April 12th
Hello family.
Not much new this week, the same old grind, and apparently it's not just us but the whole mission is like this too. At zone conference President said that the number of progressing investigators in the mission is at an all time low, lower than it's been for a few years. We still don't have anyone progressing. The Dubons were dodging us for a couple weeks but we finally caught Giovanni by surprise by dropping in unexpectedly on a tuesday night and finally caught him there. It went well surprisingly enough, his excuse for dodging us was that he has started working on weekends now so we'll have to see him weeknights from now on. That's fine with us, he also likes Elder Ordaz a lot, he says it's better that he can talk to an hispanic missionary now because he can probably explain things better than us gringos, yeah... ow... But he's right, hispanics use different sayings, different analogies, and other different things that we Anglo-Saxons don't use. Though usually that culture gap isn't too much of a problem for most people. Well his biggest doubt is still the Book of Mormon so we left him 2 Nephi 29 for homework (the chapter that disses on the bible all hardcore like). Maybe that'll help him out a bit. Also, this is his question that nobody, even President Hansen is sure how to answer... He says: "So let's say I get baptized and do all I need to do and get to live in the Celestial Kingdom with my family for ever, what if my family doesn't want to follow me? What if they don't make it there? And if they don't make it there then I think I wouldn't be happy if I didn't have all of them there..." Yeah... I've wanted to say might as well at least save yourself, but I really don't know, I don't really have an answer for that. We asked President once and he started talking about some sort of obscure doctrine regarding parent-child relationships and saving principles but nothing quite tangible enough. I dunno, I'm sure that you, Mom and Dad have thought about this before and since you are in fact parents probably have some greater insight to this than I do.
Other then that we've been doing meat grinder tactics, finding new people and dropping them just as fast, churning through the masses in hopes of finding someone. It's not fun but whatever, keeps us busy. Especially since the other missionaries I live with are incredibly disobedient with the rules. (A couple days ago my companion watched Ice Age 3 on his portable DVD player, he found the movie in street one day). Yup... A lot of fun dealing with that. Well that's all I got to say today.
The pictures are of some of the wildlife here in Texas, geckos, turtles, and elephants. It was pretty funny, we were just driving along out in Cut-N-Shoot which is redneck territory when we saw this elephant just chilling in this pasture. We stopped and snapped a couple of pictures and drove on.
-- Elder Rice
