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Hey y'all!

It's been a pretty long while since I sent out a group email, so I
figured it was about time..

-Things have been going great in Morton Ranch! I think when I first
got here I mentioned Alyssa and Laura, the twins who were going to get
baptized on the 8th.. Well, they got baptized!! It was pretty sweet!

-It was actually COLD this week. What the heck... Now that winter is
coming, I've realized I don't miss the cold that much. Or the dry air
in Utah. Humidity is the best! Sort of.

-My good friend Elder Mattson got transferred up to Spring and he's
doing swell in a car up there! I'm pretty jealous, but I got the
privilege of killing the legendary Elder Jonathon Evans. (For those of
you who may be less familiar with missionary slang, when you end the
mission, you die. So when you are companions with someone who is
dying, you are killing them.) The transfer with Elder Mattson was
pretty pure. I'll miss him! But, we are killing it down here in Morton
Ranch so I'm pretty happy!

-A lot of things "clicked" for me in this past month or so. We got to
have Elder Echo Hawk from the Seventy do a mission tour and he spoke
to us. He bore a really powerful testimony of the Apostles and the
inspiration that goes into their daily lives, especially when they are
choosing where to assign missionaries. It was one of the most
spiritual experiences of my mission. For those of you who may not
know, Houston was honestly the last place I expected to serve my
mission. Throughout my mission I have had a lot of experiences that
helped me to see why I needed to serve here and around these specific
people, and when Elder Echo Hawk spoke to us everything just came full
circle for me. I'm so grateful for the chance I have to know - for
sure - that this is where I am supposed to be in my life at this
moment. I'm so glad I got called to Houston; there's nowhere else I
would rather have served my mission. 🏋

Another thing that was really forced into perspective for me in just
the past week was how much I have to rely on God in order for anything
to actually happen with the mission work. When you look at how many
people you are in the area as well as the demographics the odds
against you finding someone to teach and baptize are pretty
staggering. But God knows where those people are. It's so necessary to
rely on Him for finding them. To all my lads on missions, as well of
any of y'all who are feeling missionary minded at the moment, I can
guarantee you that the more you learn to rely on the Lord, the more
success you will have. It's something I am still learning to do but as
we have made a special effort to do that this week we've seen so many
CRAZY miracles going on. It's been awesome.

I can't believe my year-mark is coming up on December 2nd. So much has
changed for me in this past year. I feel like so much of my mission so
far has been spent just figuring things out, who i am, what I am
supposed to do here, etc. but now.. I know who I am and I'm ready to
go all in. I'm excited to get home in a little more than a year and
for y'all to see if I have changed as much as I think I have.

Thanks for all the love and support! Love y'all. ✌🏿️

-Elder Taylor

How awesome was conference?!?

(Sometimes we ask Brooks questions and he answers them. Here's this week's!)

Mom - How are your clothes holding up? Are your shoes getting worn? Do you need anything sent out to you?

My clothes are handling everything pretty well considering what I put them through. My brown Rockports don't really have any tread left on them so they'll probably have some solid holes by the end of the mission. It's pretty sweet. I don't really need anything shipped out.

Savannah - What was one of your favorite talks from Conference and why?

One of my favorite talks was the one on the Plan of Salvation by Dieter F. Uchtdorf because it was the first talk and I was wide awake for it. It also totally applied to me because I take a lot of things about the gospel for granted, even on a mission. We don't really comprehend how life-changing that knowledge is until we talk with people who don't have it.

Lucas - What is the strangest thing that has happened to you so far?

The tracting experiences I told Dad about last week were super weird, but something really crazy happened this week. We were tracting this trailer park where no one spoke English, and on the way back, we walked by this lady who was carrying one of those trapezoid-ish shaped landscaping stones. She threw it at a car, and it didn't do any damage, so I was wondering if it was on accident, but then she picked it up again and smashed the windshield of the car super hard. So basically she went about destroying the windows of this car, and as we were on our way out, her neighbor (who presumably was the owner of the car) came out of her trailer and started yelling at her. That was pretty intense.

Eli - What do you miss about home?

Not that much, honestly. I miss y'all, and I miss music and most of my friends (heh heh), but I actually like Texas a lot. I've made some really really good friends out here too.