A belated pic with the glasses my mom sent for Halloween.
Well my favorite thing of the week was yesterday [Sunday Nov. 7]. We had an afternoon family home evening with two families. Sarah lived with the other family all through high school and got baptized, but hasn’t been active for a very long time. Her husband Dustin is not a member. They have 3 kids, though not all together. The oldest is 8. Both are great families. We had a lunch, followed by watching the restoration, a discussion, and then we all played Cranium. It was super fun, and of course my team won. Good times. That game is the best.
The members of the Church here really like us and we like them a lot too. There are a lot of super funny members here. Only a few are good missionaries, but some are starting to work on it. It’s hard in this town because a lot of them have tried the same people so many times before, but they are getting a lot better. We got a ton more investigators this week! 5 new ones. We did have 3 investigators at church, which is super good. One investigator that we thought was a member called us and wants to be taught and baptized. We have our first lesson with him today. He is more active than most members. His family are all members but apparently not him. Nobody ever told us. We'll set him with a date today. Probably soon since he doesn’t have to worry about the church attendance requirement. Overall it was a really solid week. Did some good stuff. The work is just starting to warm up a bit here.
Leadership training was way good. We are going to have one almost every month until may because we are going over the new additions to preach my gospel before they start teaching the missionaries in the MTC. There are 8 new sections of chapter 10 being added that will help in missionaries becoming better teachers. The new manual will be out in May. President Black was trained on it my first week in the field at a mission pres conference in Texas. Its point is really to get missionaries completely ready to teach the moment that they leave the MTC and to teach right. It was way sweet. Sister Black also gave a great talk about loving people and how we need to do that. I combined that with some advice from Tim who told me to be honest at all times with everyone, but especially myself, so what I’ve come up with is that I need to always be trying to find ways to love people but to never tell myself that I do when I don’t. That is super important because you can’t change for the better if you don’t believe that you need to be changed, which everyone always needs to be. It is super good advice, and I’m working on that.
Service is going well. We play bingo with the people in the hospital which is fun and we help them out. Most of them can’t read their cards, so we help them with that and putting their pieces on. It’s pretty fun and they really appreciate our being there. The library is going really well. We straighten out their books for them and do other odds and ends. They really like us and the things we do are a big help to them.
