June 23, 2011

Dear family and friends,

Things are going pretty good with me. Gabby is still in the same situation where her husband won't let her get baptized, so we've been praying as a district that her husband's heart might be softened and for all of our investigators that need special help.

Marco is still doing okay. We had a lesson with him yesterday and he had a lot of questions that didn't necessarily matter or apply to anything that we were teaching, so we tried to tell him that he has to walk before he can run and that he should understand the basics of the Gospel before he tries to have more knowledge.

We haven't had the chance to teach Rafael, but he did come to church last week and so that was really good. We hope that he can be able to progress more and be set for baptism. We also have this one guy named Ruben who was a referral from another zone and he lives up by Las Vegas Blvd. He also came to church this past week, but sometimes he seems a little out of it (maybe drugs), so we'll see how that goes this week.

It's kind of interesting how you said that Andrea got really worried about her iPod touch because Marco's sister was offering Elder Cunha a 32GB iPod touch for $50. But then he found out that it was locked, so he asked a lot of people how he could unlock it, but nobody knew until he went to a member's house. But then it only temporarily worked for about 4 hours and then it was locked again. So he tried restoring and updating everything, it still didn't work, so finally he just gave it back. He wanted to buy it so bad, but it was too much trouble for him.

This week at church there was a big argument in one of our classes because the teacher was teaching about obedience and then somehow it led into "God doesn't punish people" and so Elder Cunha stood up in the class and said that that wasn't true and a lot of people started arguing against it, and the other missionaries tried to have Elder Cunha's back by showing them scriptures like D&C 95:1, but the WHOLE class was just going against us, and we just let them believe what they wanted.

I told you about the family that all works at McDonald's a couple weeks ago. They all live in our apartment complex and since we went over and it was hot, dark, smelly, and messy when we went over, and so we offered to help them clean their whole apartment. We spent like 2 hours just cleaning their kitchen, doing the dishes, organizing all of their clothes, taking out the trash, and it felt a lot better. I only realized on my mission that cleaning your room or your apartment has a LOT of spiritual significance to it.

The new mission president, President Neider is supposed to be coming in within the next week or two, so that'll be exciting.

Everybody thinks it's super hot, but it's not that bad as long as you drink water every so often and if you have AC in your apartment. And plus you get kind of used to it after a while.

So I heard about the good news! It sounds like Kara is doing good with her new baby and that everything went pretty quickly! Thank you for the pictures. I'll try to send some pictures soon.

I also heard that Andrea got into marching band and that's great also! It'll be a lot of work, but you can do it!

So I guess that's it from me this week. I'll tell you if I need anything.

I love you!

Elder Meiners