Blizzard in Southern Cal

It has been a great but busy week! In fact it has been so busy this month we really need to start cutting some things out. We had Mission Leadership Council again on Thursday which was alright. It was all good stuff and the spirit in the meeting was fantastic and it was edifying but at the same time it was just so basic and dry that it became very hard to stay focused. It also was 8 hours long. That's never helpful. Anyway, we have spent this last few days preparing with the things we learned on how we can help our Zone with Zone Training Meeting tomorrow. It should go good but it is coming up fast.

            We got a new High Counselor over Missionary work here in Santa Margarita. Bro Hobbins is so awesome! He helped us figure out how we can get these Christmas activities a little more productive with finding those who want us to teach. We are working close with him and it is going to really be great. We have set a goal and committed to doubling baptisms in the zone next year with him.

            We had many more choir performances this week. We were able to perform in Los Alisos Sacrament meeting where there wasn't a dry tear in the chapel and it was really remarkable to see how strong the spirit was present with us. Brother Huntington the world renowned bass was even in tears and impressed! We also got to sing in Laguna Beach and Christmas Carol there which was fun cause people there are crazy indeed!

Elders Gemperline and Hegland touring Blizzard

            NOW FOR THE EXCITING PART OF MY EMAIL. WE WENT TO BLIZZARD TODAY! It was so fun! Like a dream come true. I couldn't believe it was actually happening. We showed up and they had to do a background check on both of us at the gate with armed guards. Then they finally let us in and valet-ed our car. We got up the the  head desk and they made us sign all these confidentiality forms and finally let us in to see Jayson. He gave us a VIP tour of the campus. So cool! We got to go through the museum and see the library which are included on the usual tour. Then he called the Team 1 manager and got the permission to take us into the "Top Secret" section of the campus and I got to walk around the Team 1 stomping grounds. Team 1 being the StarCraft  team. I was introduced to the head Audio Director of Blizzard. The guys who balance the units, a few graphic artists at work who were amazing, and the team manager in the end. I was telling the team manager how much I loved StarCraft II and how I hadn't been able to play Heart of the Swarm yet because I was on a mission. He told me he would give me one of his copies and sign it. Jaw Drops.  One of the coolest parts though was when Jayson who is the Lead Composer for Blizzard took us to his office and showed us the 100's of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and took us into the actual recording studio and mixer room. He showed us how he writes the music and comes up with the ideas and then records them. He honestly has probably one of the coolest jobs in the world. One of his co-workers then offered us an internship after our missions. Pretty silly but really cool! Elder Hegland keeps making fun of me for being so geeky and yes it is true. one of the 6 pillars for Blizzard is "Embrace your inner geek." It's written in their sidewalk. What a silly place.

 Merry Christmas all! 

--Elder Gemperline

BFF x3

Well transfers were exciting! I had some spiritual manifestations just before the meeting and everyone went where I thought they would! Elder Donohue went to my old Laguna Hills ward and Elder Shiu to Newport Beach again. Then the final and last thing! I got the companion I thought I might, but it was also just wishful thinking! Guess you'll just have to find out through the pictures I send. 3rd times a charm eh? :D super happy.

Thanksgiving was good. We had a fantastic dinner at the Thomas home in Coto de Caza. They invited over our entire district so it was a little district party of 10 missionaries. We played badmiton and shuffle board and all sorts of games. 

My  companion and I also got to go to Starbucks this week to see Jayson Hayes. Yup... Two missionaries at Starbucks with a crazy awesome Blizzard gamer guy... HEY! Dont' judge me. Their Apple Cider is amazing K? Anyway, we tried our best to get him to start asking questions while we also asked him questions. He has worked for Valve and Blizzard. He wrote all the music for the Protoss Campaign in Brood War. His wife is the narrator voice, the voice of medic, vocie of the wraith and "Nuclear Launch Detected." He is the voice of the "corossair, the overlord, the firebat and much more. He offered us a tour of Blizzard and President gave us the ok to go so I might be going next week! Yippie!

Well I'm loving life. Everything is looking mighty fine for this Christmas season. I might even get to go back to Temecula for a night! We shall see. Love you all! 

--Elder Gemperline

Fantasy Zone   November 21, 2013  Taylor Gemperline

            Missionaries don't play fantasy football. They play fantasy zone. We have spent so much time this week trying to gather information on what might happen tomorrow at transfers. Before we got transfer calls we already knew Elder Donohue and Elder Shiu would be leaving, who the AP would be and ... We still don't know who my next companion is going to be but it is a good chance it will be ELDER HEGLAND OR ELDER GREMILLION! You should be acquainted to E. Hegland and E. Gremillion is from my home stake in Farmington! It could be neither though. You never know.    Well we are out of time because of transfer day but here is a cool story.

