BBQ Season with lots of BBQ sauce

Here's a picture of our Skype screen with other family members hooked in...  Happy Mother's Day!!!!

If you are wondering what the weather is like here in New England. It is Springtime and all the trees are now full of baby leaves and all the colors are out and about. I can see purple, orange, yellow, white, red, green, blue, black, brown, and pink! The colors are really vivid and I didn't get any good pictures of them this week but i will keep that in mind for next week. So look forward to next week and i will get some for you!!!

With it being spring, that means there are tons and tons of little bugs. There is something called black fly's up here and they are very comparable to the flies you see on the beach that are sitting on top of the dried out seaweed. You know how when you get close to the seaweed there are hundreds of those flies that buzz around? Well imagine that all around you, while your outside. They are the worst out in the outskirts of the city of Manchester where all the trees are but still, they can get pretty annoying, especially when they get in your eye and you accidentally consume one through your eye socket!

This week in Bedford, we weren't able to get up to 20 lessons because we had 3 of our investigators drop us. Meaning they wouldn't like us to come back anymore. We still have a total teaching pool of 7 people. Which is much higher than most areas in the mission.

This week i was able to host an exchange here in Bedford and I had an elder named Elder Andrew! Isn't that funny that for the day my companion was Elder Andrew and than you have me Elder Dahlberg! Well he is on his 9th week as a missionary and we did a lot of teaching and he did a great job at teaching. We taught out of the bible and out of the book of mormon. I really liked his teaching style that is very similar, if not identical to mine. Which is to make sure during the lesson the investigator or person you are teaching is talking more than you are. I like to make lessons engaging and more like a conversation rather than a lecture of knowledge from one person to the other. Also while on exchange with Elder Andrew we were tracting some houses right after a dinner appointment and we get to a house where there is a family outside, so we go up and talk to them about the gigantic bbq they had outside their garage. Turned out the father figure, Dana Prive is a world famous bbq man. He makes his own BBQ sauce and does it competitively. He was talking about his most recent BBQ sauce and how he is going to enter it into the next competition. Both Elder Andrew and I, respond with "Well where could we get some of this sauce?" He goes over to his car and opens the trunk and gets out 6 bottles of his BBQ Sauce. 2 bottles of each of his 3 flavors and said to us "you got room in your bag for all these?". i than  took my scriptures and shoved them to one side and made the room!  HE GAVE THEM TO US FOR FREE!! How nice was that! He wasn't interested in hearing a message about Jesus Christ, but i feel like he has a lot of Christlike traits already. And im not just saying that because he gave us free bbq sauce. He was a man that I hope I can turn out to be like one day. To just be so friendly and open to strangers.

Elder Dahlberg & Elder Andrew  with their BBQ sauce haul

I think Jesus Christ put it best when he told his disciples in John Chapter 15," this is my commandment, that you love one another as i have loved you." That sentence alone, if heeded, would change this world and the people on it.

Also there is a family out here named the Hines family that will be moving to Eastlake. Just across from the Olympic training center. We helped them paint and prepare their house to get on the housing market. Kurt Hines will be an assistant football coach for Christian High School. its a christian private school. They have a son named Brock who is 18 and a daughter named Sophia or Sofia (not sure on how to spell it) who is 16 and will be a senior next year.
They are a really cool family and i will keep you posted on if they could use some help or not. (They seem to be pretty well set with help)

I enjoyed skyping my family this week, so much so that at the end of the call all that i could muster up to say was "I am grateful to have you as my family." Which is all that i needed to say. I am grateful to have such a great family that not only loves me, but wants me to be the best i can. I cant ask for anything better than that. :)

ALL SMILES

ELDER DAHLBERG

I got to play baseball with this 14 year old named Noah Hughes. Keep that name in your head because this kid has some great potential to be in the MLB! He is awesome! I also got to hit and pitch with him. Then after that I learned how to make dried banana slices! SO GOOD!

 We had to drive all the missionaries back up to Montpelier Vermont which took us from 5-11PM. So my butt was sore after that day. Here are pictures from our drive

Elder Sholer, my past companion was in the area for the day because his companion was going to the temple. So we were in a trio for the day.

Wow, you'd think he'd gone to the Amazon or something...

You may be wondering what those green nets are around our faces? The black flies are so bad that we needed those in order to work outside without having to swat at flies every 2 seconds. These nets may look goofy, but i would rather look like a goof than have all those flies goof my face with their gross little black bodies.