Our area is the whole San Diego North Stake. It is mostly within the city limits of San Diego, and the regions are Clairemont, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, University City, and Linda Vista. If you want to be really specific, my apartment is off of Clairemont Drive (I think). UCSD and the University of San Diego are both within our boundaries. Try Isaiah 41:10? We just go out and walk around and find people to teach if an appointment is ignored. We give out ridiculous amounts of referrals to the English missionaries. We found a family of 5 who have known the missionaries since 2009 and came to church more often than most of the members. They were about to get baptized, and then dropped off the face of the earth and lost interest. We started teaching the dad again (lots of doubts, I wanted to give him a libro de mormonazo in the face) and then found his two daughters and his son this week when we were looking for him. The oldest one said that we were an answer to her prayers because she didn't know which church they should go to and she asked to have people come by her house to show her. We have to re-teach all the lessons, separately to the kids and parents because they prefer different languages and they have different schedules and needs. The dad didn't know that we had started to teach his kids and found us teaching them last night. He was surprised at first, asked what we were teaching them (telling the story of Nephi and the brass plates), expressed his doubts about the story, and then left and told us to keep teaching as soon as we answered them. We are going to try and get them involved with some family night activities.
> [You asked about the "Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail" experience I had last week.] Basically this dude came up to us and started cussing us out and doing some extremely vulgar things (enough that I would have been offended even before the mission) and then the AP was raising his arm to the square to rebuke this guy when someone else drove up and chased him off. We had something similar with another person this week who interrupted one of our unplanned/outdoor lessons and held up traffic to try and throw us off. He was not nearly as obscene though and we actually got his address and an appointment to fix his doubts. We are supposed to do almost all of our finding through referrals, but of our 19 lessons last week, one was to someone introduced to us by a member. Most of the members in our branch don't do jack. Don't mean to sound discouraged, but when the relief society president and elders quorum president don't come every week or even attempt to do their callings, we have some serious issues. The mission focuses a lot on how many lessons we teach with members present, but we can't improve on that very much if we only have 3 who are willing to help. One of them is moving to Chile at the end of the month.
> An interesting thought for your studies: After a not-so-fun discussion with an evangelical about the gift of tongues, I decided to do some research. Read Acts 2, and give me your thoughts. 1 Corinthians 14 will help clarify that. After that, think about all of the other places in the New Testament (I don't have specific verses) where people speak in tongues after being baptized/confirmed. There are several in the book of Acts. If you are having a hard time thinking of why they would be doing that or what it means by speaking in tongues in those scriptures, look at 2 Nephi 32. I'm sure that you have already found most of these answers, but maybe give it to Dalton to do some research and thinking.
> It is also interesting to go through the New Testament (again in Acts) and note all of the correct principles that are mentioned when the apostles performed ordinances. Most people don't notice it, but it is very specific about procedure. Interesting food for thought.
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