March 5, 2009

Hello family!

How goes life in Tejas?! I hope well. I really do. I love y'all! Well, you might be asking yourself, how does the work go for Elder Starks? It goes well!

Things are progressing with a few of our investigators and one of them accepted an approximate baptismal date for sometime in mid-April!  Elder Nelson and I hope that things with him pan out and that he will continue to progress and make those leaps of faith necessary to find out for himself if the gospel is true. And his wife has even opened up a little as well. She spoke a few times (as I mentioned in my last email) but I'm not sure about this week, we were on exchanges with our Zone Leaders when Elder Nelson extended that time period of mid-April to John, so I'm not quite sure how Joelene took that and how she participated in the lesson. Anyway, we had a pretty good lesson with another investigator last Saturday, the Spirit was there and I think I was the most bold I've been on my mission with him when I felt prompted to tell him that if he would pray specifically to know that the Book of Mormon was true, he would receive an answer. He wouldn't commit to specifically pray, but the Spirit was there and we both felt it was a good lesson - not the usual listening to him ask questions about things from the Bible that (at least to us) do not pertain to Salvation. Pray for him and his family! Let's see...who else? A couple was just baptized two weeks ago. They're so cool. We're going to start teaching the new member lessons to them with their home teachers hopefully starting this next Tuesday. Yay! Um...I know there are more people to talk about...Oh! We have a lesson this Saturday with a lady. I think I told you last week, but we tracted into her and she said she had some cousins who were Mormon and one or two that had served or were serving missions and she said we could come back and share a lesson with her and her family. Hopefully something will come of that! We're trying hard to tract two hours each day so we can find some new potential investigators! Oh! In the Fanno Creek ward we had a lady refer her daughter (who is less-active) and her boyfriend to us. The daughter's boyfriend agreed to the lessons and the daughter apparently is on that line of being able to go either away or toward the church really easily. We hope we'll be able to make some progress with them and help them both to feel the Spirit and come to church and ultimately come unto Christ. Good stuff is happening and we're doing our best to work hard and teach people. We're hopefully going to get back to teaching the younger girl and boy we were working with. And we're slowly working on another famliy to reactivate the two that are members and teach the 8 and 10 year old's who aren't. Other than that things are going pretty well. Our exchanges with the Zone Leaders was fun. I was with Elder Barrett (one of our Zone Leaders) in their area and it was a great day! We set a goal to talk to everyone that we saw, and we were both pretty sure we did it, too, by the end of the day!

We also went to the temple this morning and that was really nice. I'm really happy that Pres. Dyches lets us go once a transfer - it definitely helps me out a lot.

Tell everybody I say hi and that I'm sorry for not writing anyone back yet - it's so hard, harder than I imagined!

Well, I've gotta go for this week, but I love y'all and hopefully will hear from y'all soon!

-Elder Michael Starks

P.S. Mail sent to our mailbox would be sweet treat!

P.P.S. Attached is a picture of Elder Nelson and I. And a picture of a cool rainbow we saw yesterday while I was on exchanges with Elder Barrett.