Dear Family,

Oh no! Poor grandma. Your right though mom, how could you live in this life believing you wouldn’t see your family again? (Mom, missionary work is all about using the members. We have had some super success this week due to the members.) Rachelle, how are you going to do a mock trial with Tyler? I missed dad’s weekly advice this week, I was hoping he would give me tips on memorizing scriptures.

So we have a ward mission leader and a ward missionary that were called recently, and thanks to my companion, we put them to work this week. We did divisions twice with them this week and both times were super successful! I felt like I was training though because they don’t know the lessons and it was awesome! It cracks me up teaching with a member, some of the things they say……

Tuesday we did the first divisions. It was sure a ruff day until we did the divisions. No one was home and the rejection was ruff and then to top it all off we had a 7th Day Adventist battle! We found them tracting and they invited us in. To make a long story short, we got our butts whipped by a lady and her thirteen year old daughter using the bible. I couldn’t believe it! It’s exactly what happened in my last area with my last companion, both of which had had a bunch of time in the mission field against the exact same religion. It was pretty funny because in both instances my companions told me afterwards that God was humbling them. I don’t know why I have to be part of their humbling experiences because once again I just sat there and listened as they argued about the bible. I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to convince an Adventist using the bible that the Sabbath is Sunday, not Saturday. But the problem is they say they can’t pray to know if something is true (such as Joseph Smith) because that would be like asking God if it’s ok to break a commandment. So after we had a nice humbling experience we were ready to do our divisions.
I went with the ward missionary who was less-active (when I first got here) and is the only member in his family of Evangelicos (still don’t know what that is in English). We had two appointments set to visit and they were both there! It was sweet. The best part was his testimony. He just flat-out tells people he is the only member of his family and he lost a lot of trust when he became a member but he did it because he prayed and received an answer. My companion and the ward mission leader went to the Bulgarian family. They are the ones we found last Sunday that had the twin son die. They have progressed so much this week! We even went to their daughter’s birthday party.

Friday we did divisions again but this time our appointment fell through so we went and found a new investigator. It’s so much easier finding with a member (I don’t know why!) We ended up finding 3 new investigators and visited a less active.

Also this week we had members bring an investigating family to church. We found a guy that needed help building the roof of his house so we brought it up in elders quorum and went with an Hermano from the ward to look at the roof. Then, without us even knowing, he and another Hermano from the ward went by, built the roof, invited them to church, and picked them up and brought them. We had 4 investigators at the church and with the family we had 7! They even set the appointment for us to join them in teaching them. It was amazing. My companion said he has never seen members do so much for the missionary work! I kinda think it’s better to just get to know the members really well and get them really excited about working than anything else.

It’s been a great week. Full of difficulty and miracles (they always seem to come together) Love you all!

Elder Tryon