A Lung Full Of Insulation

Hello One and All,

I hope everyone is doing good. I was sorry to hear about little Harrison's health troubles, hopefully he's doing better. This last week has been really awesome. Last night we found out that we led the zone in lessons taught. In all reality that's not all that impressive, because I'm pretty sure the rest of the zone just had a low amount of lessons. No worries though.

I can't remember if I mentioned this last week. But the cop that pulled me over got baptized with his whole family, but also another woman I tried to teach that turned us away is now baptized. She's a real nice, spunky older lady. It's a lot of fun visiting with her, and she did remember running off missionaries, just not me specifically.

We continue working with the Romero family, they weren't able to make it to church this week because of a wedding, but they really enjoyed it last week and want to keep moving forward, hopefully they will be able to get baptized together soon, I think they will. We found this really sharp kid Kristen last week, she's 16 and has a lot of experience with the church, she's currently attending seminary and she has a super solid testimony of everything. But she is currently in a very transitional time of her life and is trying to figure out who she wants to become. She's a good kid, and hopefully we can help her make some of these decisions. We also went and found an old investigator I taught a year ago, Susana, she remembered me, but not much of the doctrine, so we are starting from scratch with her. Another one of her kids has left home now and is going to school in Salt Lake City (go figure, she wouldn't talk to us before and now she's in Mormon capital). Susana seems a little bit more ready now, so things should be good. I also have a small stack of other people that we need to try that I taught a year ago, but I'm a little hesitant because not all of them ended on good notes, maybe a year is long enough for them to move on...vamos a ver.

This week we helped a member family out with building their house. First we were insulating the roof. So for a little while I was manning the machine and filling it with shredded up newspaper fuzz which was then sprayed up a tube and into the crawl space in the roof. After a few minutes of that the member shouted down we need a skinny guy up here. That's my cue. So I climb up there and army crawl all around the place spraying down insulation. I had to put all my weight on the three or four cross beams that I could reach so as to not fall through the sheet rock. Interestingly enough, despite my assumption I've had all my life, sheet rock is actually quite flimsy. Maybe we should change its name....anywho. So skinniness aside, I still managed to get wedged into some tight places a few times, but I finally got down out of the roof. Thank goodness for my face mask, it was dusty up there! After that we cut and hung up sheet rock. I'm gaining some valuable life experience out here. Speaking of, I've heard that we will be helping out with some cows soon...it's Pasco all over again!

Our member Sister Hoffman has been in Spokane for the last week, so naturally we party every night. Now when I say party, don't worry, we're missionaries, things don't get to crazy for us.

On Sunday I translated again, (I'm pretty sure this will be a weekly thing), and afterwards we spent some time with Eloisa which was good. She has a lot of tough times in her life, but a lot of it is her own doing. After that we got a ride with Arrow Corpus (the younger brother of Hopper who took us to Fossil every week a year ago and is now in Japan on his mission) down to Hermiston area to teach a family in the Stake President's house. It went much smoother this time, I didn't have any nervousness which is a plus. Last week I felt like the Stake Prez was evaluating me the whole time, and that the audience was a little hostile. But this time around was much smoother, we focused on my favorite thing to teach, the Doctrine of Christ. The two sons are pretty open, but their father still seems like he is waiting to unleash some crazy question or anti stuff. We will see what next week brings. At any rate the Stake President thanked us afterwards and seemed really pleased with how we had taught.

After that it was about 6ish and we were pretty famished from a long fast. Earlier in the day the High Priest Group Leader had invited us over for dinner. Which we were greatful for because our original dinner had cancelled. We got to his house and they had quite the party going, grandkids running all over the place. Apparently every Sunday they have all the family in the area over for dinner, and they prepared a bounteous feast of steak and barbq chicken. It was delectable. Point of the story being that after dinner Bro. Garrett was so gracious to us for coming over. It's next to impossible to leave that house without feeling good about yourself, they truly love the missionaries.

Well, that is enough for now; I hope everyone has a great week. I love yall and look forward to hearing from you.

Love,

Elder Richards