First off Merry early Christmas! I
hope everything is going great for everyone. Things have been good here
in good old Opelousas. The first week of this transfer has been really
good. As I said last time, Elder Hunter was transferred. The new Elder
her is Elder Hall. He has been out for the same amount of time that
Elder Bean has. He is a really good missionary and is definitely not
afraid to talk to anyone.
So this past week
Elder Bean and I have decided to almost entirely focus our work on
meeting with less-actives in the ward. We have a huge ward roster but we
only have about 40 regular members. We feel that getting members to
come back is the best way that we can help in this area. When we go out
to contact less-actives we also decided that we would tract at least one
of the houses by the person we were trying to contact. It has worked
fairly well so far. A lot of times people aren't home or don't have time
to meet with us but that is okay, we are trying.
Right
now we are in a car share with the other Elders. Their car is in the
shop and has been for a month now!!! The shop has had one problem after
another. It was only supposed to take a week and they have to keep
pushing it back because it took longer than expected or the part that
they ordered came to the shop broken.... It's annoying. They are
supposed to get it back today but we shall see. Having a car share in
our area puts a big damper on mission work because of how far spread out
our area is and because the English Elders work in different parts of
the area than Elder Bean and I do. I think the Lord is definitely trying
to teach us patience when things don't go the way that we want them to.
Yesterday
we had a really fun Zone Conference. That is why P-Day is today instead
of yesterday. This Conference was much shorter than usual and it wasn't
all sitting and listening to people speaking to us. We did a white
elephant gift exchange!! It was pretty fun! I got a package with a
flashlight, a zen book, an origami book and glow sticks. I brought a
miniature ping pong set. The Elder that got is thought it was awesome.
Other
than those things there isn't much that happened this week. I hope you
are all looking forward to Christmas and are thinking of how you can
help others this Christmas.
Elder Stoddard
