August 14, 2012

Hello all,

This week has been pretty good. We have a baptism this Sunday which is really excited and then we have 7 more next week. I am really excited for them to happen. The one on Sunday is a 9 year old boy who is part of a part-member family who was never baptized. Then next week Sandy and all of her kids are getting baptized. It is really cool to see how much they have changed in the month that we have met with them. It is really cool having a miracle convert this early in my mission. If we were lazy missionaries and didn't tract, then we would have never found her and it would not have been as good of an experience. So hard work does pay off on the mission. Anyone who gets mission calls or has exciting news make sure to tell my mom so she can email it to me. We taught quite a bit of lessons this week. We have been doing lots of work to prepare everything for the baptisms we are having soon. The work is going well and Raceview is growing to become one of the better area in the mission. We had no one to teach when we got here, and now there are heaps of people to teach. We hope to keep finding more people and teaching more people so the work can keep getting better and better here. I am excited and I am having some of the most spiritual experience I have ever had in my life so far. We have a few potential investigators that are really interested, so we will see what happens this week. We have already had 2 lessons this week and we have 10 more planned for the rest of the week. That is really high for this mission, so we are definitely keeping busy. That is as far as the work goes.

Now for some good experiences that I have had. Last week I went to a Samoan birthday party. Since we were missionaries we were automatically guests of honor. So we sat at the big table and got served our food. The people kept coming and putting food on my plate. I don't have to worry about going hungry in this area. The members always make sure we have food. There was lots of people singing and dancing. It was all in the Samoan Language so I could not understand a thing, but the food was really good. Samoan food is really good.

So 5 years ago they took away all of the Samoan speaking wards and some people didn't like that because it is hard for them to understand English, so they decided to make a break off church of the LDS church. We call them the break-offs. Well we went and visited them and they started to realized that the spirit isn't in their meetings and that they didn't have the authority from god to do all the things they do, so some of them decided to come back to church even though it is in English. So that was a miracle for us to have people come back.

Well, that is about it for my week and I hope everyone else is doing well. I miss you all and I hope you all have a great week!
 
Love,
Elder Kyler Powelson