AN AWESOME WEEK!!

Mon 7/20/09 12:11 PM
Thank you for writing again this week! Man, that fried ice cream sounds good, you should make that again in a couple of years, haha. That's cool that Brock had his farewell; he'll have alot of fun in the Phillapeans for sure. Speaking of Chantell and Brock, I sent letters for them to our address a few weeks ago because I didn't know the Perry's address, did you get those to them? And I did the same thing for Bishop last week.

This week was probably the best week for missionary work of my whole mission! We are really starting to see the payoff for stepping up our efforts to be exactly obedient. We had 3 investigators at church again: Doug, Rich, and Will. And we set two baptism dates with Doug and Rich for August 8th. Both of those seem really solid. And Nate will be baptised this Saturday, so all of this is really cool to see. We also had 20 lessons this week, which is alot better than any of our past weeks. Obedience in just the last week or two has also helped me to love my mission, my companion, and the people here alot more, and I feel like I am learning so much more as well. We committed to "stepping it up" a couple weeks ago in a companion study we had, in which we studied and discussed the relationship of faith and obedience, and the power that comes from obedience. It was definitely the best comp. study I've had, and since then this concept has been our "default lesson" for people we haven't specifically prepared another lesson for. Since we have seen such great things from that lately in our work, we feel like everyone should embrace it, and Elder Vance and I teach it well together.

Well something else new this week was Steve. Steve is a young guy who works at a place called Health Hut, which is owned by two members of the Church, and alot of the youth from the stake work there. So we go there occasionally, and we've talked to Steve before. Steve isn't a member, and lately he's been having a REALLY tough time. I don't want to explain all the details, but a little over a week ago we were told by someone that a young guy named Steve walked into our church because he said he needed to pray. And after the guy explained Steve, we knew it was "Health Hut" Steve. So, last Thursday we went in there to see how he was doing, and he told us he really needed something that would comfort him, and he felt like we could give it to him. When he got off work, we met at our church and taught him in one of the rooms about the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and we gave him a Book of Mormon and read some of it with him. Just reading from the Book gave him so much comfort, he didn't want to stop. He just kept wanting to pray and read. He told one of the Single's ward guys who taught with us that we "saved him". We met with him the next day, and he was a little bit better, and we had basically the same lesson from the day before. On Saturday, we decided to fast for him. We haven't seen him since Friday, but we are looking foreward to seeing him today.

Well, on another note, the weather here is really stange. It's been in the high 60's and dry for the past week, which is very strange for the middle of July. Oh, and by the way, Peter ended up going to church, and he is still on for his baptism on August 1st. Haha, crazy.

Well that's it, I'll talk to you next week! Love you Elder Vogan