August 1, 2011

Dear Family,

It’s been a great week to be a Lakewood Tiger! Raaarrrrrrr!!! On Monday we found this awesome family. On Friday we went back to their house and they had done everything we left for them as homework (aka, read pamphlet). Yay! Rare! and they understood everything and they read it again the night before we came just to have it fresh. On Friday we introduced them to the Book of Mormon and invited them to be baptized if they received a testimony. They accepted. I’m pretty sure they’ll get baptized. The mom told us that she had searched for lots of answers through prayer to know what to do in big decisions and had received responses. Sounds like she’s pretty prepared to receive us. :)

This week was also a little bit of a bummer in church because it was super cold and it rained really hard, which means that the two investigators that were going to get baptized this week didn’t come to church, which means they won’t be getting baptized this week. A little frustrating, because one of them was having a hard time getting up on time for church so we decided to pass by his house every day at 8:30 to wake him up to get him in the habit so he wouldn’t have a hard time on Sunday. He woke up every single day on time... except for Sunday :/ oh well, diligence wins the prize.

Church itself was really good. We had ward conference and all the talks were super awesome. This one guy gave a great talk on member missionary work. He started off talking about "the new commandment" to love one another as *he* loves them. He talked about that that love is demonstrated most fully by missionary work and one of the points he highlighted is the need to recognize our duty that we really are all missionaries and we will be held accountable for the member missionary work we do or don’t do. He also talked about the need for befriending new converts and inactives, and that the reason that there are empty seats is because of lack of befriending before they reach full conversion. It is way easier for us to make friends with them than for them to make friends with us. Reach out!!

Anyway, other than that, all’s well in Zion. Elder Singer (the other elder who lives with us and a great friend of mine) is training and because of problems with the volcano ashes in Southern Argentina, his new comp took 3 days longer to get here. His comp’s really cool. His name is Elder Carlson (from Orem), but he doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. Poor guy.

Love you all tons, family!

-Elder Spencer