Getting Back to Normal

(Letter dated October 11, 2011)

Well missionary work is indeed starting to get back to normal, as normal as missionary work is, but this week was a pretty great week. We saw some great success, and are still working hard to help our investigators progress. We kicked the week off with a great zone meeting on tuesday, involving Elder Jarrett and I training about teaching skills, and the such. We introduced the new zone goal, and everyone seems in agreement, and the zone has already seen some great miracles from it! After the meeting we had a big dessert fiesta because this past week 6 people or something like that celebrated their birthdays. So we all ate a bunch of desserts, and then headed back out to work. We were able to see Sylvia again, and she is doing so well. She agrees with everything, and doesn't have any problems except for work. We will keep working with her on that, and hopefully she'll get work off one day soon.

On Wednesday we enjoyed a wonderful zone conference, and were lectured on the Great Apostasy, the Restoration of the Gospel, and the Priesthood. We enjoyed some lunch, a small fun activity, and then did some role-playing.

But a few great finding opportunities we had this week are probably some of the highlights of the week. So I told you the story of Laticia. Well this past week we started teaching her husband, and I think he's got some great potential. He doesn't have a ton of knowledge or faith, but who knows, that might be easier to work with than somebody firmly rooted in some other church. He said he wants to learn more about God, and really wants to learn how to have faith. The other opportunity came about as a number of weeks ago we got a referral for some people that moved here from Texas, who turned out to be members. We have worked with them, as well as a sister of theirs who is a less active member. We started teaching her kids this week, and hopefully we can help their family become an eternal one.

Saturday was a very culturally uplifting day. It was a special day indeed. On saturday we had the Paterson International event in the Paterson Church. People from all different parts of the world including (Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Columbia, Jamaica, China, etc) brought different foods for people to eat, and we had a very enjoyable night. We were even able to have a few investigators come. The program included a guy wearing a silver glove singing and dancing the Baby Baby by Justin Bieber, President Jeppson singing and playing a guitar to a song about becoming an auctioneer (quite impressive), a little girl doing a dance from Mexico, and the grand finally of columbians dancing (Including some with machetes) It was pretty cool.

Sunday came around, and we finally had a normal block of church, which has been pretty rare around here. We got to see Marilu, who is progressing somewhat, but very slowly. We had to change her date to the 20th of November. Later we went and saw Manuel, who still wasn't quite ready, so we changed his date to the 30th of October. He seems to have more faith in that date, than he has had with previous dates.

And now we are today, sorry I couldn't write yesterday, but it was columbus day. Right now I'm actually on an exchange with Elder Long, who is actually going to be pretty famous someday. So I don't know if you have heard, but the church has been doing this film project that is going to be a season show in about a year, that includes the lives of different missionaries around the world. They have a camera crew that comes around with them at times, and they make video logs of themselves. Well Elder Long is one of those missionaries on that TV show, and so it will be pretty cool to be able to relive some of my mission when I watch the show after my mission. Sadly the camera crew isn't with him at this time, so I won't be on the TV, although I may be in other clips of the show because the crew has come to a few Transfer Conferences and things. It will be interesting to see what kind of show this stuff produces.

That was most of my week though. This week will be a pretty good one, including interviews with President Jeppson, an Mini MTC for the youth tomorrow in Paterson, and hopefully just seeing miracles day by day.

Thanks for all of your support, and it's good to hear you are all doing well. I love you all soo much!!

 

The Gospel is True!

 

Love,

Elder Hicks