12/22/2014

Dear Family,

Thank you for the awesome email. It is so great to hear about the things going on at home. I am glad to hear that everything is going great.

This week was pretty sweet. I can't decide if the that family we met last week is ready or not. They seem so golden. They have met with missionaries before and for whatever reason, they just stopped coming. We put them on date for the 17th of January. Then they were all excited about coming to church and it was a no-show. So I am going back and forth on them. If they are ready, then they will get baptized. Everybody else is still doing well. Julia gave a presentation in her college class about her spiritual journey. At the end she showed a Mormon Message and everybody was crying and a lot of people asked her for the link to the video. She is being a great missionary! She packs up two little girls and fights them off all during sacrament meeting and then she stays for another two hours. And she is 8 months pregnant! It is pretty awesome to see. Also, say some extra prayers that we will be able to find Steven. He moved and apparently the people working at the home that he lives are not allowed to give us his address. I think our only hope is that he calls us. We will hope for the best.

Keep praying for opportunities to reach out to families. Nice job passing out the cards. It is weird to think back when it would've been really uncomfortable to hand out a card. I guess people just expect us to do so and it isn't weird when it is a complete stranger. We have handed out over 200 cards with the link to the He is the Gift video, but I never would've handed one out to somebody that I knew personally. It is all about getting out of our comfort zone. You never know what could happen.

My companion that was having all the struggle with his Mormon Mom is doing better. She sent him a package so that is a good sign. I still feel really bad for him and I hope that she will come back to church and everything will work out.

Basketball sounds like it is about the same as always. I hated it when we were doing terrible and then we had an awesome game and we still lost. I hope they whip up on Sugar. Speaking of, what is Gunner doing? Is he on a mission or in college or just hanging out? I can only say that you just have to do the very best you can and don't worry about coaches, teammates, refs, crowds, and all that. Try to think of the positives of everything and everyone.

Ok so about the Christmas program in this ward. It was bad. Like really bad. I was embarrassed. There were more people there than usual, but I guess I am used to seeing the whole cultural hall filled with tons of less active people. None of those came. Every speaker was in the young men's or young women's program which was a good idea, but it didn't work out well. The first speaker was this 12 year old and his whole talk was on abortions! Yes! And then he tied it into the birth of Christ. "Mary could have Jesus aborted, but she didn't." Are you kidding me? HaHaHa. It was super awkward. The primary and the ward choir sang, but it was pretty generic. There was a solo that I was looking forward to. this girl had a beautiful voice, but the guy couldn't play the piano! He kept messing up so it was really awkward. They  only sang two verses. I wanted to call Brian Ashton and Melanie Moulton and Billy Beard to pack up and fly up here and give a musical number. Then, the whole program was over at 11:50 so the bishop talked for 20 minutes. He gave a great talk, but it just wasn't what I was expecting. Oh well, I think I am making too big a deal over it, it made me appreciate Tetonia 1st ward more. And of course we went to all three meetings. Ha Ha.  Nobody even discussed sacrament meeting only and then cupcakes afterward in ward council!

So about Skype. We are planning on skyping at 8:00 am our time, so 9:00 your time. If worse comes to worse, we just talk on the phone. We will both pray that there will be no technical difficulties. I have been going through my journal and have a couple of experiences I wanted to talk about. Be thinking of questions to ask and so forth. Also try to think of some cool experiences you have had since I left. We have a zone devotional at 10:30 so we should start wrapping up by 10:00.

We had interviews with President Taylor on Thursday. He is so awesome. He definitely loves Idaho. I told him how I would get frustrated when people just won't even listen to a word we say. Just the ones who say, "Not interested." before we even say anything. I want to say that I am giving out money! Then President Taylor gave a sweet analogy about hunting pheasants. He said that a dog doesn't know the difference between a hen and a rooster. That is like us before we go knock on a door or before we go talk to somebody. Then the bird flies up. If it is a hen, there is nothing we can do about it. We just have to let it go. That is the way it is when we run into those people. He said that they probably didn't even accept it in the pre-existence, they just came here because they wanted a body. So now every time we talk to somebody like that, I just say "hen". President Taylor said that we are just hunting for roosters. Then, every once in a while, we run into a lovely batch of roosters. That analogy has helped me so much.

Thank you for the email. We will talk more on Thursday. I love you!

Love,

Jaxon