           
 I'm doing well.  I’m having to say bye to my comps.

OH! We sang as a choir at a Methodist church in Laguna Beach yesterday. It was fantastic! There were a few other pastors of other churches that showed up just to see what the fuss was about with this mission choir and before the end of the night we had 8 pastors asking us to come to their congregations. We are booked out every Sunday until March now. HOLY COW! It has been a great success. One particular pastor from the Unitarian Universalist Church said "They are not real people" Referring to us because of the way we acted and conducted ourselves.  Quite a compliment right? 

--Elder Gemperline

Keeping it on Oct 26th 2013

Enjoying the days as they go by as always. President told Elder Shiu and I we need to be having fun or we won't stay ZL's for long. Better be obedient! DODGEBALL IN THE APARTMENT! = sprained finger.

We had many miracle happen this week.  

 We had a fun week where Elder Shiu went on exchanges and Elder Donohue and I went out and were able to get to know the area much better. We hit up a lot of the potentials lists and Elder Donohue learned a thing or two about appointments falling through that he has never known before. Haha he has had a pretty easy first part of his mission.

I'm often times feeling like a third wheel in the companionship because my companions have been together for so much longer but I'm just sucking it up and dealing with it as I should. Force my way into things and they understand. Not a problem even worth worrying about.

I got some awesome new shades to wear in the car when I drive everywhere. AHHHHhhhhh ya. Well out of time. Peace!

Oh and Happy HALLOWEEN!

This letter is dedicated to Granny Smith who I never find time to reply to but love dearly. :p

Into the Mixer

Well this throws me into the mixer. I have been called to be a Zone Leader in the Rancho Santa Margarita Stake. It is a pretty neat area. We work in the Santa Margarita Ward which includes the neighborhood Coto de Caza. It is the most up scale, pricey, gated community that I know of in Southern California.  A famous NBA player lived here until he got too many complaints about his helicopter being too much noise for the rest of the neighborhood. The bad part about it is we are not allowed to talk to ANYONE or we get kicked out. Its also basically covering 2 sides of the Las Flores area. I can see the Webber's house from here! We can only go to homes of members and those who we have appointments with. Despite the difficulties though we had 2 baptisms this last Saturday that were just marvelous and we will be having 3 more before the end of November if everything goes according to plan. It is super exciting!

I am happy to say that I also love my companions.  My Co-Zone Leader  is from Hong Kong. His first language is of course Cantonese but he also knows Mandarin and now English.  He is SUPER smart. Probably one of the smartest persons I've ever talked to. We have very different styles of leading people but I think we will be great together and I love him. Together we are training an Elder from Lehi Utah. He is a good ol' Utah boy. He is basically like Sam Callister for those of you who know him in personality and mannerisms. He is doing great as a new missionary. The bad thing is we expect  way too much of him sometimes. We dish a lot on him and he takes it and grows.

Well being a ZL is different. I've spent maybe 6 hours this week actually out doing missionary work. Otherwise it is running to the mission office for forms, going to District meetings of different District Leaders. Holding our own zone meetings. Going to meetings with the stake leaders. I mean for goodness sakes I put 500+ miles on our car this week! I am going to go buy myself some sun glasses now. :P At least I am 1 of 7 companionships that  has a full-time car. Elder Kempton my DL way back when is in my Zone as well as other missionary friends I have meet in the past but I am really looking forward to getting to know them all a lot better. I can tell I'm going to have to mentally exert myself and be ready for the spirit more than ever before. President Orgill needs our help in getting the Carlsbad/Anaheim culture to go away and an Irvine culture to form.

Well I would like to share one more experience. Saturday we had a baptism in our area.  At 7 in the morning a pipe that had burst was found in the room of the baptismal font at the Stk Cntr. Our investigators were still sick and it was just getting crazy how much opposition there was trying to get the baptism to loose its power.  A plumber fixed the leak and the investigators got well enough to come after much prayer and then  we got there to set up. Everyone came in and thing seemed to be going well. We planned to set up a DVD to show during the changing period after the ordinance. Elder D gave an intro to the video and bore his testimony on the restoration. When he was done I clicked the play button and the TV flickered and went out. We tried for about 3-4 minutes to figure out what was wrong in front of the 70-80 people but nothing was working. It worked 5 minutes ago darn it! I finally just dropped it all and went up on the pulpit and looked blankly at the audience. "well.... I guess I'll describe what the video says." I then recited for 12-15 minutes the Joseph Smith story in detail from the start. I went through as delicately as I could. I gave the first vision and set it up and it ended up being a GREAT thing to bring the spirit. We had investigators there who said they were very touched. It was also a great introduction to the ward. I am really happy here and will see much success. Until then though, got to go!  Love ya. 

