Week 12 August 26, 2010

Dear family,
Happy Birthday, Dad! Sorry I don't really have anything to give you, but at least I remembered it, so...yeah, you're old.

So we baptized Pablo on Saturday and I took some pictures, too. We still have Yolanda LaGuardia set for the 4th of September, but her husband is set for the 11th because he needs to come to church 3 times and he's only been to church once. Plus, he also needs some time to stop smoking. We also have Luis Lopez set for the 11th and he used to smoke, but he hasn't now for 2 weeks, and he's getting a lot better. He's starting to read and pray every day and I can already see the progress he's making towards baptism. We were also talking yesterday to one of our investigators, Arlene, who wants to get baptized, but can't because she has a court date to settle on the 13th of September now. She was telling us how she had a lot on her plate and how she didn't think she'd get through it all. I thought of an analogy where when I slept out on the soccer field at Blue Knob and I could see thousands of stars. In fact there were so many that I had to literally turn my head to see all the stars. When we focus on just one spot in the sky, it's impossible for us to see all the stars. And it's the same way with life, I said. The world wants us to just look at one spot and worry about everything in that spot, but the Lord wants us to see the whole sky, or the big picture of his eternal timeline, and we have to turn our heads in order to be able to see all of it.

So something interesting happened to us yesterday. There was a girl in our ward about 6 years old who said she needed a coloring book. So we got one and went to drop it off at her apartment. We opened the door and we gave her the coloring book, but the mom was mad and gave it back to us and said for us to stop harassing her or else she'll call the police. She also said that we needed to get a life/find something better to do with our lives. I'm doing the best thing I could possibly be doing right now, which is bringing people closer to Christ. I thought about it for a second after she slammed the door on us and then I said to Elder Parker "More wife points for us!" (This is missionary lingo, meaning the more you endure, the more points you get towards a good wife. :) )
I've only had 2 people act like that to us, and it's always the English speaking people. The Spanish people are pretty much always nice or will politely decline to hear the message.

We also went to the Las Vegas Temple today because all the new missionaries get to go and technically I'm still a new missionary, and it was sweet.

The weather here is still about 10 times better than what is in Maryland because it's dry here. Even though it's 100, it's still fine. I actually probably won't need the biking gloves for much longer because the weather is starting to get a little bit cooler and I'm never on my bike for more than 20 or 25 minutes or so. It's not like the bike trip we did 3 years ago where it was like 3 or 4 hours at a time. I don't know, I'll figure something out. You should be more worried about Elder Parker's bike, he's had 4 tire tubes pop in the last 3 weeks; he's had more bike problems in the last 3 weeks than I've had my whole life.

It sounds like Jacob is getting to be a real treat, and pretty funny, too. Hope that school will go well too with James, Julia, and Andrea. That's good that Andrea doesn't have Mr. Graf. He's hard. Well, I think that's it for now.

Elder Meiners III