Dear family,
I am so glad Ryan's home again and I'm relieved that you all got my last e-mail. Yeah myldsmail.net is a bit unreliable and it stinks that Garit isn't getting any of my e-mails, although Dad does so hopefully we won't encounter any more problems. It sounds like everyone got my last e-mail which is a huge relief for me! If we encounter more problems in the future let me know and then I'll send the unreceived week's e-mail too.
There wasn't a whole lot that happened this week. We had stake conference this week which threw our Sunday schedule for a loop since we didn't have to go to six hours of church. It really freed up our schedule, which was nice except for the fact that ALL of our appointments and back-up plans dropped on us. I was really discouraged and to make matters worse our investigator pool continues to shrink and nobody seems to be interested whenever we go out tracting.
The adult session of Stake Conference was really boring and I fought to stay awake the whole time. To make things even worse we were sitting up on the stand because we were part of the choir! I had to write a list of my favorite foods on the back of a mormon.org card to keep myself awake. Stake conference on Sunday was pretty good. The theme seemed to be on being an example of the believers. There were two primary kids who spoke, a recent convert, a laurel and someone from one of our wards plus the Stake presidency and some other lady from one of the wards I'm not serving in. The two primary kids who spoke were pretty good speakers considering how they looked up a lot, spoke calmly and one of the kids even cried as he spoke of his grandfather.
Another interesting thing was that the spouse of one of our investigators (who's an excommunicated member) showed up to Stake conference a little on the drunk side. Elder Bell and I jumped up and down for joy when we heard he was coming. Hopefully this will be the start of a new pattern that will eventually lead to his wife and kids getting baptized. That same guy is taking me, Elder Bell and the other two missionaries that live with us shopping and he's paying for our food too.
As I mentioned earlier things aren't going too well for me and Elder Bell in terms of people we're teaching. We have a pretty small investigator pool which continues to shrink all the time. I keep trying to analyze what we're doing wrong but it all comes back to agency. People just don't seem all that interested. To make matters worse they're dropping their appointments left and right and then when we try to set up another one people reply with "Let me call you back". I personally don't trust anyone to call me back so I take it as a way to try and avoid us. Our one progressing investigator's life just got busier so it's harder for us to make an appointment with him. Plus our tracting's going back to the way it used to be before President Beck gave his pogo analogy.
So in light of all of this we have a new golden investigator. Her name is Raven Stern. If you remember I told you that her husband, Adam, claims to be a descendant of Joseph Smith. The ironic thing is that he isn't very interested in what we have to say. Anyway Raven's been a blessing in our lives and I think of her as our "diamond in the rough".
She has two dogs and five ferrets. Yep, that's right she's got ferrets. I learned a lot about ferrets last night when we visited her. It turns out that there are panda ferrets, albino ferrets, sabertooth ferrets and bandit ferrets. I'm just waiting for her to say that she has a pirate ferret and a Jedi ferret. Okay that last part was a joke.
Anyway we taught her about the Book of Mormon and she's been on mormon.org and she had questions for us about the Word of Wisdom, which we resolved. We've committed her and her children to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know if it's true and they've been doing that and Raven says that there's been a dramatic change in their lives in the two days that they've started reading. So I'd really appreciate it if everyone could pray for us that we'll be able to find some people that will be interested and will take the lessons.
One more thing. Apparently there some missionaries that know how to instant message on myldsmail.net which is a big no-no. If these idiots continue we might all get our e-mail privileges taken away. If that happens I'll be writing a lot of letters! I hope it doesn't happen yet. I love you all very much and I hope this e-mail gets to you alright. Oh and could someone please tell Garit to either e-mail me or write to me because he hasn't?
I love you all,
Elder Boothe
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