What is up my wonderful family! Sounds like a great week back in good old Utah. I am so proud of Janie pie pie pony for getting baptized! That is so awesome and such a big step. You guys should have her write down everything that she felt so that she will always be able to remember her baptism. I wish I would have done that because I can't really even remember mine haha. And man what little Brielle said just made my whole day!! I love her and all of those sweet little nieces and nephews! I am excited to see them all at Christmas and see how much bigger they are getting. I am excited to be able to get home and go to all of their events! All the tennis, soccer, singing and everything else. That is going to be a blast! Sounds like the rest of the family is doing really well too. That is so good! Tell Jacque Happy Late Birthday for me! She is growing up. She will probably be taller than me when I get home and be able to put a whooping on me in tennis! She already did haha. Mom and dad great job on all of the missionary work going on back home! I am sorry to hear about your friends from park city cancelling on you to go to the Temple Open house. Everyone has their agency all we can do is be their friends and help support them and encourage them. So don't get discouraged. Be happy! Because Heavenly Father knows what you are doing and he will soften their hearts soon! Alright so I have a challenge for everyone in our family. So from serving out here in Louisiana I have seen a lot of things that they are lacking. Like Home teaching. For the past year the home teaching in this ward is .7% out of 700 members... That is absolutely horrible. So my first challenge is to do your home teaching and visiting teaching. But when you go don't just take a message and ask if your families are doing good, instead actually serve them. If you notice that their lawn needs cutting then one day go and just do it. Or do some sort of service for them to help them out and to build their trust. A big part of home teaching is helping our families so that is the first challenge! So get involved! haha and the second challenge is in 1 months time I want everyone to invite a friend to bring to church or a church activity. This does not have to be awkward or weird. All you are doing is inviting. We do not need to be scared. Honestly it is not really a member’s job to do the actual teaching, but to do the inviting and then have the missionaries step in and do the teaching. That way it takes us out of being in awkward situations or loosing friendships, because if the person we invited gets offended you could just blame the missionaries! We don't care because guess what is happening to the missionary! They are getting transferred soon anyway. HaHa just kidding! If we want our message to spread like wild fire then the members have to get more involved! So that is the challenge and I hope you all will take it up and do it! Pray and ask for help to know who you should invite or after you are done reading this I know each one of us can think of someone who we could invite. That is the Spirit telling us so remember to open your mouths and let the Spirit feel it! Alright I am done now haha :)
Well now for this week! It has been a great week!! A ton has happened and so many miracles have happened. This week it was still raining like crazy! But the miracle is we never got wet! Whenever we went out to do something the rain just seemed to stop. That was very nice. So this week we were not able to teach a lot. All our plans just kept falling through. That is the only down side of this week. We were able to do some service of helping a Hispanic family move. That was fun and nice because we were able to get out of the shirt and tie for a couple hours. Haha So something new we have been really focusing on as a ward mission is changing our focus. For so many years we have been focusing on less-active family members and home teaching. We now are going to change our focus a little bit and work on the active members and especially active members with families and kids who are almost mission age. It is crazy, but down here out of the blue a super active family will all of a sudden just stop coming. So we feel we need to focus on them then it will give them a new motivation to get involved with the work. And in return it is going to bump up home teaching and young people going on missions. So our plan is for 6 weeks straight to visit every active member every week. Of course we are still going to see less active families and investigators. We have a list of 6 families. It has been great because we are gaining the trust of the members and they are starting to open up and give us referrals. That is the way missionary work should be! So I’ll let you know how that is going!
Now for our investigators. The N. family (Asian family) they are doing really well! It has been the hardest teaching them for sure because of the language barrier. But they are slowly, but surely understanding the doctrine. It was really cool though. In one of the lessons with their family last week we taught them the plan of salvation and everything just clicked for them. W. D. S. commented and said he never understands when he goes to English class, but when we teach him he said it all makes sense. That is so awesome because we know it is the Spirit and so does he. Our last lesson with him was Saturday night and we read with him 2 Nephi 31. That chapter talks about the Gospel of Jesus Christ so having faith, repenting, getting baptized, receiving the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end. We talked a lot about baptism again with him and his sisters. He still doesn't understand why he needs to be baptized again in our church when he has already been baptized in the Baptist church. We keep going over the priesthood and he doesn't quite get it. Tonight we have an appointment with him and we are bringing a member with us that served in Cambodia so he kind of knows of his situation. We will see how it goes! PS W. and his son came to church. They love it! Especially his kid. I threw my missionary name tag on him when we were over at his house so he could be a missionary just like us and then I whispered to him things to say and he loved it and it helped him get involved with the lesson. It was awesome!
We had another investigator come to church. His name is K. He is awesome too, but he is about to move and then with L. and J. we were not able to see them this week. They had a funeral they had to go to. We are hoping this week we will be able to see them.
On Saturday we went to downtown New Orleans for our Zone training meeting. It was a lot of fun and then after we ran down to the French market and got some beignets! It was a great day! And then yesterday at church was a great fast and testimony meeting! Brother Johnson got up and bore a great testimony and after the meeting he grabbed all of us missionaries and talked to us for like an hour about how to answer the question about African Americans and the Priesthood. It was all good insight.
I am doing great! Thank you for the "sweet" package! The peaches were all smushed! haha but they tasted great with the smoothie I make every morning! Thank you for that! Well my testimony is growing every day! I am loving the work. My companion is doing a lot better as well. He still is not too sure though. He loves visiting the members though so we are going to really focus on that! haha well I hope you all are doing great back home! I love you all and don't really miss ya! haha too much haha:) have a great week! Love ya!
Elder Smith
(Cafe DuMonde)
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