Update From Seattle

Family,

This past weekend was amazing!  We were able to watch all of the sessions of general conference (minus an hour of the Saturday afternoon session because I had to drive to Seattle for a baptismal interview).  It is always such a spiritual boost.  I loved it!  There were also a lot of talks directed towards missionary work.  Can you imagine in a couple of months there will be 90,000 missionaries? It is crazy!  One of the 58 new missions happens to be from splitting our mission in half at the start of July.  The Washington Seattle mission is already one of the smallest in the world, but will only be getting smaller.  The only investigator that we had come to general conference was Jesus.  He came to the priesthood session because it was the only one that he could make it to.  He really enjoyed it, and hopefully that will help him in his plans for marriage and baptism.  We set up multiple lessons with him this week, but they all fell through because of his work.

We met two other men just yesterday and were able to teach them.  We were actually meaning to get ahold of one of their roommates, but he had left right before we got there, and they were just showing up as we knocked on the door.  They, like most Spanish men, are super busy working and said they would only be in the house if it was raining so hard that they couldn't work. They seemed interested in learning, and one actually met the missionaries in Mexico years ago, but had not a set return appointment at all.

Our teaching pool really hasn't increased at all.  We are brainstorming of ways that we can find people to teach.  Nothing that we have used in the past has been crazy successful.  We even tried contacting in Goodwill this past week.  For me personally, I would much rather knock on someone's door or talk with them in the street as a way to contact them than contact in a store.   did talk with a man who invited us to come by his apartment later in the week. The only problem is that he didn't remember what number his apartment was in a complex.  He gave us a general idea of where, and then later in the week we tracted everything around it until we found him.  We were able to share briefly about The Book of Mormon.  It was interesting because he already had a Book of Mormon in his house but had never read it.  We committed him to read the introduction and still need to follow up on that.  This is an awesome branch though, and I am super excited to continue to serve here.  I look forward to working even harder for this last month.

Love from the Emerald City,

Elder B.