

Hey everyone, Ever since the world erupted in confusion and panic I haven't been able to get a lot time to write, but now I actually have a little time to write.  Its been a little crazy over here as I'm sure it has been for you all. It all started when about a week and a half to two weeks ago President McKinnon asked everyone to buy a two week supply of none perishable food. The grocery store was packed when we went and it took us an hour to get through the line. Luckily everything went well but the next day, I believe, we learned that church meetings were being stopped and we were just able to have our zone temple day before the announcement was made that temples were closing. That was sad because I was looking forward to the temple trip for departing missionaries. Oh well :/ Within the next few days we were asked to start moving all our lessons to video or voice calls. Only a day or two after that we received notice of a shelter in place order given by the gover...

Hey wonderful Green family! Well this week has been crazy. Its been a good week because we've gotten a couple of new people to start teaching. So this week was started off with district council and then exchanges later with the Alder Elders. The exchanges went well though my bike broke and a lot of appointments fell through. After exchanges I was able to fix my bike, but we then had to take it into a bike shop in order to repair a part that had been bent. As we were walking home from the bike shop a police officer pulled over and asked us if we were all right. He said he noticed that I didn't have my bike, but my companion did so he was wondering if we had been robbed. We explained to him that we had just dropped my bike off at a bike shop. It turned out that he was a member and so he offered us a ride home. It was pretty cool. He handcuffed my companion's bike to the front of his car and let one of us ride up front and the other ride in back. Apparently handcuff...

Hey everyone! This week has been busy like always. We had exchanges last Wednesday which was fun. It was nice because the Elder I was with struggled last time to talk to everyone. However, this time he did amazing. It was cool to see that growth. Besides that, we have been continuing to try to get in contact with people that we are teaching. We were finally able to teach Matthew this week. He's been going through a rough time and is just really tired from work. We were able to have a good lesson and he said he would come to church. Sadly, he didn't and we're not sure what else to do. We are praying for guidance to know how to help him. We did have one miracle though this week. One person we've been teaching told us that he believed that the Book of Mormon was true. He's been being taught for years and has been praying for an answer. As we read the Book of Mormon last Monday, however, the presence of the Spirit was very strong. I was impressed to ask him ...

Hey everyone! This week has been busy with a lot of meetings so we weren't able to get out as much as we would like to, however we did have some fun experiences. Meetings wise we had follow up training which took another one of our afternoons away from us on top of district council and weekly planning. Follow up training, which is a meeting that allows the trainees and trainers to receive additional council and advice on any challenges they are struggling with,   was pretty fun. I was able to get some good advice on how to be willing to talk to more people. The best advice I got was to pray for the power to talk to everyone and then go out and do it. I haven't been good at applying this advice, but we've definitely gotten better at talking to everyone as a companionship. The fun part about talking to everyone is that you meet the most interesting people. We had one person ask us if we had any snacks. When we responded no, she suggested that more people might want to t...

Hey everyone! Wow! Another week has come and gone. There is still a lot of work to be done here. This week was good for the first few days. We were able to get in contact with someone that had been hard to find which was cool. He was pretty nice and even invited us to go fishing at the beach with him. We said we would love to but couldn't because the beach was outside of our mission boundaries. We also had a great zone conference. During the zone conference President McKinnon said something that was very profound. He asked that for the bicentennial general conference we prepare to receive personal revelation. He said that he believed that at least one of the things that will make the next general conference will be the personal revelation we receive. We also had some cold and windy nights this week. I'm hoping the wind dies down because it makes it harder to bike. One miracle that we had was that last night it was really cold and windy. It was also dark and we were try...

Hey everyone! So this week has been another fun week in the mission field. Last Wednesday, we had a zone conference for all the Spanish missionaries in the mission. This was the first time they've done this and I believe they may start doing it in order to help hasten the work among the Hispanic population. They really want the work among the Spanish population to increase. It was pretty fun and the new goal for Spanish missionaries is at least one baptism per companionship per month. It's a lofty goal, but we are going to do our best. We also had some great lessons this week. We just started teaching this couple and were able to give a lesson to them this week. It was a great lesson. As we taught the message of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the importance of prophets, the husband, Danny, asked if there were still prophets today. We bore a powerful testimony of modern prophets and they both felt the spirit. They said they believed it was true. It was a...

