8 November 2011

Hello family!

I hope you all had a good week.

That is sad news about Sherm. I hope the family is doing well with the passing. I will miss him.

Yesterday there was a baptism for the Carlsbad 1st ward for a man I got to interview. His name is Craig [edit]. His children were all baptized a few weeks ago, and now the family is complete! His son is the starting QB at Carlsbad High School, and got to baptize Craig. I can't wait until we can baptize a family here. So far we haven't found many new investigators. The work here has been slow for a while. The missionaries have been teaching members a lot and depending on referrals that we don't get, and haven't been using our own efforts to find people. We've been trying to focus on that a lot lately.

Tatsiana came to church again this week and had a great time. We taught the Gospel Essentials class about baptism. Our ward mission leader had to take a 2nd job that requires training and working indefinitely in Sundays, so he's going to be limited in what he can do. The lesson went really well, and Tatsiana is excited for baptism. We had one lesson with her this week, but I couldn't be there because I was interviewing Craig. Elder Herald and Brother Rosell taught her the Plan of Salvation. This week we're hoping to teach her the Restoration and probably the Word of Wisdom. She shouldn't have any trouble with the Word of Wisdom, but we'll see. She is still looking for a place to live. We talked to a lady in the ward that has a room available, but she said she is charging $650 a month for a room, and Tatsiana is looking for $500. But, Sister Wightman (the renter lady) called us back yesterday and said she's been praying and fasting about having Tatsiana stay, and might be willing to take her anyway. She wants to pray about it further, so we're hoping that she will allow Tatsiana to stay with her.

We went to the temple again this morning. It was my 7th time going to the San Diego Temple, but I still love driving up to it and looking at it. The inside is just as beautiful, and the Spirit is so powerful there. I always learn a lot of new things whenever I go in. Sister Sheila Wanlass from my Escondido ward (Kaytlyn and Mara Monsivais's aunt) attended the same session as us, so it was good to see her again! I don't know if I mentioned that a couple weeks ago we got to see Christine [edit]'s endownment session. She was a recent convert we were teaching in Escondido. We were invited to see her get her endowment, so I got to see her, as well as a bunch of members from Esco. It was a lot of fun!

Friday it was raining a lot. We usually do a free lemonade stand for the Carlsbad High School kids after school on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. This Friday we did hot chocolate because it was "cold". The hot chocolate was very popular! We're going to do it whenever it's cold.

We had zone conference yesterday in Cardiff (couple towns to the south, full name Cardiff-by-the-Sea). The church building there is weird. It is built in a square with a fairly large outdoor courtyard in the middle. One of the gym's walls is made of mostly glass windows, which opens to the courtyard. I was again asked to play piano at zone conference. Sometimes I feel like a fraud playing piano. I'm not as good as a lot of people think I am! I really like playing at meetings, but I have to spend some time learning the songs days before the meeting starts. It's forcing me to be better at playing though! President Cook usually trains for a considerable amount of time on something we can improve on as a mission (which is normal to do) but yesterday he didn't talk very much, but spent his 45 minutes of time on showing us scriptural blessings for those who labor to share the gospel, and then told us how proud he is of us for going out working hard, even with so much opposition. He teared up a lot as he was telling us how proud he was, and that Heavenly Father is taking good care of us. The rest of the time before President Cook (about 5 hours) the APs trained on how to make lesson plans in companion study. We came to the realization that the mission (including APs) have been doing lesson plans and training on how to do lesson plans wrong all along. They then trained on how to make lesson plans just as Preach My Gospel tells us to. I felt pretty stupid because I learned in the MTC to do it the right way but never applied it in the mission field. My trainer didn't do it like that so I assumed he was right!

By the way, it would be cool if all y'all could read Preach My Gospel. It's really good. Chapters 3,4,5, and 6 are all very applicable to everyone.

I hope you all have a great week. I love you all. Have a great week

Elder Jon La Follette

PS-does anybody have questions? I don't know what you like to hear about