July 24 letters

To Mom:

So yeah I've already done the math and I'll probably go home on the same day as I left.  If you add it up, because I was only at the mtc for 3 weeks the transfers line up to make exactly 2 years worth whereas daniel was in the mtc for 6 weeks so the transfers lined up for him to have 2 years minus 3 weeks.   But I don't know if you want to come fetch me that would be sweet but I'm also way excited to go home with the guys in my transfer because there's like 10 of us flying in to Utah.  But Elder Ondracek is going home 1 transfer early because his family wants to pick him up and I think Elder Keetch is doing the same thing and his dad is in the first quorum of the seventy.

This week was super awful for missionary work.  We couldn't make it to most of our area and we had to drop a lot of investigators and now we're not really doing much at all.  It's rough but we spent almost the entire week trying to visit members and we got lots of referrals out of them.  Some members have a bad attitude about missionary work but most of them are really good about it.  I also got some really good ideas from Daniel about how to use members in missionary work which I'll hopefully apply this week. 

We only taught like 2 or 3 lessons this week but we finally got the chance to teach brother T again.  He's really powerful he's been reading the Book of Mormon and he said he got the prompting just to listen to us when we taught him so we finished teaching him about the Restoration and also about the Book of Mormon and it was super powerful.  We each bore out testimony about the restoration and it was really powerful especially Brother Wildskit's testimony.  He's still a long way away because he's the president of a ministry with churches all over SA but he told us he's going to give us the addresses for his pastors and other members of his church which is exciting.

Otherwise I did nothing this week except visit members and read the scriptures so it was kind of depressing for missionary work but I think it will be better this coming week.

We've just organized a ward activity where we're going to play soccer every Saturday which I'm way excited about I just need to buy a ball.  Also some random guys saw me playing soccer in the street with some kids and they thought I was really good so they invited me to play in a game with them on Saturday so I agreed but I told them only if they let us teach them.  So this Saturday I'm going to play in a game and afterwards I'm going to get like 10 or more new people to teach I'm way excited about it

To Dad:

If you'll remember from the early days of the church there were always people abandoning the church and doing crazy controversial things and fighting against the prophet.  Because the church was new the leaders were really suspect to pride and they felt entitled to leadership so they were easy prey for Satan when they didn't think things were happening according to their own personal specifications.  That's the same with the church here a lot of the time.  Most of the members are really good people and in every ward you have just devout and good people but a lot of the time the leaders develop a sense of entitlement and so insane things happen.  I can definitely promise you that everything I said in my email was true, I've heard those things from lots of members.

Biking was fun and it felt good to work a little bit instead of just sitting in a car all day but it really affected the work.  Our area is absolutely massive so there's huge portions of our area we literally can't get to without a car.  For example we can't make it to our bishop without a car because it would take about an hour to an hour and a half on a bike.  We've had to really focus on members only so it was quite difficult but also a lot of fun.