A rough week

Dear Family,

Well, that's exciting about Ethan! He's a cute little baby.

We went to the San Diego temple for the first time today. It was really cool, and I liked it a lot. It was great to actually get to go inside this time; it was a little surreal to be at the same place we traveled to see donald's wedding, though. The temple was very peaceful and I feel spiritually renewed.

Which was kind of needed; we had a kind of tough couple of days. First of all, the baptism is off. Sister Ma called us on saturday and said that her husband isn't letting her be baptized, and she didn't come to church. So we're hoping she still has the desire and that we can work towards it, but for now, it's not happening.

One of our potential investigators, the ukrainian kid named Daniel got yelled at by his mom in russian when we were there last. We invited him to come to the Turkey Bowl (a thanksgiving morning football game) and he wanted to come - and he wanted to bring a friend! So I showed up with an exchange to give him a ride, and they were all ready to go, and his mom freaked out yelling in russian and stuff and wouldn't let him go, and kind of shut the door on us. And we were all ready to play football too, no tags, no suits, no ties, nothing. But, from what we know, she's 7th day adventist and pretty opposed to us. But Daniel still wants to meet with us, so we've arranged a meeting in his neighbors' the Rogers apartment and hopefully that will go well.

Remember the chinese kid Kai that I met tracting and gave a book of mormon and his mom has read about half of it? Well, get this, HE is the friend that daniel was going to bring to football. Crazy, huh. None of us knew the others knew eachother. So it's really too bad that his mom is such a hindrance. That would have been great to have both of our youth contacts come to an activity.

Sunday, I called diamond to invite her to a fireside and she flat-out dropped us and we don't know why. That's sad and we were kind of upset about the insult added to injury after the other setbacks to the work we had, but everyone has their agency.

Okay, about investigator status, since Mom asked:

An investigator is someone that officially:

1- You have taught a lesson to, extended commitments to, and have a solid return appointment for them.

However, often we get stood up on the follow-up appointments, so we don't count them as an investigator until that appointment happens. But you can also count:

2- Those who have accepted an invitation to hear the lessons, and you've taught them once, and they're positive enough that you feel you can count them.

Someone being nice and letting you come in and talk to them about the gospel once in a while isn't good enough to be counted as an investigator, unless they start following through with some commitments.

We got 2 new investigators this week. One was Brother Bradshaw's neighbor Quay, and we taught him again and set up another appointment. Another was Wu Lai because I stopped by with an exchange and he let me teach him (we've had 2-3 stop by lessons before) and I committed him to be baptized when he felt it was true.

So, despite the setbacks this week, we do still have hope, and we are still working hard.

Thanksgiving was fun; we had it with the Ng's and Emily for lunch and our ward mission leader Bro. Welch for dinner.

When we taught emily yesterday, I think we made some real progress. She recognized that she was feeling the spirit, and we taught some good principles.

Rick Marx is also making good progress. We gave him a blessing for his ankle on friday and talked for a while, and I think he's getting closer.

We still have some MIA investigators, Wa Suddeth and Jessica Yan. When they get back from china, we hope to teach them again.

I might be getting transferred next week, or Elkington might. He has 2 transfers left, and they'll probably want to give Gibbons a turn with him.

That's awesome that Carol and John got a mission call to new zealand. Didn't Nate Jones from CV4 just get called there too?

Well, I need to get going. Thanks for the letters. I love you all,

Love,

Elder Myers