Standing Room Only

Hello!

How are you? Sound pretty good! Sorry I missed thanksgiving this year. But we did stay up for the midnight Black Friday sale though... they had a great sale on... um... scripture cases!... so... In any case, I really like that talk by Ian Ardern also. He had a great accent and an even greater name. I just wish I could get the general conference issue of the Ensign... for some reason the mission office is being really slow getting it out to us...

Anyways, I had a pretty interesting week. First off, our two people scheduled for baptism fell through. Bummer. One had a problem with the Word of Wisdom that came out only during the baptismal interview, and the other didn't like the idea of tithing which, in hindsight, we should have probably taught him earlier. Still, kind of frustrating. Fortunately, we'll still get to be able to continue teaching them hopefully and I have faith that we'll be able to help them work past these barriers.

We had 12 investigators at church, which was pretty ridiculous. Church went really well yesterday. Everyone stayed after it ended and chatted which was really great. We had about 25 people in total so the room looked a lot more full. We have more people at church than at English class! Which is kind of strange and probably means Elder Brown and I need to spend more time passing out flyers, which we did actually do for a couple hours this week... However, we're not really having any problems finding since we found 7 more new investigators this week...

Lately, we've been discussing how we can help all of the investigators we are teaching and who are coming to church set baptismal dates. We're going to redouble our efforts this week to set a baptismal date with every one of our investigators and help them progress towards that. We feel that with the sheer number of investigators we have in our teaching pool right now, if we're planning correctly, we should have very little time to find and loads of time teaching them and helping them to build their faith in Christ and progress towards baptism. We've decided to set more clear expectations with our investigators for more frequent meeting and also daily contact.
Elder Brown and I went on exchanges with a couple elders in the filippino ward here this week which went very well. I went on exchanges with Elder Salazar seems like a very good elder. He was telling me all these crazy stories about his conversion back in the Philippines which were really hilarious. He was talking about how he was baptized when he was 12 without his parents' permission and then he was inactive for like 5 years because the branch in the area where he lived like dissolved. Then after five years the missionaries came back into his area and he like kicked them out of his house and was like "I'm Catholic now. Don't come back." Except one of the Elders told him to read and pray about the Book of Mormon so he did like a couple months later and was like "if it's true, give me a way to go back to church." So the next day, the Elders went back to his house even though he told them not to and he was like "dang it..." since he said all his friends would make fun of him if he went back. Anyways, to make a long story short, he ended up moving and was like "yes the missionaries won't be able to find me anymore!" Except he moved right accross the street from one of our chapels in another city and then proceeded to run into both one of the missionaries he first kicked out of his house and then one of the other missionaries who had tried to reactivate him who both got transferred to that area hahah. So random. It was pretty funny the way he told it. I guess if God wants you to join his church, he'll find a way haha.

In any case, I got my first ticket last night which was a real hoot. We were coming back from the baptism of one of my investigators in Union City: Ethan Wu... and I wasn't really paying attention to how fast I was going and got pulled over for speeding... I had no idea our Toyota Corolla could even go that fast: 150 mph... Ok just kidding. Only about 80. But knowing California traffic police, they'll probably charge me for an 150 mph speeding ticket...

Anyways, my time is almost up here on the library computer here so I'd better sign off. However, I hope you ahve a great week!

Love you!

-Ian