September 30

Dear Friends and Family, It was such a great week! We had two investigator as Sacrament meeting. We still have Preston coming and his mother (His brother Jamella who is 9 has decided that the world is more important that church right now but I believe that he will follow his mother and brother eventually). We are VERY excited for Preston because he finally decided that he wants to be baptized. He said originally that he wanted to wait a few months but yesterday at church, he decided that he is ready and wants to be baptized in a few weeks. He is going to talk to his mother about it and they will tell us the date he would like to be baptized on Thursday. I am SO excited. It has been amazing to see Toni(his mother) and her family go from complete estrangement to the church to coming every week and striving to be worthy for every blessing the lord has for them. It is incredible. Hopefully their influence will affect everyone in the family. We had another cool tracting experience this week. We chose a street to knock a street and had no success during the first 10-15 minutes. We suddenly came to a large house to which we had no thought of the resident being even remotely interested in Heavenly Father when they must have had such vast wealth. We had a particularly surprising experience upon actually knocking though. An unusually inviting catholic man opened the door and excitedly invites us in for some dessert and a drink. How is that for a surprise? He took us out back where we saw his wife and the puzzle was put together. We knew her because we do service at St. Vincents thrift shop once a week. He sat with is and started talking about the history of the catholic church. He is a historian of some kind. We mentioned that he should become acquainted with the history of Our church. He was surprisingly interested, especially when we told him about the third book that would come forth before Christ comes again, but He still spent pretty much the rest of the time talking about more of the history of the catholic church. Before leaving we asked if he would like to read the Book of Mormon. We got the expected response that if he was inclined to read any religious book, we would likely only choose the Bible which he specified to be the King James version. Now this I can testify is how I know that the Holy Ghost Can guide conversations because we told him that we read that same bible. It was ONLY after that comment that he chose (of his own free will) to ask us for a Book of Mormon. I don't know why he suddenly changed his mind but I am sure it's because of the spirit. Karratha is a great place! Hopefully you are all enjoying the new temple! Love Elder Butts

September 23

Dear Friends and Family, It has been a pretty busy week as usual, although it just wasn't as packed with teaching people. We have been doing extra knocking on doors. I gave a talk in sacrament meeting yesterday too. I'm pretty sure it's the longest talk i've ever given. I talked for almost 20 minutes. I'm so glad I prepared during the week and prayed that the spirit would guide me. I think it was amazing to see how much the spirit does for people who pray for it. We had another cool tracting experience this past week. We went to an area that probably hadn't been tracted for about a year (because I'm pretty sure all of karratha has been tracted 10times over) and we prayed to be able to meet someone who needed us. We met some teenagers because a lot of parents work all the time in karratha. We were able to give away 2 book of Mormons, a finding faith in Christ DVD and a CD with Mormon messages on it. We were getting close to the end of the street and we tracted into a house with an aboriginal family. It was the mothers birthday so we told her happy birthday and that we had a present for her. Her name is Joanne. We told her we were going to give her the gospel and she agreed that she needed to come back to church. "WHAT?, come back?" she told us she used to go quite regularly 2 or 3 years ago but her family was going through some financial struggles and stopped going (That happens to people a lot here is seems). Well her family is actually all non-members and they told us we could come teach them. That was a bit of a miracle. Nothing is set in stone yet, but we have lots of faith so hopefully we can help this family come back to the church and get some baptisms out of it! It is good because since she has been to church before, she already knows some of the members. On Saturday we went to an art competition at the visitors center. So the story is that about a month ago, we stopped in just to check out the visitors center and saw a flyier for a recycled art competition. I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to get into the public and share some of our beliefs. I got some pizza and cereal boxes and glued them together to make a board. To make the image, I got newspapers and magazines we found (Don't worry, I didn't cut up a single church magazine) and used the clippings of color to make an image of the Pilbarra and I placed Jesus Christ in it. When I was finished I felt that it looked like a 12year old did it but at least it will get the message across. On Saturday we went to the opening night and were able to meet some of the other people who had done artwork. It was a great way to talk about Jesus Christ and hopefully we will be able to get some people to ask some questions in the future. I love being out here serving! I hope you are all finding opportunities to serve those around you! Love Elder Butts

September 16

Dear Friends and Family, It has been a crazy week because it's getting so HOT! Just a few days ago it got up to 102 degrees. We have been drinking Tons of water but sometimes I still get headaches from either dehydration or heat exhaustion, so we have had to be pretty careful. We went tracting one day this week and had another cool experience. We have ben telling Alberto that we were gonna tract his street one of these days but never got around to it but one morning we just decided to do it. We didn't have any one who was super interested but when we got to the last house, we met Caitlin, his neighbor. She said she had talked to Alberto a lot and seen us go over there pretty often. We asked her what kinda questions she had about god and stuff and she told us that she liked finding out new things about him because she just wasn't sure. We told her about the Book of Mormon and she was interested in obtaining one so we offered to have a lesson with her and Alberto. We are going to set it up this week so it is pretty exciting! Not much else has happened. Hopefully we can get heaps of stuff going on this week though! Have a wonderful week everyone! Love, Elder Joshua Butts

