August 18, 2011

Dear friends and family,

        I was kind of confused when you guys said that I got transferred, so I guess I should explain a little. I didn't get transferred, and I'm still with the same companion, Elder Pirir. I just went to transfer conference on Tuesday because I was helping transport some of the luggage for another Elder in our district, and plus I thought I might pick up the bike from the mission office.

Later on that day, Elder Shields called me and said that I should get a hold of Bishop Hellewell. I haven't got a hold of him yet, but I'll call him today and see if maybe the Office Elders can take the bike down to our apartment or at least to the Zone Leaders because we actually got our car taken away. The car wasn't taken for anything bad, it was just that Elder Santillan in our district has a really big area, but neither him nor his companion had driving privileges, but now Elder Santillan got a new companion that has driving privileges, and so they'll be using the car and now we're back to using all bike. So I don't really know what Elder Shields meant when he said I got relocated. Maybe he thought that I was leaving, but I'm not.

        Things have been going really well this week. We're starting to find more investigators that want to actually learn more about what we have to teach and I think that it's going really good.

        So we're still teaching Byron, and we talked to his wife on Tuesday and learned a little bit more about him. Byron told us that to help him go to sleep, he takes some pills with some alcohol, but his wife said that that's not the only time he drinks and that he drinks pretty heavily each day and that he's been doing that since he was a teenager. So we haven't seen him since then, but we'll try to talk with him and see if we can work anything out, but he's probably going to lose his date of Sep. 10th.

        We also saw Luis Rodriguez this week and we taught him the Word of Wisdom. We also told him that we would try and find a ride for him to church on Sunday, but we didn't find anybody, and so I hope he's not too mad about that.

        Jose Garcia is also doing pretty good. He came to church this past week and he really liked it.

         Rafael is also doing pretty good, but we haven't seen the mom since we talked to her about two weeks ago, but Rafael is reading the Book of Mormon and we also read with him 1 Nephi 8 and talked about the tree of life.

        We also have this investigator named Lurdes and her two daughters and they're really interested. We had a lesson with them yesterday, and they seemed like they really liked it, and they hardly had any questions about anything, so we'll see how things go with them.

        We're also teaching the mom and the sister of one of the members in our ward and their names are Maria and Yeimy. They also seem like they're interested and they always invite us over to eat or have hot chocolate with them.

        There was also a less active that got a hold of us and she said that her son wanted to be baptized. We have an appointment with him tonight, so I hope that goes well.

        I felt kind of bad yesterday because we were the cause of two cars that hit each other yesterday. So this is how it went. We were going to our apartment to use the bathroom and we were waiting at a crosswalk in front of a bus stop so that we could cross the road. The car in the middle lane stopped for us, the car in the left lane (from our point of view) was going kind of fast, but he stopped, too. Then there was a pickup truck that was speeding along and he swerved from the middle lane over to the right lane. Since he was going kind of fast, I waited to see if he would keep going or stop to see if we could cross. The pickup truck must've saw the other cars stopped, so he slammed on the brakes, but the car behind him was making a huge screech sound as he tried to stop as fast as he could and then CRASH, the car rear-ended the truck. By this time, I had already started to make my way across because all of the cars had stopped for, but then once we heard that crash, it was like the walk of shame because we were the cause of all this. I didn't want to stop and help because I didn't want to make anybody more angry and it was on a busy road, too.

        So band camp sounds like it's pretty normal, haha. It's really hard and there's a lot of drama. Sounds like high school, alright.

 As far as speaking in the Spanish ward about repentance, you don't have to be afraid about being bold. Sometimes being bold is the only way that they'll remember the meeting or anything that you said. And also, probably everybody in the branch are converts in one way or another, so I'm sure that they all have had their experiences with repentance.

        So that's it with me. I don't have that much time left, but our area is doing really good and it looks like there's a lot of investigators now that we have to work on. I'll tell you if I need anything.


I love you all!


Elder Meiners