Elder Henry 1/2/2012

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!  Tell her welcome to the club :P.  Guess who's never going to live that one down XD.

(This was Michael's reaction to Sherry accidentally leaving a pocket knife in her backpack and getting busted by Homeland Security at the airport--of course, he had 5 or 6 pocket knives when he was busted a few years ago, Scouter vs hiker haha)

Dear Mom,

Pictures! 

8544 - We had Pig, Crab Salad, Chicken, and Taro

8550 - Traditional Samoan Pig at the Long Beach 15th Ward New Years Party

Thanks for all the pictures.  Its fun to look through all the family photos :).  It looks like you all had a very happy Holiday season ^^.  My guess is you will see Sherry before next Christmas :P.  Sometimes you just call up your parents and tell them you'll be home tomorrow ;), even when you are living the dream life.

This week has been a pretty rough week to be a missionary.  My guess is the holidays has made it harder than normal to find people at home, although nobody has been using that excuse on us.  We are having a lot of problems with our recent converts (from before I was here), and one of our wards is being pretty uncooperative in the missionary efforts.

Our two best investigators, J and F both can't be baptized for quite a while, and we haven't found anyone new in 3 weeks.  This week though is going to be much better.

We've been working with two less active families recently, E and I, and M and S.  I really love their company, and I sent you a picture of their whole family last week.  I don't know if I've talked at all about them, but I will now.

E and I were found by the missionaries last February and have been working on coming back to church ever since.  Eli is a football player at a local community college, and is looking to get into one of the PAC-12 teams for football.  He could probably play for the Ducks, but he needs a scholarship to afford college.  He did have a scholarship to play for WSU, but because the lead coach recently got fired, his scholarship died with the coach who recruited him :(.  They are working though some rough times, and we have been visting them to help them focus on what is most important.  They are some of my best friends in this area.  They are my age.

M and S are not married, and have a kid together with one more on the way.  S stopped us one day as we were looking for E and I (they live in the same house) and told us that they needed to meet with missionaries.  Neither of them have been to church in a couple years, but both were faithful members in their youth.  They have made some extraordinary changes in their lives since we've been meeting with them.  They are reading together the Book of Mormon everyday.  They went to church on Christmas for the first time in forever, Si quit her old job so she could have Sundays off.  Best of all they are planning to get married in the middle of February :).  We didn't do hardly anything to spur this on.  All we did was walk in, share a scripture from the Book of Mormon about how its never too late for forgiveness, and now they are on their way to reactivation and being an eternal family.  I'm really excited to continue to work with them.

That pretty much summarizes our whole week.  Thank you for writing me every week, I look forward to Monday's I'm sure just as much as you do.  I love to hear from you.

Love,

~Elder Henry

Dear Dad,

You have no idea how excited I was to switch times yesterday :P.  Going from 8:00am Church to 10:00am meant that Ward Council started at 9 instead of 7, so we don't have to wake up early on Sundays anymore ^^.  I don't know why they have church so early here as compared to other places, but you are right every time slot has its up and downs.

     Spencer's new guitar looks pretty sweet.  I hope he has lots of fun with it, and maybe even learns something from playing it.  I'm curious how you play normal guitar hero with it though...

      Sounds like work around the house keeps becoming an ever increasing list of to-dos.  You'll have to let me know this week who won the Rose Bowl.  I heard from someone that they were playing Wisconsin?  The Ducks better win a bowl for once in their career.

      Thank you for writing me every week.  I love hearing about the family exploits :)

Love,

~Elder Henry