October 21, 2010

Dear family,

Things are going a little bit better with us. We're really
excited for Luis and Arlene as their baptism is this week. Arlene is
really starting to get in the habit of studying the scriptures instead
of just reading it. She read 7 chapters and highlighted all the verses
she liked and underlined the words she didn't know. She really liked 2
Nephi 2 where it talks about the Fall. We thought that maybe Luis
should hold off again since he had a couple relapses again, but when

we prayed about it, our answer was to continue to have his baptism

 on the 23rd with Arlene.

We have another investigator named Johnny, who was a member referral,
 and he attented church in Idaho and he's trying to get enough money to get his wife in the USA from Mexico. We set him for Nov. 6 for baptism because he came to
church this past Sunday and he really liked it. I tell you, if
investigators come to church the first week you see them, you know
they have a desire to learn more.

That's good that you had the missionaries over for dinner. We
try to go to member's houses for dinner every day except for P-Day.
It's always really fun because most of the time, we'll have the other
missionaries in our district with us. This week, our district took a
"road trip" and went to member's houses and sang hymns while I played
guitar (the only 3 chords I knew were G, D and C so it was good
enough, right?) and we gave some of them brownies because we wanted
the barrier between the members and the missionaries to weaken a
little bit so we could help them a little more.

Yesterday, it was raining so much and it was about 9 inches deep in some area because there's no drainage systems except for maybe 1 or 2 every block. We
were crossing one intersection and it got all the way up to our knees.
We're all fine now. In fact, that's the good thing about the desert is
everything dries up really fast and the next day you couldn't even
tell there was a thunderstorm. We spent a ton of time cleaning again
today, about 5 hours, because it's the last week of the transfer and
they have to do inspections before the end of the transfer. So next
week is transfer conference and word on the street is Elder Parker is
staying again so I might be going, but I don't know.

It sounds like a lot of people finished the Alonzo Stagg
hike, and Andrea hiked 25 miles! That's a lot. Well, everything is
fine with me. We're just getting ready for the baptisms this week and
I still have pictures from before the MTC to send to you guys, so I'll
send it once my memory card fills up. That's it from me.

Elder Meiners