Samuel's Mission e-mail January 16, 2008

Everyone:

Well, today was another temple day, so that's why this e-mail is a bit later than usual. We're now a week into the new transfer, and I'm a senior companion again, even though my companion has more time in the mission than me. His name is Elder Vega, and he is from northern Mexico. So, I guess my theme for companions in this area is people from outside the US. We've been working on each other's language skills, so we've been enjoying ourselves.

As for what we did, Tuesday was my last day with Elder Zemp. We visited Karla and Anne and taught them. Anne stopped smoking! She's probably getting baptized the 27th. We also visited the familia Vasquez, a part-member family who just recently contacted us because the husband wanted to reactivate and the wife wanted to learn about the Church. On Wednesday we had transfers, so we spent a good bit of the day getting everyone where they needed to go and getting Elder Vega settled and just generallly transferring. We also went to the Wilshire ward correlation, because, due to the boundry change I mentioned last week, we now cover portions of both the Adams and Wilshire wards.

On Thursday, we had weekly planning, we tracted, and Elder Vega got to meet Karla and her family. Both Karla and Brandon have decided they want to be baptized as soon as possible, so now we just need to get the husband David in with them and we could have the whole family!

On Friday we had our district meeting, and then we went and tried to deliver to some referrals we had contacted earlier. Out of all of them, only one was there for her appointment. Her name was Sandra, and it turns out she's actually a less-active member, so we're working with her. We also visited Karen and found out she had been given some old furniture that needed cleaning.

On Saturday, we had Adams ward correlation, we helped Karen clean her furniture, and we visited the familia Vasquez. They're a pretty good family--the wife says she already knows she wants to get baptized, so we're pretty excited about them, as well.

On Sunday, we had Stake Conference--specifically, we had a big combined stake conference where President Hinckley, one of the Quorum of the Twelve (Elder Hales, I think), and some other general authorities spoke to all of Southern California. It was very good. We also tracted a bit, and visited Carlos Morales and his family. We had tracted into Carlos a week before and he seemed good, and when we went back we did have a good discussion. The only issue is his wife is one of those people who can dominate the conversation if you let them, so we do have some work to do there.

On Monday we had a normal work day, so we painted part of Karla's son Henry's room and visited the familia Vasquez. Yesterday, we did some tracting, visited a referral named Silvia and found out she's Seventh-Day Adventist, talked with Anne about her baptismal interview and the program for her baptism, and visited Karla to teach her instead of do service (although I did end up helping Henry with his reading and writing while Elder Vega taught her).

Today, we've gone to the temple, of course, and washed our car.

Elder Samuel Stephens