Elder Payton Thorpe : Just another one of those little miracles...

HEY!

What a week you guys had! Sure love all of the pictures of homecoming! Jants, how was your very first dance? Your date looked cute! And you well... you looked alright. ;) I am kinda bummed you cut your hair tho dude... Mom make you do that? It was super long!! Also those jerseys you guys have are pretty sick, and everyone looks so big! Nick and brooks it looks like you guys had a blast at the Utah game! Did we really put a U sticker on the car?? I like it! So this is crazy to hear about the ward splitting. It's way cool that we're in the 16th ward, but super sad that it all got divided!! That will be weird to come home to. Who else is in the ward? Are we still meeting in the same building? Why did it split, just too many people?? Well that's crazy. We didn't have that crazy of a week, but it was good!

Today was tuesday, and it was kind of a rough day. Just wasn't our day. Elder I wasn't feeling all too good, and none of the people that we went to go visit were home until about 5pm. We ended up getting a few good lessons in, but we mostly just contacted in the street. Days like those aren't very fun... We were feeling down after our first 3 appointments had fallen and were walking down the street when we ran into a couple of guys selling cable tv door to door, and one of them called us over and talked to us for a bit. The 3 of them were members from Santa Ana and 2 were returned missionaries. They joked around with us about the mission and stuff for a second and then kept telling us about how great the mission is and how cool it is to be a missionary. They gave us the little pick up boost that we needed, and from then on our attitudes changed and we started having more success. It was a good experience, just another one of those little miracles.

Today is Thursday and we had a great day. We had a cool multizone with our zone and one other and the stake presidente came to talk to us a bit and share the vision he has for the stake. President Spjut also spoke a little bit to us, he is an awesome guy. We had a good day working wise and were able to find a few positive new investigators. However, it started raining at about 3pm and hasn't stopped since. So we got to walk around in the rain a bit. But I'm starting to get pretty used to that. I learned today, or relearned, that sometimes we talk to people that just aren't ready for the Gospel yet. We found this family that needed the Gospel so bad in their lives, but they just didn't know it. We were fighting hard to get them to accept what we were teaching, but they just weren't having it. But, later down the road their hearts will soften and they will see the light. But man, I wanted it bad!

Today is Friday and it was a good day. We went and invited basically the whole world to conference this morning. Half of our zone took pamphlets, conference invitations and free juice to the park and started inviting and talking to every person that we came to. We would also jump on every bus that came through and stand up in front of everyone and explain who we were and invite them to conference, then jump off the bus before it left atiquizaya. Haha it was a lot of fun. We'll see if we have any extra people come to conference next week. Later in the day we had MH's baptism. It went great and she was way happy. It was a bit stressful getting everything going cause we had a few problems, but it turned out good. I got to do 2 more baptsm interviews afterwards and they were awesome. It was a dad and his daughter who are getting baptized on sunday. The dad has made a lot of changes in his life, he used to drink and smoke but has been able to drop all of that and is now ready to be baptized. It was awesome to hear his story and get to know him a bit. Now Elder Isom and I are finishing the day off with some pancakes.

Well today was another nice, wonderful, stressful sunday. Getting investigators to church is easily my most favorite part of being a missionary. I can't remember if I said this before but it literally is like herding cats. You almost have to drag them by the hand to church... haha but its alright. MH was confirmed a member of the church today, it went good.

We had the great opportunity to walk all over the place today. We walked out to the far part of the area today to talk more with this 20 member family that we found. It's real hard to talk to them all at once but we talked to the mom and dad/Gpa and Gma and they are actually pretty positive so we'll see how that goes. Sure would be cool to have that family be baptized all at once, huh? But after that we were able to contact this guy that is an inactive member who was sealed in the temple and everything but hasn't gone to church in a few years. But he was excited to see us and said he has desires to go back to church, so we'll see. He was super cool tho. Not much more happened today. But it was a pretty good week and this week is conference so I'm way stoked for that! Excited to see what our Father in Heaven has instore for us! This church is TRUE and we have the awesome opportunity to hear from his servants this weekend! I hope you all have an awesome conference!

I love you all like crazy and miss ya too!

Elder Thorpe