March 8, 2009

Hi Family,


Hope everything is going well back home. Thanks for the emails Mom and Dad. Sounds like things are going good wow, thanks for doing all the temple names it sounds like you are almost done. You are going a lot. Guess Dad will have to start doing some more research and keep finding more people. Hope things are good at home and in spring city. I laughed when I got your email when I pictured dad chasing giant rodents around the yard as they are pulling the traps down into their little homes. Good luck with that! Haha. Thanks for all the birthday gifts too! They were perfect. My birthday was pretty uneventful, just like a normal day but I opened the box that you sent that morning before we started our studies. Thanks so much for everything especially the music and the cds it gets pretty old listening to the same cds in the car all the time and now we have new ones and hours and hours of general conference. Thanks!

Well I'll be honest, its been another hard week. We barely taught at all. Lots of knocking and not a single lesson. Especially now that we are starting to knock many of the same areas again, people recognize me and say you came by here the other day, of course it was usually about two months ago but we are praying really hard that we will find more people to teach because the work is pretty slow. But it's not all that bad, we have a good family that we are working with a mom and two daughters. They are reading and praying and have really good questions, even the daughters who are 15 and 17 are really interested. We are pretty excited about this family, its just a matter of finding a time when they will all be home to teach them because they all have very different work schedules. But we are pretty excited to teach them about the plan of salvation because the first lesson that we taught them the week before the mom, Odalis, began to cry when we testified about families and she told us that her father had passed away about a year before. The idea of eternal families is very different for a lot of people and wow the spirit was so strong and since that first moment she is always on the edge of her chair listening intently. We tried to set a baptism date with Alvin but he was like "we'll see". So we are going to have to slow a little bit and make sure that we are helping him with his questions and his doubts. I know that he can get baptism he's been to church 4 times. Wow, if only we could get our other investigators to do that. But he doesn't seem to be certain on his testimony yet. But he is a really great investigator I think it will just take him more time. He's the kind of guy that really likes to think things through. We invited him to pray about it. We are going to go back tomorrow and see how it went. But he came to church again this week and there was a baptism right afterwards so we stayed and watched. We weren't able to talk to him in much detail to see how he liked it but I'm sure it was a good experience the spirit was very strong.

Thanks for also sending my Emily's messages. I figured that she was probably okay because she is so far south and the earthquakes are so far north but its always good to read about how things are going for my other friends out in the mission field. Its been interesting to see the reaction towards the earthquake in Chile. Many people here whether at church on the street are talking about. Many people on the street ask us if we believe that these are the last days. They are scared that something like this will happen to Puerto Rico. Many people mentioned it in their testimonies on sunday. But I'm seeing how those in our church have lot more hope. If we are prepared we won't fear. I am realizing how important it is to listen the prophet when they tell us to prepare for things like this. We had a mini wake up call when we were without water for almost a week. But even though things are happening around the world, Chile, Haiti, the scriptures promise if you are prepared you shall not fear. These things help remind us how importnat it is to live the commandments and listen to the prophet and other leaders of the church. Anyway, those are just some random thoughts.

Well thats about it, hope things are going well for all of you back home. Keep me updated on whats going on at home, that goes for family and friends if you happen to be reading this via blog. Love you all!