4/15/13 from Elder Mitts

i do enjoy the spiritual but i love hearing the everyday, nothing is too boring or not worth hearing about. i LOVED your letter, that is such a strong testimony to me, and such a great example of applying the gospel, making it real to people. i have read it so many times already, and will probably read it again sometime today.

Update on this thing called a mission. we got rain for the first time since i got here, and it was........ pathetic, could barely be called a drizzle.

we are having to restart with our investigator Lori, cause she is having trouble with some of the commandments, because she was frustrated, she stopped meeting with us. so we are going to redouble our efforts with her. we have a new investigator who is 73 years old, her name is Joellyn. she has a whole bunch of family in the church but has never really learned about it. Her mother was less active and married a baptist man, and didn't go back to church until her husband died. we tracted into Joellyn, and the first thing she said was that in her 73 years she has never had missionaries come to her door, so i of course replied, "well here we are!"

the work is soo much fun and brings me so much joy, the ward here is amazing. we just had fast and testimony meeting yesterday, and of course i had to get up there and bear my testimony, otherwise i probably would have exploded. We had an investigator (sort of) there, his name is Andy and he is doing a paper for his American Religious History Class, and he is supposed to attend a service and we tracted into him this past week and he thought it was just the perfect opportunity (which is exactly what we thought. :) LOL) he said he was going to come back next week, which is stake conference, and when i asked him if we could come by and answer any of his questions, he said he would give us a call because he had a pretty crazy busy week this week. 

A little bit of background on all of the Elders here, our zone is organized in this way. we have our zone leaders elder Arnold and Elder Walker, and then there are districts. our district consists of the zone leaders, our district leader and his companion, Elder Shiu and Elder Burnham, us, and a senior couple, Elder and sister Davies. there is another English speaking district, and a Mandarin Chinese district. Lots of really kewl Elders in there, but other then sister Davis, there are no sisters here. we hear that might change in the near future because of the great influx of missionaries coming out to the field. This is Elder Arnold's last week. so we will be getting a new zone leader, but not me, i am not done training!

we had to call the President Bowen, the Mission president this week, because Joellyn is a special case. she has a broken back and is pretty much stuck to her house, she cant leave cause her health issues are so bad. we had to ask president Bowen what we were going to do with respect to getting her to church, and the actual ordinance of baptism. he told us to get the ward to bring church to her, and that there was some special way for those who have disabilities to receive the ordinance of baptism, but he didn't go into detail, very interesting! 

Ummm.... i dont think there is too much else that is new. this is the last week of my first transfer, 6 weeks down (plus MTC time) many more to go!:)

Hold down the Fort!

Love you Mom!

-Elder Mitts