5 April 2011

Hello everyone

It's been a good week. It was really hot this week. It was around 94-95 degrees all day most days this week, with about 50% humidity. Not fun! I saw on Gen Conf that it snowed in Salt Lake. That sounds nice!

We have a baptism date for Christine [edit]. She was going to wait for the permission to get Jamie baptized so they could get baptized together, but Christine basically is tired of waiting, so she wants to be baptized soon. We picked Apr 16 (a day before Mike's birthday!). We are all excited to get that done.

This week Christine and Jamie both threw away their coffee makers. It has been quite a while since either of them have had coffee, but now they got rid of any temptation. Christine is very ready for baptism, and so is Jamie.

I was on companion exchange Sun-Mon with Elder Griffin from the San Pasqual ward. Monday morning we went to the church building to make copies of Gen Conf talks in 2008, and suddenly our mission president randomly walks in the door to the library. He was looking for a district meeting for the Spanish elders but had the wrong building. I asked if he had any word on Jamie, and he said he got a call from Salt Lake, but he will have to return the call. He is confident it is good news, so I hope he is right. Maybe, maybe Jamie can be baptized soon!!

In General Conference, they sustained several new Seventies. One of them was a Haynie. He is the stake president for our stake, the Escondido South stake. We are excited for him! The missionaries get to know him well, including me, so that is awesome. He is very fit for the calling.

Also while I was on exchange, we knocked on a random door, and a mid-aged lady answered. Her first words were "all right Elders, who sent you this time??" We thought that was funny. She said if she found a divorced LDS man with 6 sons, she would happily join the church. Until then, she wasn't interested. That is the most interesting "concern" I've ever heard!

We got another new investigator. Max [edit] and his wife Becca have lived here for almost a year. They are a young couple, and he is in the Marines on Camp Pendleton. She grew up a member, but they haven't been to church much since they were married. They have been to church 3 times since we first found them a couple months ago, and now we are teaching him. Before we started teaching anything, they both said their goal was to be members of the church together and get sealed in the temple. That sure makes our job easy! He'd read some of the Book of Mormon before when he was in Afghanistan, but he wants to try again. We are excited to be teaching Max.

This week we have spent most of our time finding former investigators. We have been trying really hard to find new people to teach, so we tried that route, since there are many dozens of former investigators' records in our area book. We ended up destroying about 40 teaching records because we can't get a hold of them anymore. About 36 of them have moved within the last year. I didn't realize the population comes and goes that quickly!

Daniell might know about Cruisin' Grand. Starting last Friday, every Friday from April to October, all the people around Escondido with old cars come and park them on Grand Avenue. It is kinda a flashback to the 1960s or something. It's really neat to see. Probably a hundred or more old cars line the streets and thousands of people come and look at them, listen to their engines roar, sit in them, and take pictures. It was really cool to walk/drive through and see all the different types of cars. We're trying to get Bro Borough to take his Model T racecar to Cruisin' Grand. You should all search Cruisin' Grand on google. It's so cool!

Well that's about all I have for this week. I hope you all listened to conference or will in coming days. It was awesome. It's cool as a missionary that we have to see all 5 complete sessions, so we get it all.

I hope y'all have a great week

Love
Jon