May 21, 2013

Congratulations on graduating! That's awesome. I know, it's weird already having my associates. My companion did the same thing as me during high school and got his in Accounting before coming out. We are both glad we did it, though, it saved a ton of time and money.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks came to Reno South for stake conferences and the missionaries were invited if they could get investigators to come. We got there super early so we were pretty close to him when he spoke. He is a really smart guy and also really funny and after he finished he had about an hour of question and answer which was cool. After wards, he walked around and shook hands and talked to us and others, which was awesome. He mentioned that she (Sister Monson) had passed while he was speaking, and all the missionaries were surprised, we had never heard.

Things are going well here. We are staying busy. On average, we rode our bikes about 20-25 miles a day and we taught a lot of lessons. C. decided he wanted to visit his family in California for a few weeks before getting baptized so he pushed his date back to July. His family is very Jewish and he wants to talk to them in person first, which we understand. He lives in Reno with his sister S. who hates the church and wont let us teach lessons in her house but she is really nice and loves us and loves talking to us for some reason. One time, we went and visited him just to see how he was doing. She came home and thought we had been teaching and gave us the death stare, I don't think I had ever been so scared in my life. After we had reassured her we were not teaching a lesson, she was fine, but man oh man, I thought she was about to murder us the look she had. She really is a nice person though, she has invited us over for dinner several times and likes to talk but is not open to the gospel.

We haven't really been able to teach E. and B. again. The whole situation in that house among other things is making it very hard to get a hold of them, but when we do get to talk to them they still want us to come over, the timing is just not right and it is worsened by the fact that we are so busy and our availability is limited, but we make and effort to stop by every day and see if we can't get a hold of any of them.

All I have to say about O. is that he is unbelievable. We meet with him about every two days and he completely accepts the gospel. We got him to come to see Elder Oaks and he thought it was great. We were worried about him because he accepts everything without question, so we were trying to get him to pray and ask and to change if he got an answer and he got frustrated with us and said,"You guys keep telling me to ask God but I already know it's true. If I didn't believe you guys and know it was good, I wouldn't let you come back." His mother had also come up to us and said what ever you are telling him, keep telling him, it's been good for him. He also said he wanted to know more and that if he came with us to church he would be able to learn more, which astounded us, we hadn't even brought up church yet. Then he asked us if we didn't smoke or drink so we then brought up the Word of Wisdom and we thought for sure he would have a problem with it, we had met him biking down the street intoxicated. He asked if he could still drink to and smoke weed, and we explained he couldn't but that we are blessed for it and he said, "OK, I will stop drinking beer and tea, I don't drink coffee or smoke cigarettes, and I was going to quite smoking weed anyway." We were speechless. Everyone else we teach has had problems having faith in the Word of Wisdom but he is all for it. There are still somethings he doesn't understand quite yet, but he wants to be be baptized and wants to be married in the temple, we are very excited for him.

I love you all and hope you have a great week