Here it comes. My Last Email. EVER!!!!

My title today comes from a weird investigator that the South Elders brought to church yesterday. We were sitting in gospel principles class this week and because there were a couple new faces we all went around and introduced ourselves. Most peoples were something along the lines of: I'm from here, my family is like this, or my hobbies are that. Then it gets to Robert... "I work 40 hours per week. I like movies. I have a DVD player at home" and just stops. haha!! it probably wasn't that funny, but we all just broke down laughing because we realized how weird some of our investigators are.

Another cool thing this week. We were at an investigator''s place and he had a buddy over who plays for Feyenoord, the best pro soccer team in the Netherlands. I asked this guy if he had an extra sticker I could have and he said, "nah, but I got something else. One second." then he gave me one of his game jerseys. Super Sick!

Based off request from my dad I have a list of 10 things I'm going to miss, 10 things I'm not going to miss, and 10 things I've learned on my mission. Here we go!...

10 Things I'll Miss

1. Sambal: A type of hot sauce that is way better than anything in America
2. The Netherlands/Dutch
3. Meeting People from all over the world
4. Riding Trains, trams, and buses
5. Ron and Esther/The Beutes
6. Inviting myself over to eat at peoples homes
7. Moments when you feel the spirit so strong after a contact or lesson
8. Pinda Saus (Peanut Sauce): Delicious
9. Dutch quirks: Always needing to be right, dish out sarcastic comments but cant take them, and more. dutch people are so odd that's why they are the best people
10. Each city's identity: Back at home you don't know really where Draper ends and Sandy begins (note not even sure if those are next to each other or not) everything flows together. Here in the Netherlands each city has its identity and there is a social and physical separation between each city. I love it. People are proud of where they are from and it gives each city a unique identity

10 Things I wont miss

1. Appointments not going through
2. Having a Companion by your side 24/7
3. The missionary rut: wake up at 6:30 leave apartment at 10:30 knock till 9. Doing the same thing everyday for 2 years gets a bit old.
4. Unnecessarily rude people
5. Working on Sundays and Holidays
6. Dutch Stairs: because homes are so small the stairs are tiny you can usually only fit half of your foot on there, so you go up the stairs sideways
7. Emailing...
8. Being more chase than a Nun
9. Getting called Jehovah Witnesses everyday
10. The disappointment that comes when someone drops you

10 Things I've learned:

1. How to deal with rejection
2. A restoration truly was needed: There is so much confusion over religion and no one seems to know where to find the truth.
3. Never eat a super spicy pepper. ever.
4. To be open to new ideas and people
5. Who I am: My strengths and weaknesses, interests, and goals
6. To love learning
7. Patience: there have been some companions...
8. How to relate to people
9. How to study
10. How to plan

See you guys Thursday! :)
--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission


Side note from MOM...Talyon flies into LAX this Thursday at 11:55am.  We realize that it is not a convenient airport or easy time, but for any family or friends that is interested or desires to welcome him back at the airport just send me reply to this email and I will get you all the flight and terminal information.  We're so excited to see him this week!!!!

This week will be very short because my last email was on Wednesday, and not a whole ton has happened since then. The miracle of the week actually piggy backs off of last week's letter. The lady that we met with the struggle of wanting to be a christian, but it is dangerous for her, well we had met her last Tuesday while knocking doors and she came to church on Sunday! And stayed all 3 hours! That's the first time on my mission that anyone has ever been found and come to church all on the same week. She liked it, but it was also a ton of information. She basically tried drinking out of a fire-hose. She wants to come next week and we should hopefully be able to meet with her sometime this week! What a tender mercy!

