Samuel's Mission e-mail October 15, 2007

Everyone:

Well, Wednesday is transfers again, so we'll have to see if I'm still in Watts or not this time next week. If I get transferred, it's possible I could be writing on Wednesday next week.

Anyways, this week on Tuesday we started a new tracting pattern where instead of just blocking off time for tracting, we plan to visit someone every hour and then if they're not home we tract instead. One of the people we visited that day was Hermana Smith. She's probably in the hospital having an operation as I write right now, so hopefully next week we'll have news that everything went well for her. We also stopped by the Libro de Mormon clase.

On Wednesday, we continued our new tracting pattern, and we ended up finding this entire family (or, well, parts of an extended family--we're still not quite sure who's related to who and how) who all seem interested in the gospel. I believe they'd all seen missionaries in El Salvador (I think that's where they're from) and one of them in particular had investiagated for a little while when he was there. We also visited Marcelino. Marcelino right now is just about ready for baptism. He's starting to grasp things a bit, and we while praying about what to teach him felt like we should promise him that the Gift of the Holy Ghost will hasten his understanding of the gospel, so he agreed to be baptised soon when we talked about that. Most likely he'll be baptised in a couple weeks.

On Thursday we had our normal planning session and visit with Norman, and then we visited Daisy Cruz in company with Sherri. It went pretty well--Daisy and Sherri seemed to get along pretty well, and Daisy is really concerned about her family, so the Church's emphasis on the family really appeals to her. In the evening we had our normal SGII ward correlation meeting.

On Friday we had our normal end-of-transfer zone meeting, and then we continued our tracting pattern. We also taught Marcelino again in the evening.

On Saturday we had a lot of return appointments, starting with Delia, who was referred by Hermana Smith. She lives with a few other people, none of whom, as far as I can tell, are related to her, but all of whom are willing to listen to us. We also visited Michelle Armstrong again, and had a pretty good lesson with her. Then for most of the rest of the day people weren't there for their return appointments, but we did teach some other lessons that were fairly good. One time when we were praying, I suddenly remembered Silvia, who was a recent convert who had moved to our area that we tracted into last transfer. We went by and visited her and she came to church on Sunday! So yes, we're always grateful for the guidance of the Spirit. In the evening we visited the Ayala family, who are some less-actives in the area.

On Sunday we had our normal church meetings, and then we visited Sherri for a bit and ended up teaching her a little bit about Church history so that she understood better what people were talking about when they referred to places like Kirtland and Nauvoo. We also revisited the family from El Salvador and taught them some more about the Book of Mormon and answered some questions about the end of the world.

Today we bowled in the morning, and later this evening we'll visit Marcelino and the Castrejon family, probably.

Well, I just want to encourage everyone to read the conference issues of the Ensign often. We're out here busy teaching how important it is to have a modern prophet, so we'd better think they're important. I actually read some of the May Conference issue and I was noticing how applicable some of the talks were to our current work. So don't let your conference issues get too dusty in between conferences!

Elder Samuel Stephens
The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?
-D&C 122:8