March 12th email

Well it's been a pretty good week out here in Sterling. We didn't have a huge amount of success by any means but we worked our hardest and we've made some good progress haha. This past Wednesday I was down and out again with some sort of bad food I must have eaten. I'm completely better now though, just must have had something not agree with me I suppose haha. It was a very very rough day for me haha. So that was kind of a bummer. Man we knocked on a ton of doors though haha. Elder Anderson hates it when we knock doors but I make him do it anyways, he's really getting a lot better at not being shy with people. So really the highlight of our week was a really great lesson we had with these kids we are teaching, Joel and Kirsten. We were trying to think what would be the most beneficial thing for us to teach them and the
thing that came to mind for whatever reason was The Plan of Salvation. So we decided we would teach that using my little wooden Plan of Salvation puzzle thing to help illustrate it a bit. When we got to the lesson though we found out that unfortunately they had just lost their grandpa's on both sides of the family and so they were really quite depressed about that and had had a pretty rough day because of it and were really wondering about what happened after death and if they would ever be able to see them again. Fortunately enough though, we had the answers to both of those questions and had actually planned to teach it. So we taught them about the Plan of Salvation and what happens after we die and that they can be with their family forever. We told them all about how still even after this life they can see them again and they will still be their grandparents and they will still be their grankids. It was such a great comfort to them and they were really greatful to us for telling them about it. You could really tell that it spoke quite a bit of peace to them about things. So that as a really cool experience. A little bit less positive news though, well bitter sweet news really, is that we got invited to our ward's weekly ward council meeting haha. Which normally would be nothing but exciting news but unfortunately I had to break the news to them that we weren't getting the support we need from the ward to be able to retain the people that we teach. I shared the example of two people who joined the church on Christmas eve and just never were befriended by anybody in the church and have already gone less active now because of it. It's a very sad story really because we still meet with the two people fairly often and man they are great people but they just don't want to go to church because they don't feel like they have anybody but the missionaries to talk to while they are there... Gah so frustrating! But hopefully with us going to that meeting from now on we can get things back to how they are supposed to be haha. But besides that really nothing super exciting has happened this past week. We are starting to get some really nice weather though! Like low 70's and sunshine. So I've gotten to break out the short-sleeved shirts and man it feels good haha. Well I hope all is well with everyone back home! Hopefully we'll have some better success stories to share next week haha.