Hey everyone, So this week I got a new companion. His name is Elder Squires and I'll be training him for the next transfer. He's adjusting to missionary life very well and is excited to do the work. We've been doing our best to talk to everyone and we've had a few successes. One miracle that happened this week was that we contacted an hermana that we had met on the street. When we passed by her house, her and her husband warmly welcomed us in and were very receptive to our message. We hope that they will continue to receive us. We also were able to visit a friend that we hadn't seen in a while and he was very happy to see us. We gave him a priesthood blessing and he felt the spirit powerfully. After that, he said, "You have a lot of power in your church." In my head I thought, "You're right. We have the power of God." It was so amazing to see that power in action. We also got a couple of new people from the Alder Elders because th...

Hey everyone! So sorry, but I forgot to send this last week so you'll get two emails this week. This week has been great but kind of slow. The highlights of this week us that we were able to find a man and his wife who are very humble and are open to receiving our message they're very friendly and we've been able to have several lessons with them this week. During one of them they said that they would love to be part of Christ's church if they found it and were certain that it was Christ's church. Our lessons with Matthew have also continued to go well. He loves learning and asked us a lot about the organization of the church. We went over the baptismal questions last Saturday night and he was so ready.  Another highlight of the week is that I got to meet some ward members that were from Peru. They were pretty awesome. It was nice to eat some Peruvian food again and they also gave us some treats that I used to eat while in Peru. It was pretty fun. The fat...

Hey Everyone! This week has been sort of a whirlwind and pretty busy. We had exchanges with the zone leaders and the I did exchanges with the Alder Elders so we have been doing a lot of coordination. The good thing is that as we have been able to talk to a lot of people and I have been able to become more comfortable with talking with people everywhere and in every place. The nice thing with talking with everyone is that we've found a lot more people willing to listen to our message. The only downside is that we've contacted people several times. The nice thing about that, however,  is that we get to know them better and while they may not be interested in our message now our multiple contacts may pique their curiosity. We also had several miracles occur. One of the people we have been trying to teach for the past few weeks was finally home and willing to hear us. He asked us about what after we die and we were able to show him using scriptures both in the Bible and the Bo...

Hey everyone! Well this week has been most eventful. Sadly, my companion has been sick so we haven't been able to get out of the house a lot. Despite our challenges, however,  we have embraced talking to everyone and this week we talked to the most we've ever been able to do in this area. During New Years Eve we went out showing a video about New Years that the church made a few years back. It was quite effective and with one person we showed it to he almost cried.  Besides showing a video, we've also been practicing sharing the message of the restoration quickly and powerfully. It has helped me be a lot more comfortable with speaking to everyone we meet. I highly recommend it to all missionaries.  Not much else has been going on. One of the people on date to be baptized didn't come to church so we were kind of sad. However, he still has a great desire to be baptized and so we will continue to work with him. He's close though. Happy New Years ev...

Hey everyone! Well, this week was a great week. I was kind of worried about tracting this week because with it being the holidays people aren't open to opening their doors. However, we prayed really hard and it turned out a lot better than I thought.  We came up with an idea that really worked. We had Books of Mormon that were gift wrapped and downloaded the video Samuel and the Star. Christmas Eve we were able to share the message with several people. Some people were interested and accepted Books of Mormon while others just talked to us. One of the people we talked to really was touched by our message. After watching the video, he started tearing up and said that every time he heard the Christmas story he always started crying. He then shared how this was his first Christmas alone and that he had been praying for God to send him someone Christmas Eve. The Spirit was very powerful and we gave him a Book of Mormon. It was a testimony to me that there are people waiting for ...