Pastors and Girlfriends

So the Cougars took a dive, huh? Me and Elder Cooper are pretty let down about that. I expect that next year will be a better result though. (Does that mean that the Utes head to a BCS bowl again? Yeesh!)

It was a week of highs and lows again. We were teaching and expecting three families to show up on Sunday, but unfortunately we only had one of them come. That’s one of the more difficult problems I’ve found in the mission. Many listen, read, and pray for a response, but when it comes time to head to church, the number drops significantly.

We’re teaching a guy named E. (I think that’s how you spell it…) who read and understood really well about everything that he read. The only problem was that after he had read and pondered about the Book of Mormon, he went and asked, not the Lord liked we invited, but his local pastor. So, when we made a return visit he ended up with less of a response than when he started, so we explained again about the importance of asking the Lord and not other people and invited him to try again. He’s a good guy, just that he usually does what his pastor tells him to do all the time, so we’re working on helping him exercise some free-agency, heh.

In other news, my comp. got a package from his girlfriend this week, which gave him a nice boost of confidence. When I arrived in the area, he hadn’t received a letter from her in two weeks (eternity for him I guess) and was predicting the worst. We’re still sweeping up the glitter that was used as the packaging, and now Elder O. has a nice smelly scented frog that sits on our study desk and makes me sneeze. He’s having me help him with English so he can impress her when he gets home. Currently he’s mastered “What’s up?” and “I love you”, so now we’re moving on to the more complicated, but just as essential, “It’s not me, it’s you” and “I’ll clean the garage after you make me dinner!” I think that he’ll be speaking well at the end of this transfer.

We’re trying to find a way to get the ward involved in the missionary work. Unfortunately, we don’t have a ward mission leader as the last one was released before I got here and they haven’t called a new one yet. We struggle in teaching lessons with members, as the ward is a bit spread out between the two areas, and we’re lacking involvement with the ward. Pray for us as we look to fix this problem.

On a closing note, we have a game of flag football planned for today. One of the Elders in the zone has a football, so we’ll see if we can instruct the Brazilian's in the way of the pigskin.

Till next time.

-Me