Colton's ready for his mission

Colton's ready for his mission

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Nov 19: Elder Richards

My district making cider.

Dear Family,

Prayer is usually the easiest answer to like everything. I guess maybe it's not always easy, but I feel if you ever have a problem, faith-filled prayer and action seem to solve so many things. I don't think I can really describe it all. Just pray more everyone. We all need it. And never say you already have enough. Except of food. Sometimes you've had enough food. I know from personal experience.

 I think right now, the thing with our area that is slowing the work, is that we just live kind of far away. And that most people aren't in their homes until after 5. So, it's not too bad, just that we aren't around enough. We are working on getting a house in our area though, so we won't have to drive 50 miles to our main town anymore. One other thing I noticed is that during the winter I guess many houses are empty. Lots of snow-birds, people that are only here for the summer, up here. But the members are all excited to have us. :) There are about 20-25 each week, and so I've gotten to know most of them all, but they're all really nice. Super supportive too. We just need to start working with them! All in all though, once we can really get the work going, it should be really good, especially since most people have never talked with missionaries. At least not in Twisp. :)

Up here the temperature will be between 26ish-43ish in the coming week. It snowed for the first time a couple days ago, but it didn't stick luckily. Of our members, three families have most of the children, and there are a couple others. They have a pot-luck every third sunday which is nice until you eat too much. -_- We bless the sacrament each sunday. All of the members are english, here, so except for a few investigators, all of the work here is english. At the beginning of my mission, I was afraid of going english, but now I'm just kind of... "Whatever. Wherever the Lord wants me to be" I actually hope to stay here for at least 3 transfers. I would love to get to know the people here really well. One of our towns looks like an old western town (on purpose). I'll have to send you pictures of that soon. :) The branch isn't new, but just hasn't ever been big enough to have missionaries of its own. For over 30 years it has gone up and down in the 20's, for the number of members, they tell me. And now they are stuffing as many missionaries as they can into our small-town mission, so here I am. :) It should be really good for the branch if we can get it going. 

We had another Seventy visit us rather unexpectedly. Elder Richards. We talked about how ordering people to do things is attempting to take away agency, and that the end of section 121 is how leaders should act. We also talked about how Obedience, is just acting on faith. Acting on the belief that you can receive more blessings. We talked about teaching more simply, which I realized I stopped doing as much over the past few months, so I feel dumb. We had already been trained on that in Spokane. Really good training. He kind of made a point that I would like you all to consider. The number of missionaries in the world has gone up about 38%. But the number of baptisms hasn't been going up. What's wrong? That's something we still need to figure out. I invite you all to pray about it. I know I'm going to.

Pray like your life depends on it! Con amor,

Elder Grant

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