Letter from November 12, 2012

So today my zone will be practicing football for the up coming mission turkey bowl! We submitted our T-Shirt design on Saturday and are excited to get our team jerseys for the game on Thanksgiving. I'm also really excited for this week and the mission tour from Larry Echo Hawk who spoke in this last general conference. It should be a great meeting and I'm sure that we'll all learn a lot. As for the mission we received some great news about the increase in missionaries... since our mission split in July we dropped down from 190 missionaries to about 110-120 and have since increased to around 160 and are working our way back up to 190. Well our mission president received a letter from the first presidency shortly after the announcement in October telling him to prepare to have 250 missionaries in our mission!!! I would imagine that this will be the same for many of the missions here and throughout the world bringing the number of missionaries in Nevada to about 750 between the 3 missions and many more else where. We will have a set of missionaries for every single ward and no longer have to run from one ward to another giving us the ability to really get to know the area and the ward. It also means I will very likely be on bike before to long and probably a good part of the rest my mission....Oh well. I'm very excited for the changes being made and we should begin receiving the new missionaries in February. Also this last week the bishop of the Hillpointe ward announced that both his daughter and son received their mission calls and one would be going to Buenos Aires North mission and the other to the Buenos Aires South mission...that will be a neat experience for their family!

 

   Well not to much happened this past week for me to report on just that our investigators are doing well. We ran into Kendal early in the week while we were cleaning out our car and had a good conversation about his life. He's doing really well and personal shared with us that he had been praying for a date and told his grandmother that he wants to get baptized in early December. I of course was thrilled to hear this news and seeing as how I might be leaving the area on December 9th I'm grateful to still be here to be a part of it. He also told me he wanted to make sure we stay in touch and we'll probably invite him our to some of the zone activities we have on P-Days.

 

   We received some sad news from our investigator Dray who threw out his back and isn't doing to well as of right now. We hope to see him sometime this week and possibly give him a blessing. On the brighter side of things we did meet with a new investigator this week named Martin. Martin is a very bright older man who translates English-Spanish-and Armenian. He has a great knowledge of religions and love to discuss religion. While we have high hopes for him and feel very welcome in his home I fear that he is set with his faith and isn't very likely to change. We did leave him with the Book of Mormon to read and a pamphlet to ask questions about next time we come by so my fingers are crossed.

 

   Well my roommates and I continue to improve the status of our apartment as we cleaned up, moved the furniture around, and had the carpets shampooed and cleaned. We can hardly recognize the place now and it looks drastically better than when I arrived. Also I got very tired of ramen a while back and I'll admit that I began doing slim fast to keep the weight down and because it's super cheap! Now please don't send me junk food for the Holidays!!! We already have way to much sitting around our place all the time and way to many dinners with desert every night. Well I'm excited for all the new changes in the mission and for the up coming holidays and mission tour. I love you all and wish you the best,

Elder Keller Reeves