These past couple weeks have been some of the hardest, but most rewarding weeks on my mission! Training a new missionary and having that responsibility has been a blessing for me. I absolutely love doing this. It is sometimes hard, but God knows when you can do something. It is up to you to have the attitude and will power to push through. So Mom had some questions for me this week that I will answer in this letter home. So the questions were: Who is in your teaching pool? What is my ward like? Do they help? And describe my companion.
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So our teaching pool... We lost 5 investigators from the change. The ones you guys are familiar with that we kept are: Vera, Uncle Larry, Charmaine, and Manuel. So to update you on these, Vera is doing really well. She expressed to Elder Payne and I that she wants to be baptized. She started reading the Book of Mormon for the first time. We are so excited to see where it goes. We are going to try to set her baptism for the 8th of March. She just needs to get over the hump of coming to church. Pray for her that she will feel peace and comfort as she decides to come to church. Uncle Larry. He is doing good. Still not progressing as much as we hope. He has been making some New Years resolutions and I felt the prompting to invite him that he does not have to join the church, but to just come to church and worship our Savior. He agreed. But he did not make it to church this Sunday. I guess he wasn't feeling it or something. We will see what happens next week. Moving on to Manuel. Manuel dropped off of planet earth. We cannot find him. We have tried and tried. And it breaks my spirit because I know how bad he needs this. I have grown to love him and I hope he reaches back out to us.
The investigators who were added to our pool are: Ralph, The Cheeny's, Katie, and Jason. We have been over to Ralph's and he is a minister at UOP. (University of the Pacific) He is super cool and we have an appt. with him soon. We haven't been able to set anything up with the others yet. We actually picked up a new investigator this week named Eruch. He already attended church and we have been through two of the lessons. We are excited for him and his progression.
The ward here is great! We have increased to 800 members in this ward. Only 200 are active or semi-active. So we have a lot of work to do. The ward here is helping so much more. The Weston ward was struggling in their missionary efforts. We now have a lot of ward missionaries and we are creating a new ward mission plan right now. I am so excited to turn this around through Jesus Christ. People are drawn to Jesus Christ and His Atonement.
So funny story for the week. We went to this house that Elder Lamm and I visited awhile back.Well they fed us and told us to come back. Well while we were there the first time they talked a lot and asked a lot of questions about weed. Well when we left he ended up telling us that he was licensed to grow and that he has a lot of weed. When we went by the next week he took us to the backyard. This man had 40,000 worth of weed in his backyard. It was nuts... Haha weed is just the California flower man. I will forever have the smell of weed in my nostrils.
Spiritual thought this week is 2 Nephi 31:19-20. It talks about enduring to the end and looking to Christ through trials. I loved these two verses. I invite you to read it and pray about it. And ask yourself how you can invite the Spirit of the Lord into your life.
I love the work.
Love,
Elder Willden
{for the following pics Elder Willden wrote:}
I cant caption. It is time for us to go.
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Love,
Elder Willden
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