Happy 4th of July!

Here  are some pictures from last week. Higher quantity = lower quality..

1 We found some cool alien shades at the Church while we were planning.

2 A final picture with President and Sister Mortensen. I'll miss those guys!! Too bad I botched it in the picture..

3 classy tracting picture

🌳

HEY y'all!!!

I hope life is going great for everyone! As I mentioned last week I got transferred! I sure miss College Station, but now I'm actually back in the Cypress Zone! This time I'm in the White Oak Ward and wow! Things are going great! My companion is named Elder Christensen and he is a stud! We saw a lot of miracles this week and we are so excited for the coming few months. There is so much work to do in this ward. I don't know if I have ever been so busy on my mission, and it feels great. In some ways it has been a little overwhelming to see how much needs to be done (for example, it was a little stressful when I found out there are more than 100 prospective Elders in the ward haha.) But we are taking things one step at a time and chipping away at it!

I am still trying to get to know the ward, investigators, etc. but I'm happy to be here. I don't have a whole ton to say this week but let me know if you have any questions!

Love y'all!

Elder Taylor

🌳

Howdy y'all!

Wow, it has been a long time since I last wrote! But things have been going great! I don't even know if I can adequately describe all the things I have learned here or the experiences I have gained. (Last night we got transfer calls and I am leaving this place, so this email is going to be a little sentimental!)

When I first got here the area was dead! (due to the previous elders not doing a whole lot...) It has been quite the adventure to try to build things from the ground up and regain the trust of the ward. We have seen SO many miracles over the past couple of weeks though. Yesterday we were able to have six investigators attending church and set another baptismal date with our investigator Moses! He is from Botswana and he is the MAN!!! Our other date is with a Chinese kid named Hao who is loving the Book of Mormon!! It has been amazing to watch this happen. It has been over a year (at least) since this ward has had that many people attending church, and it has been a long, long time on my mission since that has happened as well. The Lord is working miracles here. It's really sad to have to leave it all behind now that things are just starting to get rolling, but, I guess I have to trust that wherever I am going is where God wants me to be.

In other news, I got to have a root canal on Thursday! That was pretty awesome haha. Actually it was totally painless which is incredible! So yeah, that's not the most important thing but it was great!

If there is one thing I have learned in the past eighteen weeks, it's that more important than what you DO as a missionary, is who you ARE. You could go out and baptize a million people, but if you don't have charity, you are nothing. Just praying and asking for charity will make a huge difference in your life. I know it has in mine. I am nowhere near where I want to be in Christlike  attributes but the smallest adjustment in behavior can change your entire course of life. I am so grateful for the chance I have had to come to know and love the people in the College Station 2nd Ward, and I can never repay the Lord for all He has given me and taught me. I love the mission! And I'm so excited to see what the Lord makes of me with these remaining five transfers.

No pictures yet but we should be taking some good ones today! I'll send them out!

I love all of you!

Elder Taylor

🕺🏻

Hey y'all! Sorry it's been like 3 months since I emailed haha. Things

are going great up here in College Station though!

Well, I guess that's all I have to say, so I'll just send a bunch of

pictures per the request of my dear mother!

(1) Aggie swag

(2) Service @ the Baptist Church feat. grumpy me & a lot of cheese

(3) The unmistakable Kyle Field as taken by my good pal Elder Skelton

(4) A piece of the former World Trade Center surrounded by types &

images of devastation both PHYSICAL and EMOTIONAL

(5) Cool

(6) Expediting

(7) Elder Gessel going to war

(8) The innocent Box Elder High School crew also feat. Elder Gessel

(9) Saw my good friend Elder Mattson the other day, killin' it in

ghetto Westfield. 🥕

🐳

Hey everyone! So... hope y'all had a good 5 or so weeks since the last
time I sent a group email! I'll try to do better.. haha

Well, after an awesome crazy transfer in Morton Ranch with Elder
Stevens, I got transferred up to COLLEGE STATION!! It's a dream come
true! I am in the College Station 2nd Ward with Elder Kelly from
Logan, UT and this place is on fire!! SO many potential baptisms going
on right now! And the ward itself is pretty stellar. I don't know what
I did to deserve being sent to such an awesome place! I really miss
Morton Ranch but I sure am happy to be here!