I also had to give a talk yesterday. I was going to give a talk last month but then I told the guy that it was one of the other elder's last Sunday, so I got out of it!  But as soon as Bishop heard about that, he made sure to schedule me before I left. It was great, except the bishop told me I'd be the last speaker and would speak for about 15 minutes but then I showed up and there was miscommunication and I only had to talk for 5 minutes, so I cut almost everything out of my talk. What I ended up with was 2 quick things I learned on my mission. 1. That through trials we grow closer to our heavenly father and 2. Life is a marathon not a sprint. We only need to get a bit better everyday. It goes back to my email about a month ago with the bridge. While I still need to improve at having meaningful prayers daily or studying the scriptures daily, if I look back to where I came from 2 years ago I've grown so much. Slow progression will always trump no Progression.

Speaking of Trump, it sounds like something happened with him again? The Dutch people have been acting like the world is already over. We shared the Book of Mormon with someone the other day and they said "This is great, but World War 3 will have started before I can finish reading this book, so I think it isn't a good use of my time". People here go crazy about him, its honestly hilarious.

That's it. Stay tuned for my last email ever, next week!

Love you guys!
--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

This last week was super crazy with tons of excitement and laughs. To begin, I'll start with some of the stupid things I said this week, as my mouth seemed to be working faster than my brain at times:

1. We contacted some Americans on my exchange with Elder Dearden and they told us they had no interest so I said "That's alright. Good Job." As we were walking away and immediately thought, "Good job? why did say good job?"
2. We were contacting people on Easter and I wished a guy a Merry Christmas.
3. When we walked into the temple they asked us what kind of session we would be doing and I told them that we were there to do a "bevestiging Dienst" (confirmations) instead of a "Begiftiging Dienst"(endowments) so they looked at me like I was crazy, until my companion realized what I had said.

To sum it up, words are hard...

Our Zone hit our Easter Egg Goal! finding 59 new investigators with our goal of 55. We were way stoked to hit it, especially because that means an average of 6 per companionship! We spiced up the pepper eating competition and people could nominate another companionship to do the pepper challenge with us and we happened to have a 3 way tie so 8 of us will be doing it together, including Sam Hunter, haha (We made sure that happened) we will do it on Monday.

We had an amazing day in Keukenhof, the dutch tulip gardens. I gave my "dying testimony" at the zone conference in the morning and yes I cried... Then I spend the day with Elder Dearden and ELder Bruneau who have become my best friends on the mission. I realized what kind of friendship I really want with people because of those two. One that is way chill and fun, but we also talk about spiritual things often and in depth. I Loved it.

Friday night we were able to hear from President Uchtdorf as he spoke to the members in our stake. [Side note I got to see the Beute family again (the bishop in Leiden) and also Tessa (the girl that we pranked the new office elders with)]. The main message President Uchtdorf had for us was "Keep the commandments and trust in God" but a couple other highlights were:

• The Sunday before Easter, Palm Sunday, Jesus entered into the city with crowds of believers shouting and praising him. Only a few days later as Christ was being Judged these "believers" were nowhere to be found. Are we Palm Sunday Saints or are we followers and believers no matter happens to us or others.
  
• Speaking about serving in our callings: We are not judges by the titles we've held, the amount of hours served, or the weight that was on our shoulders, but rather by the desires of our heart. There is no calling that is better than another, they are of equal importance if we serve right.
  
• A lady asked what do you do when you feel like you can't fulfill your calling like you should: "If you feel like you aren't doing enough, think about how I feel" and He continued to share that Satan is the one that wants us to feel inadequate and is usually a sign that we are doing what we should be doing.
  
• A funny one! Some lady asked if she should go to the Paris temple open hour with all the recent terrorist attacks: "Well the first thing I did after hearing about the attacks in Brussels and Paris was get on a plane to France! Why do you need to go to Paris anyway, you have a temple 5 minutes away from here" Shutdown! haha
  

Then to close we had a tender lesson last night with a lady from Turkey. She is Muslim, but also wants to be Christian and she shared with us parts of her history including that she was married and wanted to become Christian but her husband abused her and attempted to kill her because of it. Sadly we hear similar things like this often from refugees from the middle east.  My point has nothing to do with cultural politics, but rather a reminder for all Christians. There are those in the world that give up family, friends, and even their lives to follow Christ, and yet we complain when we have to wake up for 9am church or to go to a Tuesday night mutual activity. Do we really know what sacrifice is?

