Elder Samuel Barlow - Florida Jacksonille Mission

This week has gone by really fast and usually that's a sign that lots of stuff happened but nope we had a lot of stuff almost happen. So we will move on to next week and try a little harder to get things moving. One thought I had this week was the relationship between pondering and prayer. Someone asked how do you get to know someone? The answer is you spend time with them, so it is no different with our heavenly father we need to spend time talking to him everyday to be able to build a relationship with him. And I had many reminders this week from the scriptures and the spirit that as we pray we are literally talking to our father in heaven and need to speak with him as we would if he was standing in front of us. I can't say how many times I have stopped myself in the middle of a prayer this week and said "wow that sucked, I didn't even say anything meaningful" and start again. So as I am trying to have more sincere prayers I encourage all of you to do the sam...

This week flew by but it also had a lot of disappointments. We had lots of appointments of appointments fall through. But I know that God is aware of each of us and our individual feelings and problems. Because this week was frustrating but on Sunday, fast Sunday, we just got done with studies after church and we were going to break our fast and eat dinner. But I felt like we should go visit one person before we ate, so we left and met Diane right as she was leaving and it was so needed for us to be there in that moment. She told us about all the things going wrong in her life and that she has looked at so many churches but never found peace. We said a prayer with her gave her a book of mormon and made an appointment for  Saturday. She cried as we were talking and I could feel the spirit so strongly. Missions are so hard and I have got rejected a lot but those few experiences make it all worth it.  I just want to bear testimony that this gospel is true and the book of m...

Hey ya'll! This week has been very different from the rest of my mission. Monday and Tuesday were a lot of goodbyes to different missionaries and families in the ward. Julington Creek was awesome and I really hope I can go back at the end of my mission. So high Springs. Not as rural as I thought, more like an old town with lots of ghetto parts and cinderblock houses. It is really slow when it comes to missionary work but I'm excited to go and get it moving. On Wednesday I got in a van with a bunch of other missionaries to get to my new area. I got talked into trying pure coconut water and I'll just say that it tastes how you would think baby spit up tastes, yeah sorry for putting that taste into your mouth but that's the only way I can describe it. It would probably be bearable if it was in an actual coconut but out of a bottle I'm not touching it. My Companion is Elder Neunswander he is from Dallas Texas and is pretty cool. He's six weeks in so I'm trying t...

This week was cool. We got transfer calls on Saturday and I am going to be leaving after 6 months in Julington. My new are is in the boonies so I am excited to see what weird stuff is going to happen lol. But my new companion is elder Neunswander and he's been out for only 2 months so I'm pumped to go out there and serve. It's sad to say goodbye to all the ward but I'm ready for new experiences. If anyone hasn't listened to the new 6 episode podcast on the restoration go do it it has some really good things. If you want you can skip the 6th it talks about foliage and forestry and how the Grove is the same and how it's not, really boring but the rest of it is a testimony builder so go listen to it! Love you all Elder Barlow Me and peeps and Cafe rio(courtesy of sister handy cause there's only one in Orlando and she went to the temple and brought me one back 🏿) 

This week was pretty good and I can't believe we are almost halfway through February. Thursday we went to Jackies to help her out and she had us spread a ton of sand in the horses stalls. This sand was straight from the ocean so we had a fun time gathering huge shells but it was disappointing that we didn't find any shark teeth.  Friday we went to a practice for a concert called Genesis. They do it in the downtown ward of Jax and invite a bunch of other churches to celebrate black history month. So the missionaries got to be in a choir and sing a couple songs but we only had this day to practice and only for two hours so we were all excited to see how it would turn out.  Saturday we went and taught Walt in the morning and he is very stubborn. It seems like we are making progress and then he'll say something and we'll be back to square one. But if nothing else we are able to help out his wife and son nick who are members but somewhat less active. Then we had sports d...

This week was pretty cool. We went to this awesome food place called Hurricane and I got the Macdaddy burger which was awesome it had fried Mac and cheese on the burger so lots of cheesy goodness. On the topic of food this week we had 3 different member dinners cancel in a row and they each sent us a pizza so we had three nights of pizza but each of them were from a different place. Unfortunately pizza hut was last and its already not that good to begin with so I was kinda done by then. We went to a family that just moved into our ward and they have three little boys who are the funniest. The oldest was trying to be good but wanted to play with toys, the middle child showed us all of his toys right during our spiritual thought, the youngest who is about 1 year old would not stop trying to talk to us the entire time. It was great.  We went straight to a ward basketball night becasue they have an inactive member who likes to play basketball but they don't so they asked if we cou...