Here are some pictures from last week leaving the area!

The Radcliffe's took us to Rainforest Cafe for dinner on New Year's!

These are the Mocks with their friend Isa! He's gonna get baptized on the 21st of January! (hopefully) Excuse my lack of selfie skills!

The Kulhaneks! Man I'm going to miss these guys! They were the BEST!!

Nice one Elder Stevens! Haha. He's going to be so happy that I included that one! Miss that guy!

Finally, here is the new district! Elder Kelly is the elder farthest on the right! Tbh this is probably the most awkward district photo I've ever seen!

🦃

Hey y'all!

This week was awesome! Definitely one of the top weeks of my mission.
Transfers happened and i got a new companion, Elder Stevens. He is
from Idaho Falls, has been on his mission for three months, and he's a
STUD!! We have seen so many miracles happen this week. I'm so pumped
for the rest of this transfer. The Lord is blessing the Bear Creek
Zone like crazy!! We're trying to get 23 baptisms in 2 months and we
only have one left.. so now is the time to kill it!

Here are some awesome things that happened this week:

-We found 12 new investigators to teach. Last week we found 0. The
average in Morton Ranch so far has been around 4. We have been trying
really hard to seek inspiration regarding where to tract and the Lord
has helped us find new people to teach every single time.

- We were teaching the Restoration to an investigator named Chris and
man, the Spirit was so strong. We taught him about the Book of Mormon
and he was like "you know what? I need to read this book for 20
minutes a day." Haha. People never do that!

There are more but I'm too lazy to type them all up haha.. but just
know that things are going great! Morton Ranch is exploding, the
members are so fired up about missionary work, and we have had so much
JOY in the past week. I don't know why the Lord is being so merciful
to us. Keep an eye out for baptisms coming up before the end of the
year!!

I love this work and I'm so grateful for this chance I have to serve
God. He has done so much to redeem me and change me from who I was
before the mission. It's such a privilege that He has trusted me and
all of us with bringing that change to others. And I am grateful for
all of your love and support! It means a lot. I really have been
humbled by all that I have heard from y'all and everything that has
happened this week!

Love y'all!

Elder Taylor

P.S. We went to Waffle House!! What more can I say?

📸

Hey y'all!

I don't really have that much to say about this week, but it was a swell one. I'll just send a bunch of pictures..

The district went to Track 21 last P-Day. It's this place that has go karts, laser tag, etc. and it was so much fun. Best P-Day of my life!!

We also went to the temple this week! It was very sick as always. Oh, and we got to ride with the sisters as a trio on the way there and back! Man it was a once in a mission experience. I know it doesn't seem special to y'all but it was such a relief. Sister Dummer and Sister Pinster are SO chill too! (Even though they look like we are driving them crazy.. Hahaha) The studly guy on my left is Elder Neely from the Bear Creek Ward. Such a good experience all around.

Legendary Katy North District.

Elder Evans goes home in less than 10 days. I'm going to miss this guy! It's been a great transfer. (Yes, we are working hard!) Haha.

Peace out, y'all!

Love,

Elder Taylor

🐣

Hey y'all!

Wow, it was an awesome week! We have been teaching a lot and just
working super hard. Some very exciting things are starting to happen
here in Morton Ranch. The investigators we have now are more solid
than ever! I'm so stoked for the next couple months.

-On Friday we ate dinner at our bishop's house. The Bishop of Morton
Ranch is sick! He's from the Phillippines so we asked him to let us
try some weird Filipino food. (Well really I did, Elder Evans wasn't
so happy about that haha.) So I got to eat balut, which is a duck egg
that has been fertilized and incubated for about two weeks then
boiled. I'm so glad I can say now that I ate an unborn duck chick on
my mission in Texas. I also ate a century egg, which is an egg that
has been buried for a long time until it turns completely black
inside. That one was really good.

