Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Only one year left!

Dear Friends and Family:

This week, we achieved standards in all key indicators! Yay! This is the first time in my mission that I have done it. I've come close one other week when I was with Elder Bailey, but I fell short on a few of them.

On Sunday, we needed three more member present lessons and a member blessing, and it seemed like we weren't going to be able to get them. None of the members we called were able to come out with us, and we were getting close to the time that we had to go out to a lesson. Then, the last person we called finally said he could come out teaching with us! So we went and picked him up, and we started going to visit all of our investigators. But we literally visited ten or so homes, finding out that none of them were there, before we actually had a lesson! We just barely achieved standards for MPLs, but God blessed us for working hard to get the member out with us and we had three excellent lessons with him!

Elder Fisher and I are getting along well. Much better than we did at the start of the transfer, and we are getting a lot of amazing work done. We had 8 people in sacrament meeting yesterday, from a family of five, and two individuals from part-member families, and one other individual. We are excited to have six baptisms next week!

Our ward just got a new Ward Mission Leader, Brother Giullian, so we are excited to work with him and to have closer unity with the ward.

In one of my studies this week or last, I started making a list of my recent converts and trying to see patterns. One thing I noticed is that almost all of my recent converts have neither 1. come teaching with us, or 2. gone to the temple. So that is one thing I really need to repent of and be better at. I'm going to place more of a focus on missionary work and on the temple in our lessons, and especially after these people are baptized, I'm not going to just let them go inactive without ever visiting the temple.

If any of you have sent me letters that have been returned home to you from the mission office, be rest assured, it's happening to everyone. For some reason, none of the packages or letters that are arriving in the mission office are being forwarded to the right places. They are all being returned to the sender. This is mission-wide, and the senior missionaries are doing their best to find out why this is happening and to fix the problem so that we junior missionaries can receive all of your letters and love-in-a-box. Thanks for your patience!

Unfortunately, as some of you have already remarked, this past week I hit my half-way mark on my mission. The week before I hit my year-to-home mark, and this upcoming week I'll hit my year mark. I know, it's sad, but really, I still have a year left! If you don't count the MTC, I've still got a few weeks until I even hit my half-way mark. So you probably don't have to bring it up for another 11 months or so...

Thanks,

Elder Slade

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