William Barclay, a Scottish minister, once said "love always involves sacrifice. And we do not really love Christ unless we are prepared to face His task and to take up His Cross" In Short, we can't learn to love Christ until we are ready to sacrifice our time, our habits, and our will for his. Pres. Uchtdorf also encouraged the saints here to look for ways to sacrifice a bit more and promised them they would grow stronger in faith because of it.

Thats my 2 cents, with 2 weeks left :)

--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

This week was a sick week for the Rotterdam zone! Everyone in the zone has been going hard and found 34 new investigators last week! That means nothing until you know that in the last year the next highest number of new investigators was only 22, so we got 150% of that!  We need to find 14 this week to hit our goal for the "Easter Egg Hunt" If they do that then Elder Williams and I, along with 2 other elders, have to eat these peppers from Suriname called the Madame Jeanette, which is one of the hottest that you can find in the Netherlands, haha, I'm getting stoked!

Nancy was super busy this week and for the next couple weeks so all we could do was share a quick Mormon Message Video with her, but she is still positive. This week we got a part member family to church. The Guy is inactive and the wife isn't a member. Not only did they come with their 5 kids but they brought their cousin who is also a less active and she brought her boyfriend who isn't a member. We had the funniest investigators/gospel principles class ever. To give you some background the Islands of Aruba and Curacao are both dutch colonies so they grow up speaking dutch in school but they speak Spanish at home. So our investigators/returning members consisted of several people from Aruba, Curacao, Angola (Portuguese speaking Africa), Peru, Netherlands, and the missionaries from the states. The 4 elders taught the restoration in 4 different languages. Elder O'Campo would ask a question is Spanish and then someone would respond in Dutch and the next would make a comment in English or Portuguese, haha! So much fun!

Yesterday Elder Williams and I happened to walk into a Ghanaian party while knocking doors so we got invited in to eat! It was sick all the guys there were in these African toga type things, straight out of Ghana. I love Africans.

And that's all i got for you this week. This next week is going to be sick! Tomorrow we go to the Tulip gardens as a mission, Friday I go back to Leiden on exchanges with Elder Dearden, Friday night we get to go to a fireside with President Uchdorf who is coming to speak to the Rotterdam and Den Haag Stakes, and Saturday morning we are going to the temple for my last time in the Netherlands! Should fly by! I cant wait to see you guys especially Braylin! I miss you the most, baby girl!!


Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

What an amazing weekend of Conference! I really like it this time, more than any other time in my life. I think it's because I didn't really pay that good of attention until my mission and the last 3 on my mission have been great but if it didn't talk about something that related to missionary work it didn't really apply, whereas now everything I hear applies! I'm actually getting kinda pumped to attempt some family history work, Dad you need to show me how it goes when I get back. I loved President Uchtdorf's talk about leadership in the priesthood session, and I didn't fall asleep during Elder Ballards talk so I'd call it a pretty successful conference! :)

I am really running out of steam to write these weeklys...

Our biggest highlight of the week was finding this lady Nancy and being able to teach her. We were knocking doors a week and a half ago and I saw this lady on the street and jokingly said to Elder Williams "Watch this, I'm going to go get us a lesson" and to my utter surprise she was actually interested haha! We went to her place on Monday night and shared the restoration with her. When we brought out the Book Of Mormon and started telling her it was more scripture from God she was blown away. Her Eyes were completely fixed on the book and we just had a moment of silence as she stared, and we said "Special, right?" and she responded "Yeah. Very special." Super tender moment. Can't wait to teach her in a couple days!

Sorry that's all you're getting from me this week!


Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

This week was pretty anti-climatic. On Monday Elder Dearden had to go to the office for the Monday meetings (I miss those!) so Elder Hunter and his comp babysat me for the day. It worked out perfectly because that happened to be the day that the North elders had a dinner appointment with Aunt Michelle's friend. They were awesome and it was so nice to be with Americans. Americans are so much more caring and nice than Dutch people :) I'm pretty excited to get back to an American ward, there is something about the gospel that just doesn't seem to translate into Dutch or the dutch culture, you can just feel it when talking to American members or thinking back to my time in the American ward in Heerlen. We really have a lot to be thankful for!

Not a whole lot happened this week. Most of our lessons didn't go through again, so we only ended up with 1 all week, but we should have some stuff set up for next week. Right now we are preparing for a zone conference about the Church's new Easter video, which comes out on March 31st and is amazing! Along with that all zones have been asked to have a new investigator challenge/goal for our zones. Ours went so well last transfer that they are trying to make it a mission thing! This time the theme is The Easter Egg Hunt, and if we reach our goal I think Elder Williams and I are going to be downing some insanely hot peppers at zone p-day and everyone can enjoy us in pain.

Today's spiritual thought comes from a hymn again! Funny because hymns were the last thing I'd listen to before my mission.

The famous song "Praise to the Man", a hymn talking about the life and mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith, was written by W. W. Phelps, who's the author of many LDS hymns. While in Missouri, W W Phelps was reprimanded for the misuse of church funds and for selling church property without permission. This chastisement lead W W Phelps out of the church and turned him against the church. In 1838 Phelps had a change of heart and wrote to the Prophet Joseph Smith asking for forgiveness, which Joseph freely gave. After the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, W. W. Phelps penned the words to the hymn "Praise to the Man" including the following lines as the chorus:

Hail to the Prophet, ascended to heaven!
Traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain.
Mingling with Gods, he can plan for his brethren;
Death cannot conquer the hero again.

W. W. Phelps, who at one time was a traitor himself, wrote of those that would fight against the prophet. I have no doubt that Phelps would not have used the word traitor if he had not forgiven himself of his past mistakes. We all have moments when we do not fully follow Gods commandments, and we must not only receive forgiveness from God but we need to learn to forgive ourselves as well!

--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

That day has come, I'm on my last transfer! Pretty exciting! So I'm staying in Rotterdam South for another transfer but with a new companion. I'm getting Elder Connor Williams. I think he's from Utah but that's usually just a safe bet in our mission. Dearden is leaving but we both expected him to leave after that transfer. It was a great reunion, but I think it's good for me to get someone new for my last transfer. It was super successful with Elder Dearden though. We went hard and found twice as many gators (investigators) as either of us had ever found in a transfer. The Zone reached our goal for gators! So in 2.5 weeks we found 53 investigators among the 10 companionships, which was sick!
This week was great, but not really note worthy. We found a few new investigators but no one that was actually very solid.
This week we went back to this Bulgarian couple and we happened to show up when they had like 3 friends over. It was crazy busy over there. We pulled out some pamphlets in Bulgarian and they went crazy for it. They were so pumped when they saw the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet because now they are convinced that we are evangelicals and promised to come to church every Sunday, hahah we tried to explain that we aren't Evangelicals but they didn't understand us. What ever gets people to church right?? ;)
Well I have to type all this on the phone because the computers aren't working this week so I'm going to keep it short. Love you guys!
--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

We broke out of the 1 good week- 1 bad week cycle this week and had our 2nd straight good week. haha It's hard because people can be pretty flaky, but we are starting to find some people that are pretty consistent.

A laugh:
Often times when we speak with college aged people we contact them in English because they think it's sick when Americans speak English to them and it forces them to listen. Usually when we speak dutch, the dutch person controls the conversation because they are better at speaking but that totally gets reversed when we speak English! Anyways, we contacted this girl in English and she was pretty interested but then halfway through the conversation she figured out we spoke dutch and flipped out. ha ha. She didn't believe we were Americans or from a church, so we spent the next few minutes showing her our residency cards and ministerial certificates to keep her from calling the cops. After putting out the fire she ended up setting an appointment up with us, but she was really scared. The struggles of working in the ghettos.

