Email - April 28

   This week has been hard. This has been one of the hardest weeks of missionary work I have had in my mission, besides my first few weeks in Yuma because we were white-washed into that area. It has been hard because we only have 2 solid families of investigators. That is all our investigators!! Through out my mission I have been very blessed to almost always have MANY people to teach, and it has been easy to find people. This week we have been working on "finding" by going through former investigators, potential investigators, visiting lots of members, and less-actives. We have knocked on so many doors trying to find, but no luck. We need the help from the members or little success will come. Yesterday, we had the privilege of speaking in Sacrament meeting. All 4 of us missionaries in the ward. Elder Whitted spoke about personal conversion, Elder Keene about acting on the faith we do have, I spoke about family missionary work and a plan, and Sister Segura talked about Preach My Gospel. It was really awesome! I wrote my talk and Sister Segura helped me to correct the things that were wrong with the grammar and stuff. It actually wasn't too bad. It is amazing to see that in December when I spoke in the Spanish branch in Yuma, it was so hard to write just a tiny talk and now this one I could of written a really long one. It was about 8 minutes and I had to cut out some things. We hope that the members can see the importance of their conversion and of missionary work. We hope that it will help with our struggle right now with finding people.

   This week has also been fun and spiritual. We had Missionary Leadership Council (MLC) on Thursday and it was one of the best ones that I have been to. It brought a lot of things to my remembrance of why goals are important. I am really bad at making goals but as I have been on my mission I have learned a lot about making goals. There is something in my mission called "the standard of excellence". I don't know if you know but everything we do as missionaries, we record and have statistics for it. Every lesson we teach, every referral we receive, every person at church, every new investigator, ext. So the "standard of excellence" is the goals the mission president set for our stats. When he sets this he prays and seeks to know what is reachable but gives us a good stretch. When he first set it, all the missionaries didn't think it was possible because the numbers were real high. But while I was in Yuma with Sister Pinnock and Sister White, we were hitting these high numbers from week to week. It was hard, but achievable. We kind of forgot about the Standard of Excellence and we forgot how important it is to strive to achieve these goals which are set. So for MLC we had a training on the "standard of excellence". It touched my spirit a lot because I am one of the missionaries that absolutely KNOWS that it is achievable! And I want to do it again in this area. I know that it might be a little harder because it is an all Spanish area, but I know that it is the Lord's vision and it is reachable! So this Wednesday we are training our zone on meeting the Lord's vision, I am super excited!

   As I said on my Facebook post, we taught the 11-year-old girls in the stake. It was just for 10 minutes, but it was so amazing to have this opportunity. The night before, this lady calls us and says her name and said "I was thinking about you two and I was wondering if you can come teach the activity-day girls tomorrow morning? I have only met you once or twice but I just know you two are perfect to come teach." This was really cool because we really did just meet her super fast, 2 times, and she has sister missionaries in her own ward that really could of done it, but she called us to do it. As missionaries, I don't think we really realize how members and other people look at us. She told us the theme about becoming Christ-like and being daughters of God. She said that they are passing out mirrors for them to decorate and stuff. This reminded me of the poem I wrote, "Mirror Image" We used the poem in our presentation. We had them close their eyes and imagine themselves with God and Jesus Christ, we asked them a few questions while they closed their eyes like "What do you want to tell Heavenly Father and Christ of what you did as you lived here on earth? Who do you want to become? What changes do you want them to notice in you?" We had them open their eyes and tell us who they want to become and we wrote those things on the board. The first hand shot up and she said "Jesus" It was so cute. I felt so much love for all of these girls. Youth NEED to be strong in these days, there is no other way!! We asked them the things that could maybe harm them or stop them from becoming these things. We told them to not let anything stop them! It was really awesome!

Oh and finally our Venezuelan family came to church yay!!

I love you!