Maybe you got one of these

Dear Family,

   I did send a letter, hopefully it gets there soon.  I wrote a lot of letters last preparation day.  Probably twice as many as I have written in the last 4 months. 

  This week was great though.  The weather was so nice, I actually got sun burnt on Saturday. We did a lot of tracting this week.  The beginning of the week started out really slow but the end of the week picked up.  We found a new investigator on Saturday.  We were going to visit a potential inv, who ended up not being home.  We started to walk down the hilly and long driveway and we saw a person in the woods, kindof in a clearing. We walked over there and talked with her. She was actually looking for a 100 dollar bill.  We helped her look for a couple of minutes.  We didn’t end up finding it, we told her who we were and she started to cry. She told us how she is going through a really hard time right now and that she is miserable. We told her about Christ and put her on date for May 12^th. She really wants to change her life.  She wants to stop smoking and be the mom that she needs to be.  She wasn’t able to come to church this weekend because she was in Kent with her two kids but she will be there next Sunday. 

  Elder Yamashita is doing pretty good. It’s a little hard sometimes just because he doesn’t really know that much English and it is hard for him to follow conversations.  It’s good for me because it is helping me be more patient. 

  There was a homecoming talk on Sunday.  The topic was receiving revelation from general conf., I though it was kindof a weird topic for a homecoming talk.  But it was ok. 

  I did hear that Kansas lost.  I actually talked with someone that was from Emporia yesterday and who went to KU.  The shoes are great I really like them. I really have to start running in the morning because of all the food.  I have gone back to my old self and am having cereal like 3 or 4 times a day.  I didn’t realise how close mother’s day was. So I will see you then!

  Well I hope everyone has a good week!

Love, Elder Clark

ah..the tension between gatherers and sifters...my boy is now a real missionary!

Dear Family,

  Riding a bike in May Valley is terrible. This week we had to ride bikes till Friday. My legs were shot.  But it was relatively a good week. We didn't have our baptism, which was sad. Its been pushed back to next week.  Hopefully our bishop will still allow her to be baptised.  Mercedes' family is looking for a condo to move to, and there are no condos in our area.  So she will be moving out of our ward and that concerns our bishop with the transition and everything.  From the missionaries point of view she needs to be clean as soon as possible and the transition will be tough either way so why not let her receive the holy ghost? Also one of the  members of the ward council raised some concerns on whether or not she was qualified.  He asked some good questions, questions that should be asked before someone is baptised but the way he asked them were sort of cantankerous.  Like "are you teaching the Book of Mormon?" But all is well that ends well. Hopefully she will be baptised next week.

  This is the last week of the transfer. Another transfer has come and gone....way too fast.  I feel like it's 50/50 on whether or not I will be transferred.  But life is going good in May Valley. We put two part member twins on date for baptism yesterday so that was great.  Sis Robins has been out of town for the past several days.  Hopefully they don't get back until tomorrow we have some cleaning up to do before they get back.  We get a little lackadaisical in being diligent with the dishes and others miscellaneous things when they are gone. 

  We have been asked to give talks, not this Sunday but the following. Which will be good.  Get to cry repentance to a captive audience about them not doing their part in finding...just kidding. Kind of. In all seriousness, May Valley is great ward. Lots of willing members, who will do things at the drop of a hat. Bishop Jarman is very missionary minded, which is awesome.  But in the eyes of all missionaries, members could always find more.   

  We have been doing some re-activation recently. Which I have found to be pretty cool.  With the senior couple in our ward working with the less-actives we don't do too much, but we have tracted into some inactive members.  We have been teaching them and a couple of them are making the journey to return to being active members.  I never really learned how to do less active work in the beginning of my mission, but I've learned that you have to treat them just like an investigator.  Be bold. Extend commitments. And get fellowship. 

  This week was one of the hardest finding weeks.  It seemed like no one was interested. I don't think we had a single tracting lesson. Usually I'm pretty good at being able to say two prayers and share a quick message at the doorstep. But this week was just difficult. 

  Sounds like things are still up and going back home. That's cool that you get to go to Dallas.  Got an email from Drew.  He was wondering why he hasn't got an email forwarded or the blog updated.  His guess as to why, was a little radical.  I bet Wesley and Tanner are rejoicing this week while Reagan is at camp.  But sounds like it should be pretty fun. Boomerangs must be in the swing of summer, with 70% of the rentals being water pieces.  There are pros and cons to that.  Well have a good week. It's going to be a busy preparation day today.  Need to catch up on some letters that I have been procrastinating. Surprise I know.  And we have to clean and then go play basketball. Then back to work for the week.

 

Love, Elder Clark

Lost and Found

Dear Family,

Well this was a pretty good week.  I'm having trouble remembering what happened. This week we didn't have a lot of time to proselyte. Tuesday we got Elder Yamashita moved in and everything.  One Thursday we we had weekly plan, a zone meeting, met with the bishop, and had ward correllation. So we had about two hours to work that day.  It’s amazing how many meetings we have. On Saturday we had a breakfast at the stake president’s house. It was really good, we had pancakes, egss, hashbrowns, sausage, and fruit.

Elder Yamashita is great.  His dad is a member of the 70 so that is pretty cool.  His english is coming along. He gave a great testimony in church yesterday. He said, “I love America. I love hamburger. I love five guys.” Everyone started to laugh. Hopefully we can find some Japanese people so that he can talk to them in Japanese.  So we do language study from 10-11. I am not exactly sure how to help him learn English. We usually just read out of the white handbook and any words that he doesn’t know I define for him.

I had the opportunity to do another baptism interview. It was pretty cool. His name was Jordan Alves. I don’t know if you could find another person as on fire as he is. He is 22 years old.  Elder Aiken and Elder Berry taught him 7 months ago. He then went to college and kindof got lost. But once he got back home he referred himself because he remembered the spirit that he felt when he was first taught.  He is in pre-law right now and is applying to go to different colleges. He said the elders are trying to get me to apply to BYU and I am thinking about doing that.  I will most likely get to do another interview this week as well.

This was kind of a slow week.  Because of all the meetings numbers were a little down this week.  We did find several new investigators.  We met this one guy Ken who is 46 years old. We first talked with him about three or four weeks ago and we could never catch him at home. On Saturday we did and we were able to have a lesson with him. It turns out his wife died three years ago from cancer and he has a 12 year old son.  Really nice guy, he works for Boeing (like pretty much half the people that we meet). He goes to a community church. But during the lesson he said that he has always wondered why there are so many Christian churchs and that in his mind he has always thought that there has to be one that God wants everyone to join.  So that’s a good start, hopefully he reads the Book of Mormon before we go back on Tuesday…

The Robins address is 16028 SE 148^th St Renton, WA.  Did you get the CD they sent? It has about 40 pictures on it.

Sounds like Reagan had a good soccer game.  Hopefully they can win their next game. Who is her soccer coach?  Wes how do you like tennis more than baseball? Haven’t you only played tennis like two or three times…I bet you will like baseball a lot more once the games start.  The weather has been really nice the past several days. It was sunny and around 60 degrees for like three days. It’s a little gray today. But it was nice to be able to wear short sleeves and get a little tan. 

Well have a great week!

Love, Elder Clark