February 17, 2009

Family,

That's a good idea, I'll just tell the members of our branch that for
every referral they give us, well give them a free ice cream cone. One of
the members of our ward Brother Rodriguez is a manager in construction.
He picked up this man for work and told him a little about the church. I
haven't met the family yet but tonight we are going to visit the family
with Brother Rodriguez. We always bring the Cerda family over for FHE (Family Home Evening) at the Rodriguez'. He said he felt bad that he wasn't finding anybody
himself for us to teach, so that's when he found the man and told us
about him. He was so excited to tell us that he had found somebody.

The Cerda Family (Alejandra and the two sons) are still scheduled to be
baptized this Sunday. We have reviewed all the baptismal questions and
they're ready. So I'm pretty excited about that.

The Ochoa family is struggling, the husband prevented her to come to church this Sunday. She
knows church is a family thing, and wants her whole family to go. The rest of the family is just a little lazy, so that makes it harder for her to go. We still have high hopes for them, we just need a good talk with them at our next lesson.

We have started teaching a few other families in the past couple weeks.
One of them has a Mexican flag with the Virgin Mary in the middle, and
they say they know Joseph Smith is a prophet, they just don't understand
that their church isn't true. We have 2 other families where the kids
ask the parents questions that the parents don't know the answers to. So they
have started listening to the lessons. In one of the families, the
Esperanza family, they had a lot of questions about the Plan of
Salvation, so we taught that to them first. Then during the lesson she
burst out "I just don't understand why there are so many churches, the
Catholics, the Christians, the Mormons, I just don't get it."
So we have a return appointment today, and we are going to explain about
the Apostasy and why there are so many churches. Then we'll teach them
the Restoration and we'll see what they think.
Mostly everybody we are teaching is a family, which is really good.

Elder Anderson and I get along really well. I've been in the area for
about 4-5 months, and I hope I stay here for a while.

Keep up the good missionary work,
The Elder James Meiners