--Elder Gemperline

Bounce

Well this week was a game changer. I got the call on Saturday night that I'm getting transferred again. I've only been here 6 weeks with Elder Swejkoski and Elder Bartell. Now Elder Bartell and I are leaving again. There is definitely a good reason. We just don't know what that reason is. Haha in fact 5 of the 8 Elders in my district are getting transferred. 4 of them have only been here 6 weeks. It’s going to be a crazy transfer meeting tonight. 

I had a good last week here though. We had Elder Falabella of the 70 come and visit our mission. It was awesome to be able to rub shoulders again with a GA. He taught us all about a strew of things. I can't really point out the overarching theme but I guess if I had to it would be doing missionary work through Family History invitations. It was a very revelatory meeting and I got lots of answers to questions and pages and pages of notes to look through when I can find the time. 

We had a fantastic experience Friday night . I turned a corner and saw a young man washing his car and decided to go talk to him about it. It’s a fun little car and one I actually know some things about thanks to Elder Bunker and after getting to know the kid and his plans to have the car for a few months he said he would have to give it up after that. I asked what then and he explained that he was going to join the Marine Corps. He talked about all he had left to do to join is "swear in" and graduate High School. Well I took the opportunity to talk to him about how he feels a relationship with God could help him in the battlefield. It was a perfectly smooth transition and after talking about his relationship with God helping him we shared a few scriptures in the B of M that showed him the protection and comfort that could come from having the gospel while away from home. We talked about how the fore-front of that relationship with God would be making a promise with him which is baptism. He agreed with an invitation from us to be baptized in November. It was very exciting! It was just as our leaders and Elder Falabella have instructed. The greatest expression of love we can give as missionaries to our investigators is the invitation to be baptized. 

Saying good-bye to the Kubats was pretty hard. They are an awesome family, as many families I have met have been. Bro Kubat is just so in tune with what the Lord wants done with the work here in LH3. I have seen him countless times, again and again, gain an impression on our investigators and carry it out with diligence to see such great blessings reaped from it. I will be leaving this ward with the potential to baptize 5-6 people before the end of the year. 

Praying Mantis Wars are scary and gross and cool. Boys will always be boys. We made a giant tent of blankets (again) and had a "campout" in the living room 2 nights ago which was fun. It rained HARDCORE this Wednesday. We were in the rain for a total of about.... 8 seconds and we were drenched from head to toe! There was a river in the street shin high and we spent a lot of the night picking up people's trashcans that had been washed away. It was pretty awesome! 

Well I'll talk to you in my next area! More pictures but I already packed the camera cord so later. Thx! ttfn

--Elder Gemperline

  

General Conference is always a treat. I really soaked it up and just ate every word given. I felt like I really walked out of the meetings with just such a determination to be better and like I just hadn't given my all quite yet. I also walked out with a full belly because of our awesome zone lunch but that is another story. 

I went to the first official Irvine Mission Choir meeting last Wednesday as an official member. It was fun but I feel like I'm getting lost at the moment. Suddenly choir classes would have come in handy. Haha good thing most of the choir is lost with me. :P

Last Tuesday night we found a Praying Mantis in our bathroom. We captured it and named it "She-Bear" after the story of the she-bears eating the kids after they laughed at Elisha's bald head. We keep it on our front porch and feed it crickets and Daddy long legs. It's really disgusting to be honest but it really entertains my companions  :P. 

We had a rough lesson this week. . He has taken discussions with missionaries for almost 15 yrs now and still doesn't know if he believes in God. Of course no missionaries prior to us had actually discovered this. We really well described what faith is and how he can act in faith but when it came to inviting him to really search the scriptures daily and pray to find out. He said he just isn't ready. It is going to take a lot of time to soften his heart to that point. 

We also had a lesson with a family where the  daughterhas not yet been baptized but really wants to be a member of the church. We went over for dinner, had a short lesson on baptism and the holy ghost and invited her to be baptized. We extended the invitation and she said yes. We tried to set a date to do it on and the Mom said "we will talk about that later." In other words she doesn't plan on it happening anytime soon.  . 

So a sad week but fine because at least we are making steps of progression in the area of sifting through who isn't yet ready! We are trying hard to find one of the Lord's Elect to teach. The goal is 3 baptisms before the end of the year. I'm fully committed. We're going to do it. We already have 1 planned for November. Her name is Nat. She is at BYU as a non-member and is being taught up there but she is getting baptized down here so we will technically be counting it.

Well we are really crunched on time because it was a temple day. I love you all. Love the weather cooling down finally. It was a high of 73 today. Isn't that just awful? :P Spoken like a true Californian.