December 12, 2011

Hi everyone that reads this letter,

     This week has been somewhat of a difficult week.

     Mission packages sent to the mission office take a while to get to me. We have to wait for someone in the zone to go to the office up in Santa Clarita and then we finally get it. Usually, people are up there once a week.

     We made Christmas cards!! So hopefully we'll be sending those out today (knowing us, it probably won't get done until next P-Day, but you know, it'll get to you).

     We just keep going through investigators. Picking up, dropping, picked up, being dropped, finding, teaching, dropping. Not so much baptizing. It's kinda tough to get anything going, and our ward is starting to get a little upset with us because of our lack of success in baptisms, whereas the sister ward NoHo 4to is baptizing left and right. We're just in a bit of a rut right now where we just haven't been able to have the baptismal success that has been seen in the past. But, I'm really not too worried about that right now because I know that we're working our hardest as a district, and that's all I really care about.

     I went on exchanges with the zone leaders this past Tuesday. I had requested that I do my exchanges with them earlier in the transfer because I felt like I needed to learn as soon as possible so that I could be a better trainer sooner and a better district leader sooner.

     We have a few progressing investigators. Karen Mendez is the daughter of Elizabeth (my first baptism). She wants to get baptized and knows that this church is true. Two problems: 1) She doesn't want to go to church because she's being lazy. 2) She is not married to the guy she is living with. They want to get married. Elizabeth is completely against them getting marired (I don't blame her). So that becomes a pretty big issue. We're not really sure what to do.

     Miriam and Chris are progressing, especially Chris. We found out that one of our good young men (Alfredo) is going to go to the same school as Chris, and they really hit it off. That was pretty sweet. The only problem is that Chris always seems to go out of town on the weekends (Palmdale, San Diego, places like that) where it makes it tough for him to go to church. He did go one week, and he kinda liked it. The young men were a little rowdy that week (except for Alfredo, he's always pretty good).

     We had a Christmas music devotional. Guess who got asked to play the piano for basically all the wards about 30 minutes before it started... Mhmm. It was really nice though.

     Elder Bushman and I have been pretty sick recently. Yesterday, my voice was completely gone. We couldn't get any lessons yesterday because my companion can't speak Spanish and I couldn't speak period.

     It's raining right now...

     Everything else is going well... I guess.

     Well, there's not much else to report on.

Con amor,

Elder Nathan Gruenewald