October 14, 2010

Dear family,


Wow! James is getting married! That's crazy. I almost don't believe it. That's actually funny because when I was in interviews with President Christensen, he asked about my family and I was like "I think they're fine." and then Sister Christensen also asked and I said again "I think they're fine."

We've been doing better with LTM's (Lessons taught with a member present) this week. It's still not anywhere near our goal of 20 but it's a huge improvement from where we came from. I heard that in Maryland, the goal in whatever mission it is also has 20 as their goal.

Luis is doing really good, still. He came to Stake Conference and he really liked it. We had Elder Pearson from the First Quorum of the Seventy speak to us. Arlene is still doing good. She still goes out on the weekend, but she did try to come back for Church on Saturday night but she had a hard time finding the right bus and everything. So we reset both of them for the 23rd and we hope this goes through because this will be the only baptism(s) we get this transfer.

We have a referral that Elder Tuione and Elder Murillo gave us (they live in our apartment) and we had a sweet lesson with them yesterday. We put into practice everything that we learned from the AP trainings while President was doing interviews about how we should say the First Vision slowly and how we should kneel for every prayer and have the investigators say the prayer. We have some high expectations for them.

We've had some pretty creative ways to stay awake during personal study. Those balloons that you gave me for my birthday-- whenever one of us falls asleep, the other will blow up a balloon and pop it to scare the heck out of us. It always works. Our P-Day activity was pretty awesome. There are some mountains to the east that have a trail that you can hike up and it was actually pretty intense. It wasn't that many miles to walk, it was probably only about 3 or 4, but there were hardly any switchbacks, so instead of having to zigzag up the mountain, we pretty much had a straight path up the mountain. Usually when you hike up mountains, there are switchbacks so it's not that steep, but it takes a little longer. This wasn't like that at all. I got a good exercise out of it, though. On the way down, I finished it in about 40 minutes.
 I think Elder Parker finally realized that maybe it's a rim problem instead of a tube problem, but I don't know how he'll fix it.
 So on Monday morning, we got a surprise call from the mission office saying that they were inspecting our apartment at 9:30. All 4 of us spent 2 hours hurriedly trying to fix our apartment, washing the dishes, throwing away any furniture, vaccuuming, organizing, it was crazy, but we passed and we got a dozen donuts as a reward.

That's cool that Andrea is doing the Alonzo Stagg hike this week. Dad has been in charge of the Alonzo Stagg (with Brother Maughan) for a long time now. I don't think I ever remember a time where Dad wasn't at the Alonzo Stagg. I never finished, but I bet I would've if I wasn't so dang busy on the weekends during high school. The last time I hiked it was when I was in 8th grade and I only did 16 miles or so. That's cool that you and Mom are also teaching a marriage class at the church. I don't think we have anything like that here.

 Be sure you also get to know the missionaries in the ward, even just knowing their name and talking to them will make a difference and show that you care. I know it makes me feel better.

That's pretty much it for me. I've been doing great and we're excited to see how our investigators will be progressing and also for the baptisms next week. I love you!

Elder Meiners