February 9, 2015 - Rajahmundry

Hey you vacationers!!!!!!! All play for you this week huh? haha anyways glad you are getting away to Hawaii to have some fun.  We all need fun in life.  Even 2 Nephi tell us "men are that they might have joy" and i am sure he didn't mean that the only way to have joy is working hard and having no vacations to hawaii haha.  I better get a good update next week about how much fun you had and what you did.  

As far as my update for the week.  So many of our appointments bunked this week but the appointments that we did have were very successful and productive.  When we went to teach an investigator named Johnson Raj, his daughter told us he wants to be baptized!! So this week we will be teaching him a lot and try to extend a date for him.  The only thing that will be difficult is helping him overcome his word of wisdom problem.  He is a great guy so we are going to focus on him a lot this week.  As far as Shirley and Joshua, we taught them this week but when we asked when we could pick them up to take them for church, their mom told us they weren't going this week because their pastor is becoming angry on them.  So this week we are going to teach the Restoration and Do or Die lesson basically.  We are going to try and powerfully hit them with the spirit of the truthfulness of the Restoration of the gospel and hopefully help them understand that there is one true church and that our church is that church.  So we will see how that goes this week. 

We also taught two new investigators.  One named Kupavathi who is a cousin of one of our members and she said she doesn't believe in any church right now because the ones she has gone to are all not true.  She hasn't been to ours yet so we will be teaching her and she said she is very willing to listen to us.  The other is the mother of a member named Devi and she has faith in Jesus Christ but we need to teach her how to act on that faith through Repentance, Baptism, Holy Ghost and Endure to the End.  We also have a couple of potentially good investigators upcoming this week.  We also got a referral from other elders and this guy's name is Teja and his has a friend named Pradeep and they both speak English!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank goodness. That is the ONLY thing i do not like about this transfer.  So I absolutely the people, the food, the apartment, the companion, the area, pretty much the everything.  EXCEPT for i am pretty much useless here most of the time....so most of our investigators are part-member families and the rule is if there is one telugu speaking elder in the companionship, that elder can teach in telugu but no member translation or translation period...so with these people i pretty much just sit there and for the first 15 minutes try to decipher what is being said and the rest of the time wonder when we can teach an english investigator.  So i was very very excited to finally get an english speaking referral.  It has just been kind of frustrating in that aspect.  Other than that i love everything about this place.  It is just frustrating because i want so badly to just teach people but i can't teach anything.  So we have some possible referrals from members but we told them they need to be able to speak english so we will see how many of them speak English.  

So i still have to get my lungi stitched today so then i will start wearing it around the apartment all the time:)  Well hope you have so much fun in Hawaii and i really hope Tyler is doing okay with you being gone.  

Love you guys so much!
Love, Elder Ball