February 1, 2010

Dear Family and Friends: Ben's most recent letter was in "pigeon" Spanish and very hard to read, even for the Spanish speakers in our house. He does seem to be learning but needs more time to get so that he thinks in Spanish as well as he writes and speaks. It was mainly answering my questions and commenting on news (he said to congratulate Kristyn and Russell on the birth of Baby Steven).

Yup I know. JAJAJAJAJAJA. Hoppefully Sarah translated even if it was painfully incorrect gramatically, I basically talked about how weird things go on here and answered your questions. Well this week I have alot more to say about things happening. We didnt baptize our investigator. He just kind of disappeared. We hadnt seen him in at church and he was very hard to get ahold of and generally evasive. We talked about it with him after finally getting ahold of him, and he has been reading in the Book of Mormon. He found a part in Moroni(I dont remember where. I should find out shouldnt I? =P ) and it was talking about how we need to forgive others before we can ourselves be forgiven. Turns out that he has someone that he just cannot forgive. We challenged him to try really hard to do so, and to think really hard about it, if he can or even wants to be forgiven for the things he has done, he has to forgive this person. I don´t know about you but I thought about it and I realized how I never had it quite that bad, but that is something that can stop us from feeling the Spirit. We had a visit from President this week. He visited when the crazy Elders Quorum president and the branch president spoke. It was great because he dropped cane(when someone gets in trouble) on them in his talk. He then talked to us afterwards and was like yeah, so I noticed you dont have alot of numbers. I can see why. You are to work with the members and combat all the gossip and mistakes of others and build up this branch, and then you will find people. The missionaries are not supposed to be finding, the members are supposed to do that and we teach. So yeah thats basically all thats gone on. We will see how things like that work, because we have to see the effects of our work, and the work of getting this branch to a 50 person or more branch will be alot. I will have more to say on the subject later, but yeah Mom you should get Preach My Gospel out and read it a little. Ch 9 maybe.

(Mom told him that she has more opportunities to talk to people about the Church these days and maybe she should study the missionary manual.)

Bye Bye for now I love you all tons.