Week 9

Our first week into transfers went really well!  I was super stressed at first, knowing that I have a lot more responsibility now in training, but I feel like I've grown a lot more as a missionary because of it!  I've been more in tune with the spirit, I've received a lot more promptings on what to do, I'm not really worried about anything out here anymore, and I've been a lot better at teaching.

We had a lot of cool experiences when we were looking for more people to teach.  One lady just walked up to us and told us we should come talk to her family at their lemonade stand!  We talked to them for about 40 minutes.  They gave us cookies and her husband gave me a book he wrote about the Bible.  Then there was another guy who was just sitting in his driveway and had a lot of questions for us.  One of his friends used to be Mormon so he knew a good amount about our church.  We are going to go back and see both of them later this week!

Saturday morning we got to be witnesses for a kid's baptism from the ward.  When we got home there was a crazy storm!  The wind knocked over trees all over the roads, there was a lot of smashed cars in the parking lots.  We helped people clean up some of the mess and then we went out and taught a couple of investigators.  Our power was out until the next day and we got soaked in the rain!  It's been nice to have the rain though.  Since the power was out, nobody was in their houses because they were all in their cars listening to the Seahawks game, so I had a good chance to talk sports with some people!

Hope you all have a good week!

Ben

Other tidbits:

I asked about people they are teaching:  The granddaughter to the ward member is named Stephanie and we taught her last night.  She is committed to read 1 Nephi.  The guy who just walked into the stake center is Justin, we are still teaching him, just not this past week.  He was pretty sick but we have an appointment Tuesday.  We got him a copy of the Book of Mormon in Tamil and he said he'd read it.  He said he prays a lot already, so that is good!  There are two people we are teaching that were here when I started.  Brenda is one of them,  she's in her 50s and takes care of her grandkids.  She wants them to grow up in a church.  She's been really busy with her daughter's wedding and stuff but that's all over now.  The other is Sharon.  First time I met her we talked for 2 hours.

re:  new companion/training:  Elder Skelton doesn't have driving privileges but he doesn't want to drive anyway.  The training part came to me really easily.  I don't even think about it anymore.  My first day I spent my personal study time planning what we could talk about for the next two hours but teaching is just easy for me now.  They had me teach Gospel Doctrine again too, and it's just easy.  I don't worry about it.  We get along pretty well.