17 January 2012

Hello family!  I hope you are having a great day

We've been picking up our work little by little lately, and it's been really nice.  We are even more grateful than usual to have new people to teach, since it's been really hard to find people lately.  Finally we are getting some new investigators.  I think I told you about Bryan, the fan of Mitt Romney.  He didn't make it to church this week, but he did ask us to help him move his furniture and things from his place to the downstairs unit, where he will stay for several months.  He is opening up to us more and more, and he is going through major struggles in his family right now.  He is a good man, and I think this is a great time in his life for the Gospel.  After we helped him move, he had us help him make dinner for all of us--steak, grilled peppers and onions, hot dogs, and some things like that.  I learned that I'm not as good of a cook as I thought!  But it all worked out.  We found out later though, that while we were there, we missed our usual meeting with Brother Waddell, and this time his son was in town for two days and wanted us to meet him.  His son is usually in Peru as an area Seventy for the Church.  We are pretty bummed about that, but hopefully I'll get to meet him later!

I'm out of time, but I have more to say.  Next week!

Love you all

Elder La Follette

I got a couple more minutes it looks like, so I'll just highlight a few more things that happened this week.

Tatsiana came to church yesterday, which is the first time we've heard from her in several weeks.  She is still interested but may be staying in Encinitas, or may move to another place out of our stake, so she probably won't get baptized in our ward, but will get baptized soon I think.  We will hopefully teach her in the next couple days again.

We found another new investigator this week, a really Bible-smart guy that likes talking to all types of religious people.  His name is Adrian [edit].  He is smart enough we can use phrases like Levitical Priesthood or Atonement and he knows just what we're talking about.  It's pretty nice that we can talk straight to him!  He has some interesting views, but is willing to learn about our view.  Hopefully he can come to church soon.  He has a really good heart.

We also finally found an inactive couple that we've bene trying to get a hold of for a month.  They are Ben and Melissa [edit], about 28 yrs old each.  Ben is a returned missionary, and neither have been to church for 4-5 years.  They just got married and moved in last July.  They told us they want to be sealed this year and want to come back to church.  We are going to have another lesson and dinner with them tonight.  They are awesome.  Ben is also a huge surfer and has about 12 surf boards in their front room alone.  Apparently the size of the waves will influence your board choice!

We picked up another new investigator last night named Rian [edit].  He just married an inactive member, Misty [edit].  He is interested in learning but doesn't want to be pressured into baptism.  We assured him we wouldn't drag him to the font and drown him, but we'll wait to talk about that until he feels he is ready to make that choice.  They will probably have a hard time getting to church because their jobs depend on them working on Sunday, but we'll try to work that out soon.

We have a new district now, since transfers were last week.  Elder Wheeler and Elder Findley are gone, and now we have Elder Hensley from St. George and Elder Soderburg from Kaysville, UT.  They makes 6 out of 8 in our district from UT.  One is from Wyo, and one from Samoa.  Go Utah!

Well that's all the time I have.  Have a great week!

Elder La Follette