September 17th He Had a Birthday!

 ♥  Happy 19th Birthday Jared!!!! ♥

This was a hard day for mom, but it was a GREAT one for Jared! 

He loved all the packages he received in the mail. 

Jared was excited to get some homemade jam. I thought this story was funny.

A couple other missionaries tried to talk me into giving them one of the jars and I was like "This jam is worth more than gold, I'll let you have like a pb&j with it, but there's no way you're gonna get a whole jar"

Here is the email after his birthday on Sept 22nd 2014:

This week has been packed! My birthday was great! Thanks everyone for the packages and cards! On my birthday we had zone training, and it was really good. It was focused on finding more people to teach and we were challenged to spend 2 hours every day looking for people to teach. We can find them however we want, so the method we like most is called 'OYMing' for Open Your Mouth. Basically you just go around talking to everyone you see and try to bring up the gospel, it's super simple. We met a few people on Saturday in the park who we're going to try to teach so it should go well. We'd also had the Knox county fair last week and we've started getting a ton of referrals from it. The first one we contacted, I went on a split with a member to contact them and she was really excited to have us in and hear what we had to say. I taught her the Restoration and she stared me down the whole time, she was just soaking in everything I was saying and when I finished she asked quite a few questions. The member who I was with answered a lot of her questions and spent a lot of time bearing testimony to her. He told her how the gospel has blessed his life so much and what he wanted most was to help her to have the same feelings and blessings that the gospel brought to him. We visited her again yesterday with her husband and taught the restoration again and they both were super receptive and you could see in their eyes that they could feel the spirit and they asked quite a few really good questions. The member who we brought was able to share his testimony and answer some of the questions also. They said that they wanted to really know that the church was true before they'd want to be baptized, which was a really good sign, and they also said they liked how we explained that all churches are trying to do good and how they have some truth and we have the full truth.

Love y'all,

Elder Jared Petersen

Here are the selfies he promised along with the new ties!