New things that have happened this week....my companion got hit by a car again. On Wednesday. Wrecked my bike. So thank heavens for insurance! Julliet is fine, but Bob (my first bike) is not. We went to the ER and were there from 6:00-10:30. I was companion less than an entire 3.5 hours! It was great. I found a less active family in the ER whose nephew (he was almost 30) had had a reeeealy bad seizure and was expected to die. He is now completely brain dead and I think they took him off of life support yesterday. I was able to just be with them and talk with them for about 2 of the 3.5 hours. There's a reason M was hit by a car! They hadn't been in contact with missionaries for years, and I was talking to their youngest son about baptism. He had wanted to know for so long what it was and how to do it, and he really wanted to be baptized. Some of the other kids had been baptized but didn't remember a lot, so I was able to talk to them too. It was great. A day, seemingly wasted, turned out to be incredibly productful. And then they asked me to give him a blessing, so we did that on Thursday. It felt so good to be able to help and comfort this family in their time of need! It almost makes me want to wish that bad things would happen so I could help people out, but that wouldn't be nice. I love you all!

Elder Hunter

Other letters:

Sorry I haven't been answering your questions, I don't know how much information you want so I keep it as short and succinct as possible.

Mom, did you call my mission office? In any case, sister Jameson is sending you a picture of me with elder Safsten and me with elder Meyers.

To answer your questions....I am in a different zone now. There are ten zones in my mission. My companion doesn't trust me as much as he should, which is frustrating, but not the end of the world. I guess that's really how I was when I came out. He is just convinced he knows what is going on, but he actually doesn't. The investigators we are teaching....there is a girl that is on date that we have not been able to meet with yet, and we got a referral for this guy that turned out to be a potential investigator. He was dropped a long time ago. We met with him last night with bishop Kimbrell, who is by the way, amaaaaazing. He is a motivational speaker for Disney. Guess how much they charge people who want him to come speak for stuff? $17,500/HOUR!  That's right. $17,500/hour. Anyway, he (the investigator) was saying how he's going to be baptized by default and I corrected him, in a joking way, that we are the default. He is completely nuts. He won't stop talking. He waaaay over complicates everything. If you said, Are you sitting in front of me, yes or no, he would say, well it depends on......dhjskssirojr. At a point in our meeting I said, "you need to let us talk. You need to let us teach you. If you don't this won't go anywhere and you won't get baptized." But anyway, bishop is a champ. Those are our investigators right now. To find people to teach we use the area book.

Literally, tracting is useless and a waste of time. So we go visit existing people in the area book that are potentials. And we have a big long list of those. We rely so much on members to. If members don't bring us to people to teach we are stuck bringing crazies like L to church for the Ward to fellowship. Then the Ward complains.

Well, to bad, it's their problem! So if you (the whole family here) want to have normal people get baptized instead of having crazies that the missionaries find and bring to church that freak everyone out that end up being a waste of time, ask your friends to consider learning about the church from the missionaries! And that's what the Ward is really struggling in. They won't do missionary work. So we are trying to strengthen less actives and part members BY finding people to teach through them, not doing it after. It needs to happen now. Pray for our members to find the people that need to be taught. Not us. Because they are the ones that need the help finding. They don't get that it's their job.

The girl from meet the Mormons doesn't live here. She lives in Utah I think. She was just here for a fireside. I appreciate those thoughts and quotes dad, the spirit revealed some things to me as I read them that will help in the work in our area. Love you all!

Elder Hunter

P.S. Dad could you email me that talk by Jeffrey R. Holland again? The one that he gave in one of the MTC's? I lost it somehow.

A note to family:

Ok we won't say anything to Connor about Stockton. That is really sad.

I'm glad you had a fun time with unka mike and Jeff and Krista!

Continue to do fun things this week! I will write more in response to your other email. Mickey Mouse has already been baptized actually, so we missed that boat....we just didn't get a lot done the first week partly because we had a ton of meetings. We didn't have any info on any members or investigators either. So unfortunately we did end up wasting some time tracting. There are loooots of meetings for new elders here because of the iPads and everything.