The Lows:
We got dropped by our Ex-Jehovah Witness guy because he claimed that we don't believe in heaven or something, and we showed him a scripture that supported his beliefs, but he wouldn't listen. Almost 100% positive that he found something bad about us online and was looking for an excuse to stop meeting with us. Like I always "Search and ye shall find" is true for all things. If you look for the bad you will find the bad, but if you look for the truth you will also find the truth.  

We won't be meeting with some of our favorite investigators this week because everyone is busy with work. Not the end of the world

The Highs:

While planning for our week we felt the need to pick a new neighborhood to work in, so we looked on the map and google to scope some places out and we both really felt like we needed to go to this particular street not too far from our apartment. We got in the car and headed there as soon as planning was over and stumbled upon a miracle! We found a girl that was baptized as a young teenager (8 years ago) but had since moved and no one knew where she lived because she was inactive at the time of her move. She is in her young 20s and about to have her first child. We should be going there this week to  get to know her!

The zone has been killing it with new investigators. We now have 32 gators out of our goal of 45. This is the last week so we will have to work hard to reach our goal!

This week we did service as part of the Netherlands's National Service Day. We built a park with a sand pit and man was it tough work! We had to move 1 ton of sand to the pit, an actual ton,--not just an exaggeration. I took a least 30 full wheel barrels full of sand from the truck to the park. exhausting. Luckily there were 4-5 others that were doing it as well. One thing I learned is the work ethic of a bunch of Mormon Missionaries is incomparable to a bunch of Dutch College Kids. We showed up and started shoveling and wheel barreling and etc for 3 hours straight while they took a 30 min break every 30 mins... (also note: the dutch guys were just painting, so the easy stuff.)  We ate lunch then went straight back to it for another 3 hours. So even though they think we are crazy for coming to this county to preach about Christ, at the very least we have definitely learned how to work.

We got an investigator to church yesterday! That's huge! I think I've only gotten 3-4 people to come to church my whole mission. This lady is a super sweet mother of 2 from Suriname and we felt like the talks were perfect for her. All 3 speakers were woman and the last was the Young Woman's President who spoke about what they teach the youth and it was perfect because her children are 14 and 10. The members reached out to her perfectly. She left after the 1st hour, but she said next time she wants to bring her children with her, so in a couple weeks she should be back!

It's crazy hard to believe that its almost my last transfer! Ill finish strong and be much ready to come home!


Was a great week!

Love you guys!
--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

Good Morning Family and Friends,

This week was a true 180 degree turn around from last week. That was much needed. This week Elder Dearden and I had the opportunity to lead a great zone conference. President Bunnell talked about faith and the assistants talked about accountability, which were both great lead ins to our presentation. Our presentation was on Gator Hunting.  Specifically new investi-GATORS. We lead a pretty hype presentation and challenged the Zone to raise their vision and get 45 new investigators in the next 2.5 weeks. We have 10 companionships and the average per week is usually around 10 gators, so it is a pretty high mark. It has been awesome to see that people are really getting behind it. Most of the zone members now talk about gators or potential gators. In the first half week we've already managed to find us 17 gators as a group! So we are going to continue to search the swamp for more gators this coming week. (Side Note for the Hunter Family: They should be proud of their son he pulled in 6 gators in the first half week. He's a hard worker)

We had a great lesson with Merril, who is a lady from Suriname that we found a few weeks ago. She invited her kids to join in the lesson this week, so we did a special lesson with a game about prayer and the holy ghost. We invited her to come to church this coming week so hopefully that happens. We meet with her on Tuesday so we still have a lesson to re-invite/confirm that she is coming on Sunday.

