Week of July 14, 2008 -- To Mom

 July 14, 2008

Dear Family,

Well, I hope all is well in the outside world.

I have just completed my first real week in the field (wow, it was long) and it was a lot of hard work.

It's cool that Jade has a lot of progressing investigators.  As for here in Marshalltown, there were no progressing investigators when we arrived.  There were a lot of investigators that we had to sort through to see if they were really interested.  But now we are working on at least 3 different people...hoping that they will decide to let the Lord change their lives.

Thursday was our first district meeting and the first time that I met my District Leader Elder McDonough and my zone leaders, elder's timothy and Smuin.  They are really great guys.  I kind of made a bad first impression (or at least an impression they will never forget), for I had the spiritual thought and chastised them about their singing (because I didn't think they did the music justice--plus I wouldn't be a good musician if I didn't at least say something.)  I kind of felt bad about it afterwards and well, now I get to organize some kind of musical number with my district because they know I love music so much for the Zone conference on the 24th.  After the meeting and reviewing the new mission rules (such as no wearing ankle socks) we went to Applebees and got a real good deal.

After that meeting, Elder Mclaws and I felt that we needed to change how we were doing the work in the field.  Instead of waiting 'til friday to plan and figure out how we can change/fix the work, we spent all the rest of the day thursday to review everything.  We are now more focussed.  We know who we are working on and what we can do to help people come to church and actually progress.  Elder Mclaws is a good companion; he pushes me to do my best.  He says that I help him do the same because he says that I have the MTC fire/spirit about me.  I at least am better than his last two companions.

We are working on a family named Maria Guadalupe and Antonio.  Everytime we go to their house she feeds us.  She is a very nice lady and can share some awesome stories that are usually funny.  It is definitely really cool.  We are working with her, but she is ready (we feel) to be baptize.  We need to explain to her that she needs to get married to Antonio and then she will pretty much be ready.

We were working on a less active member of the church named Maria Banderas.  She seems to be in denial about ever joining our church but she is in our records.  We decided to focus on her 14 year old son, Chris.  She seems to listen better when Chris explains things to her/plus, if we can have Chris find out for himself that this church is true and become baptized, then she would probably come back into the fold, it is really cool.

On sunday we went to the outlying areas that are around Marshalltown, about a 75 mile round trip.  We went to contact less actives and also referalls that we had.  It was definitely an experience.  We met a family in La Moille that we thought was interested but was not.  They were really nice though and it went well.  The mom was extremely against Hispanics crossing illegally.  I just had to keep a straight face throughout her whole speech.

We have stinkin' awesome investigators.  We taught the first lesson to Faviola and Juan, a married couple that have an infant named Eduardo.  The lesson went really well, we came out feeling the spirit strongly and everything.  She was really intent on hearing on message and the huspand wasn't openly against it.  We also have an investigator named Felipe and we have been helping him follow the word of wisdom.  Going to his house always makes me feel good because he always thanks us for the service that we do.  I love this guy.  And we have one more investigator name Javier who also listened very intently to the lesson we had to share and invited us back for more.

We have our good times and our bad.  Our ups and our downs.  Sometimes this work is hard and sometimes all I want to do is work.  I love it out here.  It's hard to talk to everybody...we do though, we talk to everybody and we get a lot of different reactions.  Some don't care, some fight back, some reject us before we even say hi...but then there is this one in a million that want to hear what we have to say.  It is definitely exhillarating to do something that will help people change.

That's all I have to say...keep me posted (it lifts my spirits off the ground.)

Elder John Gonzales