I DON'T HAVE A COMPANION!

February 8, 2011

Well hello,

I bet you are all wondering what I am doing without a companion. The white handbook (missionary rules) says you are always supposed to be with your companion. Well if I was with Elder Lemeprle right now I would be on a plane headed for the Salt Lake airport. He has finished his two years and now has to deal with real life, luckily that day is in the future and I don't have to worry about it. Even though he was my official companion, Elders Curtis and Spencer were nice enough (or some-what forced) to take me in so we are in a threesome for a few days. It is hard being in a threesome and we are back to covering four units until tomorrow when I go pick up my companion. The call came yesterday who my companion would be and I am so excited for him to get here! It is one of my best friends in the mission and I can't wait. My companion is going to be none other than Elder Lawerence Liu. Elder Liu and I were companions in the MTC and we have always joked that we would be companions. Now it is actually happening. Last time I taught with Elder Liu it was in Mongolian so we will see how we do in English.

This week has been really good and I am happy that Elder Lemperle and I were able to end on a high note. We have worked our hardest and we weren't seeing any real success. We had a few glimmers of light but they got snuffed out pretty quickly, but this week we had some awesome confidence boosters. Last week we had started to drop investigators and our teaching pool started to get really low. But the Lord blessed us again and we were able to find two new investigators. One is a college student named Dakota who seems really interested and is very open to new things. He does have some word of wisdom things but that can be overcome. The funny thing is that he already knows a couple people in the YSA branch. As we were leaving the lesson he said he was going to go get some dinner at this girls house. That girl just happened to be the Relief Society President in the branch. It is funny how things like that work out.

The other new investigator is Tom Young. We knocked on the door and he opened right up and said come in. We are always a little hesitant when people invite us right in. It turned out to be great. He said he moved from Indiana and had taken the lessons there. He said he saw us tracting on the other side of the street and was really hoping that we would come to his house. We started talking and got to know him. He asked a few questions that he wanted cleared up about the Church but he said he really likes it. He has been talking to one of his ex-wives who is a member now and has been learning a lot about it. We left him with a restoration movie and it was truly inspired. He loves movies and he said he had just seen an advertisement on TV for that movie and he really wanted to see it. We are going to go back next week and see how he liked the movie. I have a very good feeling about him. I am so grateful for all the resources we have now to use. It makes missionary work a lot easier.

This week has just been a lot of fun as we worked until the very last day of Elder Lemperle's mission. There were a lot of funny stories from this week. We were saying good bye to Tiah and Dylan (investigators) and their fellow-shippers came over. We have this spiritual thought where we use a water bottle rocket launcher. As we do righteous things we get more air pressure and as we do what we need we can achieve our full potential or make the rocket go really high. Well the daughter of the fellow-shipper gets up in sacrament meeting to bear her testimony and talks about it. She says "I went to an investigators house with the missionaries and they were giving a spiritual thought and it involved bottle rockets." She forgot to say the water part so everyone was asking us why we had bottle rockets.

We had a couple cool events happen this week. We got to ride in a 68' fast back mustang. If you have seen the movie ‘Bullitt’, it is that car. It is an exact replica. The only difference is that it has a racing engine. It was so amazing and fast.

Another cool experience was that we got to crawl under a house to help with some plumbing. under this house there was only like two feet of clearance and water had built up under there. The water was one to six inches deep depending on where you were. We were putting a French Drain so the water could drain out but of course the prep work wasn't done so we had to spend like two hours in freezing water digging a trench. It was so much fun. I don't think I have ever been so muddy.

This week was full of wonderful experiences and opportunities. We had interviews this week and it was a great chance for me to really get to know and become closer to my mission President and his wife. We also had Zone Leader Council which is one of the best meetings in the mission. We talked about a lot of great principles but one thing that I think can help each of us in sharing the Gospel. It is the new mormon.org website. It is amazing and I urge you to check it out. It is a perfect way to help someone understand what we believe. It has a lot of short inspirational videos and it outlines the basic Doctrines of our Church. All you have to do is ask someone to look over the website and listen to the messages that are shared. That is another one of those amazing resources we have to share the gospel.

I hope you all have an amazing week and stay safe. Every day is the best day of our life if we allow it to. Remember to replace fear with faith and continue to build your faith in the Savior. He can help us through anything.

Love,

Elder Scottie Draper