Camera

August 12, 2013

How beautiful are the feet . . . ? . . .

Yes, I bought a camera today, but I don't have any new pictures to send from it just yet.  The pictures are from Sister Winsor's camera. The first one of our feet after a rainy day, there's one of us canning peaches and then one that Sister Winsor took of me while we were tracting a gravel road on Saturday. We were on that road for three hours. It was exhausting. But the scenery was beautiful.

When we're helping, we're happy

I'm so excited to hear about [my cousin Mikelle's baby] Kinslee! It's strange to think that she'll be over a year old before I see her. 

We've had a pretty good week down here. Last Monday evening was actually really incredible. Because we only have three hours to work, we generally don't get a lot done. But this past Monday we got 4 new investigators. That's about 4x as many as we normally get in a week! So we were pretty excited. 

The first three investigators are a married couple and their brother.  We met them the second or third day after I got here, and were able to talk to the whole family, except for the husband, but hadn't been able to catch them all together again after that. We stopped by last Monday and luckily the three of them were all sitting outside. We ended up talking to them for about an hour, answering questions they had and talking about the Book of Mormon. I'm really excited about them. They're all at different places in their spiritual lives, but I can tell that they've all been prepared to hear the gospel and I think all of them could accept it. The brother is such a cool guy. He has an interesting past; he was in a gang at some point and had one of his legs shot off, so he has a prosthetic leg. He went to jail for something and while he was there decided to become Muslim. He said one of the main reasons he became Muslim is because there's only one version of the Koran, he doesn't like all the different versions of the Bible. So we were really excited to tell him about the Book of Mormon. The wife knows she needs to go to church and be baptized, but she's worried about messing up after that, so we talked to her about the sacrament. And then the husband isn't very interested in religion, he was raised in another church, but he said he was forced to believe it so I think he's a little wary of religion at the moment. But he got more involved in the conversation as we talked, which was good. We're going back to see them again tonight, hopefully things go well. 

Also on Monday night we were able to contact a referral from the Spanish elders. He's from Costa Rica and speaks pretty good English, although I really had to concentrate to understand his accent. His wife, who's eight months pregnant, doesn't speak any English though, but there are people in the ward who could help us out there. He was very nice, and invited us back anytime, so we'll hopefully see him soon too. 

One of the things that's very different about the South is that people aren't afraid to talk over each other. It's not something I'm used to. Like one evening we stopped by a less active family's house and ran into a daughter and the grandma out in the yard. We started talking to the daughter, but then the grandma started talking as well, so I started listening to the grandma and Sister Winsor kept listening to the daughter. We talked for almost half an hour, and even though Sister Winsor and I were standing right next to each other, we might as well have been on opposite sides of the room, we were having a totally different experience. We walked away and I asked her "So, how was your conversation?". It was pretty funny in a way, how even though we were both right there, we had entirely different conversations. 

I love you all, I'm happy to be out here and I'm happy everything is going well at home. I always love hearing from people. Have a great week!