SLOW BUT STILL GOOD

1/24/11

Well hello:

So I am having a really hard time thinking about what happened this week. We stayed busy but nothing to extraordinary happened. We have still been trying to find people and but still teaching a lot of the same people. Alicia officially dropped us this week. Last week she had said that she didn't want to meet with us anymore, then we got a random text from her asking us if we could come over and talk for a second. We thought all she wanted to do was bash with us because she has been getting anti-ed by a lot of people and her youth pastor gave her a bunch of stuff off the Internet. I ended up actually being on exchange that night with Elder Ahart so we went over there and just had a little chat. She kept bringing up random anti-stuff but all we kept saying is "if I understand you correctly, you are asking about ... but what it all comes down to is if Joseph Smith is a prophet then this is true." In the whole time we have taught her she has never prayed about it. So we told her that's what needed to happen. We could teach her until we are blue in the face but unless she gains a testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon then it doesn't matter.

The rest of the exchange with Elder Ahart went well. We tracted a ton and found a new potential that seemed pretty promising. We will see what comes of it.

We ended up doing a lot of service this week as well. We took down Christmas lights for an older guy in the ward, moved furniture out of a house so they could refinish the floors, washed a horse that had lice and conducted a math class for some struggling young single adults. It turned out to be really good and the one that was most worried about their test got a 78% on the test. It was a good chance to review my math skills as well. I still remember quite a bit. We had lessons with our usual investigators and they all went well. With the ones that are just waiting for family and legal issues to clear up, we are having them teach us. We give them a topic and then they study it and teach it in our next lesson. It is actually working really well.

Nothing else to out of the ordinary happened. We had a cool ‘following the spirit’ story though. Tuesday night before stake meetings we had an appointment that fell through. We had thirty minutes to fill and we had no clue who to go see. We both had a prompting to go see this guy named Jake who is never home. We decided to try it and see what happened. He ended up being home and we had a very nice talk with him.

We have also been learning how to rope. It is funny how many people open up when you start talking about the stuff they like. We have started off some great lessons this week by talking about that. I am getting really good at it. We really started practicing last week at zone p-day. We would have one of the elders bear crawl across the gym floor and the others would run after him and try to catch him with the rope. It was really fun. I think I might buy myself a rope today but we will see what happens. This week was just another week but still very good.

I hope you are having a great week as well. As we try to learn something from every situation, we become better people. We can learn how to better ourselves every day, we just need to look at what we can learn and not why did this have to happen. Every situation can be good, it just depends on how you look at it. Be safe this week and replace fear with faith.

Love Elder Draper