-Hopefully y'all will see some baptisms coming up before the end of
the year. The mission is trying to reach its goal of 600 in a year and
crazy miracles are happening in every area.

I don't really have much else to say, so here's some pictures and videos!

Legendary Bear Creek Zone.

I believe in joy!

Elder Evans in his natural habitat.

The century egg: before and after the shell is removed.

Peace out everyone! Love y'all.

-Elder Taylor

🐿

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.

Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Mom - Tell us about your companion.

Mom - Elder Mattson is pretty awesome. Honestly, when I first met him I thought he just cared about being "cool" or "chill" more than actually doing the work but it turns out he's a super solid missionary. He's really driven to work hard and honestly he has been one of the boldest companions I've been with. He is half Puerto Rican and is super proud of that even though he's from Lehi. Every time we talk to someone who turns out to be Puerto Rican he just loves them and talks to them about it forever. He also likes Phoenix and Two Door Cinema Club so we have that in common. He's a really genuine and good person, he's ridiculously passionate and pretty crazy, but I like him.

Savannah - What is your favorite flavor of Blue Bunny ice cream?

Savannah - I assume you're referring to Blue Bell, since that's the one that's unique to Texas? Blue Bell is phenomenal. I would have to say my favorite flavor is Cookie Two Step, which is cookie dough and cookies and creme combined. It sounds weird at first but when you actually try it it's so good. That's the only flavor I have been able to eat a half gallon of in four days. Too bad y'all will never get to try it. :)

Lucas - Has there been a time so far when you felt scared?

Lucas - I don't really get scared of things any more. We are generally in really safe areas and I'm not really scared to talk to people. It can be kind of scary to go into a lesson knowing that this person's conversion can really depend on what you say and how well you follow the Spirit. I wouldn't say it's really scary though, it just makes me feel really responsible. Back in Sealy there were some really ghetto areas but I never felt very unsafe. The only time i have felt really scared is when we were in this city called Eagle Lake looking for prospective elders and one of them was supposed to live in this house that was totally abandoned and falling apart. We knocked the door at like 8:45 at night too so that was pretty sketch. Other than that I can't really think of anything.

Eli - How many ties do you have and which one is your favorite?

Eli - My ties have multiplied a lot. I think I have around 35 right now. My favorite one is the floral tie that you can see me wearing in a lot of pictures I have sent. I got that one for free from a 60-year-old gay man in Cypress. It's pretty sweet.

Katy

Hey y'all.

Things are going great! I got transferred down to a ward called Morton
Ranch in Katy. It's a brand new ward that was created about one
transfer before I got there. Basically it's a part of 3 different
wards that all got split off and combined. The work was already going
really well when I got here so that was pretty exciting to see. We
have two baptismal dates named Alyssa and Laura who are gonna get
baptized on October 1 so I'm pretty stoked about that!! Oh, and it's
another bike area so it's a lot of the same old sweatiness and rain.
Gotta love that Houston weather. 😊

My new address is 2000 Westborough Drive, Katy, TX 77449. Write me letters! 💌

Oh, and this my new companion. His name is Elder Mattson and he's from
Lehi, Utah! #puertoricanpride

Always & forevermore: Cypress!

Well, we got transfer calls last night and I found out I'm out of
here. I LOVE Cypress. I can't even explain to y'all how much I'm going
to miss this place. But I'm really excited for the next step in my
mission. In this area the Lord refined me like crazy. He taught me so
much. Just like Sealy i feel like Cypress has completely changed me.
It has changed the course of my life for the better. I can't wait to
see all the change that happens wherever I'm going next because the
Lord has shown me here just how much I have that needs to change. I'm
so grateful for the time I have spent here and just for the
opportunity it was to learn and grow. I hope y'all are doing great
with school starting and everything; I don't have a whole lot else to

say besides those generalities so I'll just send some pictures. 🙌

This dude was a great companion.

Legendary Cy-Fair District at the temple. #nofilter just kidding.

Love these guys.