Elder Ben Hilburn: For Floor Installation: Call 1-800-Elder Hilburn

As the title says, if y'all need someone to put in your flooring, IM YOUR MAN. This past week we were able to help out a less active family (The Baugh Family) in our branch that is remodeling their house and they were putting in wood floors. We stopped by to see if they needed any help and sure enough they invited us back to help them put in their floors! This will be my third floor installation project on my mission.,haha. I don’t know what Heavenly Father is trying to tell me but I sure hope he's not trying to tell me what my future career is. I like doing this as service on my mission but sure don’t want to be doing this for my livelihood... It has been a fun project though on the mish for sure. I have learned a lot of skills that I definitely would have never learned if I wasn't out here on my mission being put in these circumstances so in that way I know for a fact that I am here for a reason. And, because I love it! I know that Heavenly Father guided us to stop by this families home to see how they were doing and see if they needed any help. They have been going through a hard time with this remodeling project and they are also crunched for time and money. I know without a shadow of a doubt that Heavenly Father placed us there at that exact moment so that we could help them as much as we could. The husband even told us he took his only week of vacation this past week so he could do as much as he could at the house and he won’t have anymore vacation time for the rest of the year! My comp and I felt so blessed to have this cool experience!

The week of my birthday I had the flu so I wasn't able to accomplish much. I read a lot from the scriptures that week! Haha. When you’re stuck in an apartment with nothing to do you seem to just want to read the scriptures or listen to Conference talks! I learned a whole lot that week! Also never thought I'd see myself doing that but that's how I know I've changed! And changed for the better! Part of the sick week we were on exchanges and I was with Elder Hughes in his area. I wasn't planning on being sick the entire week but my body thought otherwise. So I ended up staying in that area till Thursday afternoon being sick haha. It was okay Elder Hughes took great care of me.

Funny story, so every transfer we are allowed to have what is called a "District P-Day" which means we can get together as an entire District on P-Day and do a fun adventure together. What this basically just means for us was we could hang out with the Sister missionaries lol. Since we already are usually together with the Marion Elders every Monday. So we were just allowed to get together, just the six of us haha. Yeah it is a small district lol. Anyway, we grouped up down in the city of Anderson which is the Sisters area and also the biggest "city" there is in our district so there was more stuff to do there. We heard about the national park that people said was pretty cool so we all decided to go to the national park and go on a little hike.(not really a hike because there is no such thing as elevation in Indiana) It was a good time but as we were walking back to the car we just decided to walk on the road back to the car and we see this man get out of his truck and start taking pictures of us as a group. We all were like what the heck and who is the creepy old dude doing taking pictures of us. We just decided to let it go. The old man hops back in his car and drives a little farther down the road but then stops again. And sure enough gets out of his car and starts to take pictures of us again. We were finally close enough to be able to go over to him and ask him what he was doing. Well sure enough, he told us he was from "The Hearald Bulletin" which is the local newspaper. He went on to tell us that he was trying to take a cool picture of us walking in the park so that he could put us in the paper for the next day. All of us were like, oh dang that's dope haha. We told him who we were and what we were doing in Indiana for two years. He was pretty impressed and told us to look for tomorrow’s newspaper! Sure enough WE MADE IT. So thought that was pretty dope. Kinda funny but cool lol.

A couple weeks ago we were walking around our little town of Alexandria trying to just find someone to talk to and we ran into this guy Chad W. We stopped to talk to him for a little bit and had just a brief but nice conversation with the man. We tried to ask him if he would be interested in hearing a message about Christ but he avoided it and basically said he wasn't interested. So we didn’t try to push it on him anymore. I just asked him if I could leave him a card with our names and phone number on it and we told him if there was anything we could help with we told him to give us a call. He said okay and thanked us and we went our separate ways. I didn’t think too much about that encounter really the rest of the day because ever since I have been on my mission I've have never had someone call or text us back when we just gave them our number without getting theirs. Well that all changed that day! He actually texted us!! He texted us basically to thank us for talking to him and he told us that he was "grateful to talk to two young men who have their heads on straight, that's what this world needs more of" He went on and said a couple of other nice things. After that we just texted him back and reassured him if there was really anything we could do, to please let us know. About two days later, he texts us AGAIN!! This time he wanted to let us know that he had moved to the neighboring town of Marion and he wanted to let us know that if we would be interested in meeting(which no duh of course haha) that he would like to meet up with us again and just have a discussion!!! Now this is a bittersweet moment because obviously its awesome that he wants to meet with us again, BUT, that ain't our area so we had to refer him to the Elders serving in Marion but all in all it is pretty cool and I hope he progresses!

Yesterday on Sunday we were able to have a lesson with someone new! That was pretty exciting because we hadn't had a lesson with someone new in a while so this was a blessing. It was cool that we were able to meet with someone new but this guy wasn't super receptive. We basically just had a discussion about religion as a whole for about the first hour. We asked him if it would be okay if we just shared with him a unique message about Jesus Christ and he gladly let us. So we pulled out the Resto of course haha. After we taught him he basically told us that he would be willing to read from the Book of Mormon but he claims "the bible is the only word of God" and how he doesn’t think the Book of Mormon is really a true testament of Jesus Christ. But, we did our part of inviting him to read from it and pray about it. We got a return appointment with him for next Sunday so hopefully he has read it and prayed about it. We will see!

Sorry everyone that it had been so long since I have written an email! But that is why I wrote this extra long email! So I could make up for the past couple of weeks lol

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes, it was an okay birthday haha. As you know I was sick so that was a bummer

Well I hope y'all have a good week and make sure y'all are preparing for General Conference that is coming up in less than a month!!! CRAZY STUFF BOUTA HAPPEN!!

love y'all and don’t forget to SEND IT FOR THE LORD

ELDER HILBURN