Week 58

Hey there y'all! It's been another great week here in East Texas! We are now in AUGUST (crazy, huh?) and it is about to get HOT. I think all this next week it's supposed to be triple digits (I know in Vegas you've had that since May, but at least it's dry there) and so we are going to be sweaty. But such is the life of a Texas missionary in August. You sweat, knock, teach sweat, baptize and sweat some more. As you may have guessed, I get sweaty. But I love it here, so I deal with it. Besides, it builds character ;)

This last week did not go as well as we would have liked as far as new people to teach goes. We didn't put the time needed into finding and we are going to do a lot more this week in hopes to find new people to teach. While we didn't find a lot of people, we did have a baptism! Sevren was baptized by his father and it was a great service as well as confirmation. We are happy to see success here and the Ward council is as well. We have a date with Charles Shaw this weekend and he came to church Sunday so he is ready for that. I keep seeing this pattern in my mission over and over again: work hard and the Lord will provide. It's happened before and it is happening now.

We have had a couple miracles over this last week. The first is a woman named Terra. We had to get our oil changed in Tyler on Tuesday and the wait was about 3 hours. 0_0 We had to get it done, though, so we went with Elder Lewis and Elder Olvera on a mini-exchange while that happened, so by the time we got back to our area, it was about 4:45. We had about 30 minutes before dinner and so we went and tracted a street we had planned on earlier and it turned out to have only 6 or7 houses on it. We figured we'd give it a whirl anyways and knocked on her door. She is probably in her mid- to late-twenties and just went through a divorce. She has two little girls and we talked a lot about family and how it's hard to raise a family in today's world because of degrading moral values and in broken homes, much like hers is. We are focusing a lot on the Restoration and modern prophets and we will be giving her a copy of A Proclamation to the World: the Family to read this week. She is really open to all of it and we will be teaching her more on Tuesday.

The other is Stacy and David. We found Stacy and David last Saturday right before dinner and they let us in and we gave them a brief rundown of the Restoration and a copy of the Book of Mormon. We listened with the Spirit and were bold and asked questions that were definitely inspired. It was really good, even though it was short, and set up another appointment right before Sevren's baptism on Thursday. When we returned, we answered questions and talked mainly about the Book of Mormon. David is really open to the whole thing. We asked him what he thought of the First Vision and he said he believed crazier things in the Bible, so why not? (That was cool) Stacy on the other hand is a little bit more skeptical. We asked her the right questions, however, and waited and listened to where we were able to draw out a bit more of her concerns and resolve them. It was a really powerful lesson with a promise to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. We will see them again tomorrow.

Other than that there hasn't been anything crazy or exciting, besides the fact that I saw a LIVE armadillo! In 14 months of being here, all the armadillos I've seen have been victims of roadkill, either in or on the side of the road, and we finally saw one alive! They are crazy little buggers; they move fast, too. It was pretty cool.

I hope y'all have great week!

Love,

Elder Grondel