My Mission: Goodbye Knoxville

This has been a really hard week. It is hard to hear the sadness in Jared's email about leaving Grove Park. He said it has become a home away from home. He has a good attitude about transferring, but my heart can't help but hurt for him. He has met some really great people on his mission and I can't imagine having to leave them behind every few months. There are many people whom I would love to meet when we go get him. I can't wait! I hope to have pictures of some of them at the bottom of this post.

I can't wait to hear where he got transferred and who his new companion is.

Oct 20 2014 -- email from Jared -- Goodbye Grove Park

This week we had transfer calls and I'm being transferred out of Grove Park. I'm not excited to leave because I've loved it here, but I guess I'm needed somewhere else.

So this week we also had a lot of rain, and we had to bike in a lot of rain, it was so cold!! The rain here is liquid nitrogen, I swear. We were able to have some really good lessons though, so it was good. There's one couple who has been inactive for years and recently moved here, and we happened to come across them even though their records aren't here. They were excited to see us and we got to know them and they've had some seriously hard times, but they have a lot of drive to improve their situation and they want to get back into church, so I'm excited for them. Another family we met with is a part member family who recently started coming back and it's almost the same thing, they have a lot of drive to get back into church and the members of the family who aren't members of the church are really interested and show a lot of promise.

We also had zone training this week and there was one really good training. One of the sisters told a story about 6 people who went on a journey and their destination was this super great city with mansions for everyone. A boy and a girl found each other early on in the journey and started going with each other, then they came across 4 youngins who they took in and helped along the journey. The youngins grew up and one by one decided to go off on their own on this journey. Eventually the boy and girl got to the city and waited for the rest. Over some time 3 of the 4 showed up at the city gates and came in. After a while they had a homecoming feast prepared for them, and when they went to the feast and all sat down they noticed that there was 6 chairs, but only 5 people. The empty chair overtook all of their thoughts and they couldn't eat knowing that this chair was empty. So they decided to go back and try to find the last one, but they learned that once you're in the city you can't get out, so they'd have to just hope and pray that another person who was still on their journey would come across the last one and help them along the way. The whole time she was telling the story the room was completely silent, and the spirit was very strong. She then explained that we are those travelers who they're relying on who are still on our journey and the only way those people will be with their loved ones again is if we go and find them and help them. She also gave us a kind of motto, it's "No empty chairs"

Love y'all,

Elder Jared Petersen

Silly E Rayburn

Oct 13, 2014 -- email from E Petersen

We helped out at the bishop's storehouse again this week, it was really fun to help out and see all the people who go. I saw Elder Smith there, one of my MTC companions, and I got to talk to him and talk about all of our experiences. We hit 7 months yesterday!Time is going by so fast it doesn't even make sense. We also got to see the Meet The Mormons movie, it was so good! If you haven't seen it, go see it and take a friend. The people on there have amazing stories. A sister missionary in our ward had her birthday also, so a member took all the missionaries in the ward to O'Charley's, which is a nice southern restaurant, that was fun. We had another lesson with the family who we're teaching who is progressing really well, we taught them the Gospel of Jesus Christ and we committed them to be baptized on November 8th. They don't really have any holdbacks except coffee and tea and when they were talking about giving them up they were saying when, not if, so we were excited about that. They also really want to know that it's the true church before they decide to be baptized for sure so we were excited about that because they are asking really sincerely. An 8 year old boy in our ward was baptized on Saturday also. It was really cool because his parents had us go over the lessons with him before he was baptized, so we got to teach him and get to know him before he was baptized.

Love y'all,

Elder Jared Petersen