May 25, 2009

Hello,

Well sounds pretty nuts at home right now with a lot going on. I can’t believe everyone’s graduated especially Taylor, that’s so weird. The summer is definitely here now.It’s Super humid and our apartment is rough on the 3rd floor and a little AC in the window ha. This morning was awesome, there are 4 elders in our pad and 2 phones that wake us up every morning. Both our phones were on silent from church yesterday so we ended up waking up at 730 instead of 630. We walk Into the kitchen and me and my companions study area and there’s like a million maggots all over the ground. We spent a long time vacuuming maggots and cleaning up the place. It was pretty terrible. Then we did our Laundry, shopping and went to the place where we email and it’s closed. Then we tried the library and it’s closed too because of the holiday, but finally we found a place to email.We’re going to the Brooklyn Bridge after I’m done to take pictures I think. It should be real cool.The thing that happened last week wasn’t anything to stress over just terrible. I woke up at 2 am with my companion and we listened to our neighbor under us beat his wife half to death for over an hour. Throwing things, both of them were screaming and there was nothing we could do. It was really sad but that’s life here it’s ridiculous. This past week was a hard one, probably the hardest but I’ll stay positive ha. We had so many appointments with solid investigators and all week almost all of them cancelled so we walked around fear Lessing a TON. We had to drop Geraldo the kid from Equador that we’ve spent so much time working with. He is moving back to Equador in 4 weeks and is just too hard hearted. We’ve been meeting with him every other day for five weeks, he's been to church 5 times but is so set in the ways of his church. We had a member comes with us who is probably the strongest member of the branch to teach with Geraldo. He explained the book of Mormon so well cuz Geraldo still has problems thinking it’s of God because the bible says you can’t add to it,but only an educated person knows that in the bible it says you can’t add to that certain book. He bore the strongest testimony and the spirit was there so strong and Geraldo just says, “the book of Mormon isn’t true". After that we all were in shock. The member later told us it felt like he had stabbed him in the heart with a dagger. It was hard to drop Geraldo because we worked so hard with him and its like we didn’t get our paycheck. He still came to church though which was kinda weird. We had 4 investigators at church with us. We're working with a couple guys my age who are way sweet. One of them already believes in our church after one visit. He has been researching the church online and knew more about Joseph smith than I do, just kidding, but his parents hate all other religions so we'll see what happens. We had a lot of good investigators drop last week but I guess it’s not their time to come into the church. My companion and I are trying to work with the less actives. We’re trying to work with the ex-branch president who has been inactive for 5 years since the last president were called. His wife who isn’t a member wants him to go back to church. Less actives are hard to work with because they juke us more than the investigators even if we call them the day of and remind them we're coming. The other elders had a baptism yesterday which was awesome. The kid is 20 and bore the strongest testimony afterwards. There’s been 2 baptisms since I've been here and both were in their 20's so Elder Childs and I are gonna focus on working with the youth in the branch and their friends. The problem is there’s not very members in our split off area and it’s hard to work with them, but usually success here is thru members. Its good to hear everything is well at home. I love you and thanks for all the support.

Love, Elder Breinholt