March 5, 2013

  This week we came one short of my record of lessons for a week (22 and 23) and we have been hitting part-member families really hard.  Elder Villalobos and I were never able to get anywhere with part-member families, but all of the investigators we have added the past few weeks have been from part-member families.  Things are fairly difficult in that my companion speaks nearly unintelligible Spanish and he goes home in June, but I am being a tough taskmaster and he is starting to learn more.  Last night we had a really good lesson and he started chattering in spanish about the best I've ever heard him speak.  The spirit really helps sometimes.  Elder Gay from the 70 gave us a surprise visit this week, and he gave a phenomenal talk on how to involve members more in missionary work.  He talked about when he did that as a mission president and they split the mission twice.  On his mission, he also nearly single-handedly changed how missionary work was done in Spain.  Also, his grandmother received a personal visit from Jesus Christ right before she died.  It was a crazy good talk.  Also, the missionary dept just changed the policy on email for missionaries, and we are allowed to write friends now (that's why I'm writing so late).  More info on our area-- one of the assistants came up to us yesterday and putting a third companionship in the branch is a strong possibility with the huge surge and the kind of numbers that we have been putting up.  We just need to get some baptisms behind it. 

We also got to teach victor this week (we had only seen him once in the past two months).  We got on the phone with him on thursday, and cancelled an appt so that we could go see him that same night.  We then taught him on friday and took him to church on sunday.  we were supposed to see him last night but he had to cancel, so we're seeing him in a few minutes.  Because he has made it to church enough times now, we're gonna commit him to pay tithing tonight and schedule a baptismal interview and see if we can't get him baptized this weekend.  It's a huge stretch, but we can make it happen.  As far as pollito/my companion goes, we are getting along pretty well.  He does a lot of really weird stuff, but it's mostly funny.  There are still times where I have to stop myself from saying "what on earth are you doing?" but he means well so I have no problem with it.  He has been out 21 months, so now he is already thinking about going home and always asks me for advice about how he should get himself married.  I've let him know my thoughts about marriage, which is a nice way of emphasizing on staying focused on finding, teaching, baptizing, restoring the gospel, preaching it, gathering the house of israel, reactivating, fulfilling prophecy, and everything else we have to do.  Have a good week! 

February 26, 2013

This week we did really well.  The other missionaries taught 21 lessons, and we had 17, so things picked up a ton.  The mission set an all-time record for new investigators (180) this week, and we added 2 of them.  Both were from part-member families that we had tried before but were more willing this time.  Ricardo gave a talk this week.  The doctrine was all solid, but he was still pacing around and talking with his hands a la evangelica...LOL.   That investigator talked to a member who owned a restaurant about getting a job so that she wouldn't have to work sundays, and he was super rude to her and ended up turning someone else away from the church with his attitude.  The missionaries were able to fix her situation, but it was still kinda rough.   I have had some technical difficulties with some of them and had to throw 2 away and a third one won't last much longer.  I got some beautiful new ties at a discount clothing store, and then one of them (I wore it to transfer meeting and literally got 20+ compliments on it) got stained the first day I wore it.  Two of my nice brooks brothers ties also had large stains, and I was really worried about asians dry-cleaning them (I had my suit dry-cleaned in september and it looked worse after than before), but they all came out looking like new, so that was good.  The wave just started this transfer, and it's really going to hit hard in march.  It will be interesting.  

 

We just heard that there were going to be 58 new missions.  We actually only found out because we went to an arab international store in search of inca kola and heard it on npr while we were there.  That is great that you are helping the missionaries out down there.  Member work is a much better way of doing things. Our youth programs here are kind of terrible to be honest.  It seems like everywhere in the stake that the leadership just really doesn't do that great of a job.  That is really good that you are getting them involved in family history.  We have tried to get lots of people involved, but hispanics here just aren't interested. 

Elder Karlinsey