Gator Miracles:

1. We met this cute young couple that is from Bulgaria. They are in their mid 20s and are expecting their first baby in a few months. We told them that we had a book about Jesus and they wanted it! So yesterday we brought it by and they invited themselves to church this coming Sunday. There is still a language barrier there but we told them that we had pamphlets in Bulgarian for them if they come on Sunday. They are so nice as well. They invited us over to eat in a few weeks. Bulgarians are great, if only they spoke any English or Dutch... haha

2. Miguel: We met this guy a few weeks ago and I honestly didn't think our appointment would go through because we have so many people that "want" to listen to us but aren't there when our appointment comes around. Despite my lack of faith, Miguel was there! He is from Portugal and had an experience of getting a blessing from Mormons when he was 4 and deathly sick. As you expected, he recovered, even when doctors didn't give him a chance, and is here 30 years later as a father of a cute 4 year old. He seems very prepared because he knows lots about the bible, and believes strongly that there is only one true church. He told us several times that he's learned of several churches but he still hasn't found the true church. We are way excited to work with him in the coming weeks. (side note: can you believe that I only have 2 months left? Not much longer!)

We going to make like Steve Irwin and go Crocodile hunting!

Love you guys!

--

Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission

Every summer as High School (and Higher level) football teams get ready for the start of their season in the fall they have a week dedicated to football. This week consists of 2 practices a day for 3-4 hours each, and is often referred to as Hell Week. While missionary work isn't anything like football, we did experience our own version of "hell week" as all but 1 of our 17 lessons cancelled on us. It was pretty frustrating honestly, especially after how amazing the last 2 weeks have been. It was a reminder that missionary work is hard, but you just got to keep pushing through. This Is Talyon Perry Doctrine but I believe that, like in football, we need to have a Hell Week every now and again to be able to appreciate how great life can be and to recognize the tender mercies in our lives. While this week stunk, it did give me and Elder Dearden the chance to reflect on our work and to make goals to improve our finding/teaching in these coming weeks.

Unfortunately this week i don't really have any miracle to share so I'll leave with a spiritual thought based on repentance from something that happened this week.

Early this week Elder Dearden and I decided to go for a run, which in itself was repentance for my lack of exercise over my mission, haha. We planned to do a roughly 3 mile run to the Erasmus Bridge, which is one of the most famous parts of the city. The first half of the run was all weaving through side streets, but the last half (so roughly 1.5 miles) was on this straight road heading toward the Erasmus Bridge. As we were running head on to the bridge Elder Dearden made a comment about how when you run with the goal straight ahead of you it feels like it takes 3x as long to get there. This principle made me reflect on repentance and my mission. Repentance means only that we change in order to reach our end goal of becoming perfect like our Heavenly Father. In most cases, this means simply that we make small corrections in our lives; like our daily prayer habits, cleaning up our messes, and trying not to judge others. Eternal Life is our Erasmus Bridge and repentance is the strides that we need to take in order to get to the end goal. Often Perfection can seem like the Erasmus Bridge, in our sights but out of reach. I have seen on my mission that as time goes on I continue to run towards the goal but I don't feel like it is any closer no matter how long I've been running at it. I've learned that sometimes our perspective of progress gets distorted because we don't feel like we are getting any closer to our goal, but instead of focusing on our end goal, I would suggest that we need to look at progression in other ways. My suggestions are that instead of focusing on the big goal we should make smaller goals that are going to help us to get to the finish line. During the run I first thought "I'm never going to be  able to run all the way to the bridge without taking a break" but what helped me to be able to reach my goal was telling myself "I just need to run to that building." or "Just to the tram stop" As we see ourselves achieving these small goals they give us the confidence to be able to reach our big and eternal goal. Another suggestion is not to be afraid to look back. Don't live in the past, but look back. Often when I don't feel like I've grown or changed I take a few minutes to remember what I was like before my mission or as a greeny. While I may not see a huge change every day, I can see a change from where I was when I started and where I am now.

Hopefully that may help you to reach your goals!

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Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission