This week was pretty good. We had 9 investigators at church on Sunday and we have 20 people with baptism dates for the next 3 weeks. I hope we will be able to baptize most of them if not all of them. A lot of these people are really prepared to receive the gospel. That is always really exciting and very uplifting. It makes all of us really happy. As a mission we are hoping to get 2008 baptisms by the end of this year and every missionary is working hard to achieve that goal. As for Elder Olsen and I, we got up early and left the apartment early on Sunday to get as many people as we could to church. We really saw the fruits of our labors.
The district meetings I plan help a lot, because I can just focus on the things that my district needs. Basically I stand and teach a lesson for about one hour. I am giving my second district meeting on Tuesday. My first one was about love for your area, your investigators, and your companion. Without love missionary work does not work. Nothing happens without love. President said, “Do ‘Missionary Work’, not ‘Missionary Things’.”
I finally got the package and I was so happy about it. Thank you for all of the things in it. I really like the CDs. I listen to them all the time. The kids love the lollypops. The smiles on their faces are amazing. We took this really poor family consisting of a mother and her two children out last week. We took them to an ice cream store and bought them ice cream. The children (10 and 7 years old) loved it and the mother was so thankful. Things like that are just really amazing. We did not do much, but they were really grateful. The people here really like it when we roll up our sleeves and help them with different things. We moved a pile of sand for a person we did not know. After we were done they gave us drinks and pineapple and all this fruit, because they were so thankful. Just simple things like that make them so happy.
I love this work. It is amazing. It changes people’s lives and it changes the lives of the missionaries. It has changed mine. I know it has.
Anyway, I need to get going. I have just a few minutes left on the computer and I need to write president Robison his weekly letter.
Love,
Jeff
