October 7, 2013

"Conference Weekend!"

Hey yall!!!

Sorry for the late email everyone! The power at the Library went off for a long time and we ended up having to come to the church to email. So now you will all be able to hear about this week now!! It was a pretty awesome week! General Conference was great and the work is starting to pick up!

This week we had a pretty rough week when it came to lessons and investigators. We had a lot of canceling going on and we didn't know what to do. One of our investigators, Jenny Stowman, was one of the best lessons this week. We were on exchanges so Vaoga was in another area and I had the Zone Leader with me. We went to Jenny's house to teach her lesson 3, which is Faith, Repentance, Baptism, Receiving the Gift of the Holy Ghost, and Enduring to the End. Jenny is a very Bible based person, but so is everyone else here in Texas. But we have had a lesson every week with her and we have finally gotten to this lesson. She has had questions and problems understanding things in the previous 2 lessons. However, this lesson she had no complaints. She agreed with everything that we said and she was able to read from the Book of Mormon as well. I extended the invitation to be baptized and she said she wasn't ready yet. But she has shown a lot of progression in the past couple week especially.

Ken Kurtpatrick wasn't home all week so we weren't able to talk with him. He said he is planning on moving somewhere else so we are going to have to teach him faster so he will be baptized and not lose interest in the church. The Campos family, who have been awesome, decided to drop us out of no where yesterday. :( We reminded them to come to General Conference this week and they replied very rudely back at us. So it was hard to focus at the start of conference because we were trying to figure out what happened.

We are starting to make progress on reactivating Maddison Morris and another family. Maddison also wants us to teach her boyfriend who is making progress too. But he is 19. So he will have to go to the YSA ward. We haven't brought that up just yet. The other family that I mentioned is the Wray family. They were baptized 3 years ago and then just fell away. We have been able to talk to the husband. He said he had questions about the church and we will happily answer them.

General Conference was amazing this week. I did something that I hadn't done before and that was take notes and come with a question. Because I was able to do these things it made conference so much better. My question was answered and I was able to stay awake for all the sessions! By far my favorite talk was Utchdorf in the 2nd session and in Priesthood. We were able to watch the Saturday sessions at a members house and then we watched conference on Sunday at our Ward Mission Leaders house. IT was an awesome weekend for conference but not for mission work. We only taught 2 lessons this weekend. I was kinda shocked though that no temples were announced but it was still a great session.

That was really all that happened this week. Today for P. Day, another basketball day and I am going on an exchange tonight. So that means I will be running the area tomorrow. I hope you all have a fantastic week and I cant wait next week for all your emails!!!

Elder O'Brien