Mon 8/09/10 9:19 AM
Another week gone by. I got your card on Saturday with the cute pictures of little Charli and Tucker! That was awesome. I'm Whitney and Kyle are great parents! My mouth started watering when you talked about getting peach melba shakes from Jacob Lake - man, that will be a tough tradition to break. Good luck, Hannah! I will pray for the volleyball tryouts. Crazy that school starts again already, which means summer will be over before we know it. The green Wisconsin summers are nice except for the misquitos and humidity, but I do love the fall season here - all the misquitos die and trees get really colorful. That was fun to hear about Mom's reunion.
Last time I wrote you, our zone was probably at its lowest point ever, but I'm glad to say that things went alot better this week. Hopefully that means that the worst is behind us and it will just be an upward trend from here. It's weird though, at our most recent leadership meeting on Friday, we were talking and the whole mission felt what our zone felt last week - like a dark cloud over the mission. We seem to be coming out of it now. That Friday meeting was definitely the best meeting since President Jones has been here, so hopefully they continue to be great and motivating. After that, attitudes changed and miracles happened.
I had another sweet exchange with Elder Heyte (sp?). I tell him he's a miracle worker because every time we work together awesome things happen. We exchanged right after our leadership training and within the next couple hours we had a great lesson with a part-member/less-active family and we found 2 new really interested potential investigators - Kim and Jake. Jake didn't know that there were any Mormons in Wisconsin, and he had never seen missionaries here before. He had been really curious about our church, mostly because he really likes everything Glenn Beck says about faith and he's LDS. He doesn't claim to be any complete faith. He says he's a 'hybrid' because he was raised Catholic, but he doesn't believe in praying to saints. When we told him where our church was, it blew his mind because its only a few blocks away from his house. He thought our church was a non-denominational church. So, he said he would come to a service, but we didn't see him there yesterday.
Saturday, early afternoon, we were driving toward the area we wanted to see people, and decided to plug in my gps an address for a semi-less-active, part-member lady who I had never been by to visit. Our timing couldn't have been more perfect. Her brother (very prepared for the gospel) and her son (very less-active, but very ready to come back) were downstairs moving and reorganizing a lot of heavy stuff, and they really needed help but they hadn't called anyone. So, we felt good to be there to help, but then as Sister Fisher was getting us water, she told us that our timing was even better than we thought. A few days before she had gotten her eyes dilated and they never returned to normal, and she really wanted a blessing because of that and other things. She had been talking to friends and family members, asking them to pray for her, and she told them that she would be calling "the Elders of the Church, like it says in the Bible that we should do". But we beat her to it, and it overwhelmed her to tears because she knew that God loved her and was aware of her. We were able to teach her brother about what blessings are and then give Sister Fisher a blessing. After finishing our work, we had an awesome spirit-filled lesson in which her brother, Greg, and her son, Joe, committed to come to church. They both came and Joe brought his 5 year-old daughter who loved it! They are going to have us over for more lessons and feed us a BBQ dinner next time!
After that lesson, Heyte said, "The Spirit's thick as mud in there", and we went to our next appointment. On the way, I decided that I really needed to go to the bathroom, so we went to a gas station. When we were about to leave, the people that we were about to see were there getting drinks. They had already moved to a new house, and if we hadn't seen them then, and they had not let us follow them, it would have taken a really long time to find out where they moved. We all gave credit to the Lord for that working out. And now the oldest sister in the family, Khadijah (cool name, huh), has a date to be baptized on the first week of September, and her fiance will probably be baptized with her. They asked us for pass-along cards of the temples and of Jesus to hang in their apartment, and they loved the idea of being sealed together there as a family.
So there's some cool stories I was excited to tell you about this week! Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Vogan
