January 23rd - 29th

Dearest Family,

I love you all so much. Thank you for your time and efforts in supporting me in my mission.

I still have flashbacks where I think I'm still at home and just visiting, and then I realize that I'm on a mission and will be for quite some time still. Tonsofun.

Hope you enjoy the letter this week!

-Paden

-President's Letter-

Dear President Thomas,

Our teaching pool is kind of nonexistant at this point in time, honestly. We go finding every day. We visited lots of people this week, but some of our third watches were a little on the lame side. We'll try to do better this week. We need to keep calling less actives and other people to visit to try and stay busy during third watch.

F- My family is staying way busy. My parents are both busy with school. My dad is dealing with the stress of a new class. He's teaching a BIO250 Environmental Biology and his FDSCI 101 got a new outline for the semester outlook of the class. My mom is taking a Microbiology class that seems to be keeping her busy. My 17 and 15 year old sisters got a part in the high school musical called Honk. It's a spin off of the ugly duckling story. Cool for them. My 13 year old brother is competing in Utah with his ballroom company. Busy busy busy.

A- The area is what we make of it, honestly. I try to share the gospel when we go out finding. We pray before and after when we go finding. I do my best to present the gospel in an understandable way to everyone we come in contact with, but no one seems to be understanding or interested. I still sleep well at night though. I try not to let it be a way of not trying my best. I try to approach each door with the mentality that the person behind that door is a child of God and they deserve to hear the message of the restored gospel. Even if they're 80 years old and have been a Baptist their entire life. Or if they just want to talk about faith, that's cool too. It's good representation for the church. I try to bring up the Book of Mormon on every door step and sometimes it really saves door contacts. Even though we always introduce ourselves as missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, people want nothing to do with us. Oh well. Soldier on, I guess. I don't really let things get me down. We build the tower. It doesn't say we build one every day. Towers are built brick by brick. I always carry the hope that we will find more people this upcoming week to teach and to share the message of the restored gospel with.

Still no contact with Jessica. A little on the sad side about that.

Talked to Marvin and Melissa the 28th. They actually got married that night, which is way cool. They were living together, which was gonna not work out. But Marvin told me that he would call us later this week when they get back from their honeymoon shindig. That's cool. I hope he will. He seemed like he would too. They've just been crazy busy with everything. Maybe their schedules are finally evening out so that they can meet with us again. I sure hope so. Elder Child hasn't even met anyone from our last transfer yet.

We taught a couple by the name of Dawn and Terry Hicks on Monday and they agreed to baptismal dates on the 10th of March. They called us Thursday and dropped us. They had done more "research" and didn't agree with the modern day prophet. A little frustrating. Isn't it somewhere in Hebrews 13 that says that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever? Wouldn't that mean he would want his new church to be just like his old church? I just don't get some of these people sometimes. But they're all children of God. Some people are harder to love than others.

C- Elder Child is awesome. We get along really well. We have lots of things in common, and we talk a lot about those things. It helps to keep our morale up. He's a good worker. He knows what to do in the situations where I do not. We even each other out very well. I hope that we will be able to see the progress in each other by the time our time together ends.

T- A story from this week: Yesterday, we went finding from about 2:30 to 5:30 about. The very last door we knocked on, a man came out. He told us that he was on an important phone call and that he only had a few seconds. We briefly introduced the introduction and gave him a card for mormon.org. He said that he would check it out, and walked back into his house. As we were walking away, his wife came back out with the card and gave it back to us. She said that we should check out what they were all about and that we were not in any way what Christ was about. She spoke fluent Baptist. It was frustrating. We turned to her and told her that we were out telling people that Christ was the center of our church and that he had again restored his church to the earth. She turned around and just went through the door after giving us a smirk. The most frustrating part follows: As we turned around to leave, Elder Child accidentally drops the card. She comes through the door, tells us that we dropped the card, and WATCHES him pick it up and walk away.

It's hard to not deconstruct people's logic, as missionaries. Who is she to say that we don't follow Christ in our church? Who is she to limit Christ to just the Bible? Who is she to take away the agency of her husband and refuse the card that we left with him? Who is she to turn away the missionaries? I bet she did exactly as her preacher told her to.

"Your church isn't true."

"Where'd you get that information? Your preacher? Where'd he get his information?"

This scenario has ran through my head over and over again over the last 18 hours or so. I guess it comes down to this: it's hard to love people like that. Why are people so satisfied with ignorance? My choir teacher used to tell me that satisfaction is death. I agree. Human nature, I guess, though. Soldier on.

S- Study is going great. I'm in the Isaiah chapters of 2 Nephi, and I've elected to open Isaiah and mark all the differences between the two versions. A lot of the verses are verbatim. Most have just slight differences. It's fun to see the differences. Chapter 14 was a lot of fun to read. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've finally entered in Leviticus! Woo! Lots of cool stuff. I was reading last night and had some personal revelation: when they had to have a sin offering, the sinner had to provide the lamb for the sacrifice. And then it dawns on me: when repenting, we have to APPLY the Atonement to our lives to be forgiven of our sin. So symbolic is the law of Moses. I love it. In Preach My Gospel I've made it through chapter 4 in my study journal. For the first bullet in personal study and application in the back of the chapter I almost wrote an entire page. Fun stuff. It's really fun to look back and see the things that you've written.

This is grand. I love being a missionary. In other news, Saturday afternoon I was asked to give a 10-15 minutes speech on making good choices, so I went and spent about 30 minutes preparing an outline for it. Sunday I spoke for 25 minutes, and didn't seem nearly that long. My patriarchal blessing says I have a nac for speaking. I guess it's true. It was fun. I loved it.

Hope everything's well with the mission!

-Elder Carter