September 9

Dear Friends and Family, It has been such an incredible week! We have been finding so many new investigators and helping people so much. One of the best pieces of news is that Kelvin came back up here from Perth. He came to church yesterday and he had an incredible Gospel Principals lesson on Charity. We had a really cool experience tracting yesterday after church. We went to a street we had tracted earlier in the week but nobody was home at the time so we decided to retract it. As we were knocking a few doors, it seemed that most people were just drinking and partying so it wasn't the best situation to be in for tracting but we still knew that no effort is ever wasted. We went to the next house only to find a very nice christian lady named Belinda, who opened the door and listened to us share for a minute about how god has called a prophet and how we can be with our families forever by being sealed in the temple. She didn't seem too convinced at first so I decided to just tell it to her straight that "Our church is the only true church on the earth". She replied saying that she felt the same way about her church to which we told her that she was only going to be able to find out which of us was right if she read the book of Mormon and prayed to know whether or not we were telling the truth. She seemed quite hesitant to accept the book of Mormon but the second she took it she said "You know. I'm gonna pray about this OK. And I'm gonna ask if what you're telling me is true". She said we could come back next week and find out how everything went. It was a really cool experience. We also sometimes spend some time at the library for a drink/bathroom break when we are biking out in the farther part of our area. Well this time while we were sitting, the woman at the desk at the library was talking to us about books. We asked her if she had ever heard of the book of Mormon. She told us that she hadn't but we could donate one to her if we had an extra one. That would be a really good way to get people exposed to it (but we mostly wanted the librarian chaz to read it). We gave her the book and she started reading right away. She even asked some questions about the Gold Plates and Joseph smith. A few days later we went back for another short break and showed her some pictures of the temples which she showed great interest in. She was especially interested in the Rome temple which is under construction and also told us we could bring the Book of Mormon Ensign to donate it to the library as well. It is so incredible how much missionary work has been going on in Karratha and we will be expecting some great miracles in the near future. Thanks for all the support again. Keep doing your best everyone! Love ya Elder Joshua Butts

September 2

Dear Friends and Family, It has been such an incredible week. We baptized Priscilla on Saturday! It went so great and she even bore her testimony during fast and testimony meeting at church yesterday. Elder Case baptized her on saturday and I confirmed her on Sunday. I hope you all had fun at the Brigham City Temple open house. I will be getting my new companion in a few hours. His name is Elder Pasina. He is from Tonga. I am pretty excited to keep the missionary work rolling with him. We have also still been meeting with Toni this week. Her and Preston(her son) came to the baptism of Priscilla and they seemed to really like it and they also came to church. Jamella is the one who wants to be baptised but he decided to stay at his friends house instead of going to church so we will have to keep working on his keeping the sabbath day holy so he and Preston can be baptised soon. I had a kinda cool experience with a member yesterday. We were talking with him at the chapel and he was telling us about a YSA activity they were doing that night. He said they were all going to get fast food for the activity because he didn't have that much food and he had done other things that were much worse anyway so it wouldn't matter this once. It reminded me of when we were teaching Preston and Jamella about keeping the sabbath day holy and we read a story from the friend to them called "Drive-Through Decision". I really felt like sharing the same story with the member we were talking to so I had him pull it up on his phone and I read it to him. Before I finished the story he said "OKAY I wont go anymore ok!" but a minute later he said it reminded him of when he was going to go to the store on a sunday but he stubbed his foot on the way in so he decided to leave. Later in the day he called us and told us thanks for helping him keep the sabbath day holy. I am so glad that we were able to help him with that and I felt like it was much inspired to read the story. I hope you all have a wonderful week!! Love, Elder Joshua Butts

Priscilla Baptism

August 26

Dear Friends and Family, It has been such a spirit filled week! We got 13 lessons which is pretty much a record for this area. We also have some amazing and exciting news. We will be having a baptism this Saturday! It is for Pracilla. We have been teaching her and she finally got an interview with the branch president at church yesterday and she passed it with flying colours so he suggested that we get in contact with the mission president and set up a time for the next interview. We called up President Lindsay and he said it was so great that she is going so well and that after he Skype's her on Tuesday that she is ready for baptism. Since Elder Case is going home next week, president suggested that we set up the baptism for this Saturday. there are many members of the branch who are leaving town but he said that if we felt good about it, that we should set it up for this Saturday. We both felt pretty good about it and after making some calls, we decided to go with it. I am super excited. We also are teaching Pracillas uncle as of this week too. We got a random call from Noretta (Pracillas sister who was baptised last November) and she said she had been talking to her Uncle Victor and he had some great questions about how our body is a temple and about other Mormon temples. It was an incredible lesson that we got to teach. He apparently went to a YSA activity the other day with one of the other YSA. The next step is to just get him to church and keep teaching him. On Saturdays we usually help out with some community gardens. While we were helping, we met Kurt. He is from Queensland and has been traveling through Australia. He is really big into Tai Chi so he likes meditating a lot. Sometimes he just stops whatever he is doing and stars doing hand and leg movements like he's dancing, or he'll sit on the ground with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. I didn't really mind, but sometimes it was a little strange to be mixing cement for a flower bed container and he would randomly disappear. He told us he liked reading the bible a bit and we shared with him about the book of Mormon. He seemed a little interested so we offered to give him one. The next day, bro Otto had talked him to church. That was a bit surprising. We found out that as bro Otto was driving to church, he saw Kurt at the side of the road. He asked what Kurt was doing and Kurt told him that he wasn't really doing much. Bro Otto just decided to bring him to church. He really seemed to enjoy it and I was glad that he came. Hopefully he will contact other missionaries on his travels. I am so thankful to be out here witnessing all these miracles and I really hope you are all finding people to share the gospel with also. Thanks so much for all your love and support. I love you all, Elder Joshua Butts