February 3, 2011

Dear family,


This week has been a little better. We've slowly been getting more lessons in people's homes and more new investigators. We got a few new investigators in Laughlin, but they live very far away, so we probably won't be able to visit them that often. I still think that we have a lot more finding to do because we still haven't had that many lessons. I feel like we can also get the members more involved in having referrals for us, so we'll try and see what we can do about that this week.

We've been trying to give out more Book of Mormons out on the street because of the talk that President Ezra Taft Benson gave called "Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon". It's kind of an old talk but it tells of the need for more copies to be given out and for those of us with copies of it to read or listen to it somehow every day. We've met some pretty interesting people on the street, too. I don't know if it's just because I'm in English now, but I'm noticing a lot more people that are just trying to bash with us or put us down for one reason or another.

We were in a lesson with a lady named Karina and she said that she had already been baptized. I had heard this about a hundred times on my mission, so I knew exactly how to answer it. I told her that baptism has to be done by someone holding the authority from God and that this authority was restored through the prophet Joseph Smith. She got offended at first, but then she said that I said exactly what God wanted me to tell her, even if it was bold. I looked over a book that an Elder in our last zone had about how to be a good missionary and it said that we need to teach the principles of the Restoration with boldness. And as we do so, the people will either get offended or they will think that it might actually be true, so I guess we just have to make sure we do our part and have them completely on one side or completely on the other.

There was a neat experience that we had yesterday night. We went over to our ward mission leader's house because all of our appointments had fallen through and we asked him if he had any referrals and he said he did. We talked about the person he had in mind for a little bit and then she came to his house to pick up something she forgot. He introduced her to us and we got to set up an appointment with her, so that was really neat.

Wow, Reservoir's going to Chicago! That sounds like it'll be pretty fun. I don't think Reservoir had ever gone to Chicago (or has even gone west at all, usually it's just north or south), so that should be a new and fun experience. It also sounds like it's still snowy in Maryland. It's still really windy and it was pretty cold yesterday morning. We went to wash our car at about 7am before Zone Conference and the leftover water from the carwash was frozen in about 5 minutes. We told that story to some members and they said that they didn't think it got that cold here.

Well, I guess that's it for this week. Not too much has been happening with our investigators, so I'll let you know when something does happen.



I love you!



Elder Meiners