Settling into Mission Life

June 15, 2015

Dear Family:

This week has been pretty good. I am starting to feel like a real missionary more consistently which is fun. The key is just being bold with people I guess. I really focused on that this week and I felt really good about my efforts this week.

We had a pretty average week teaching wise, but things are slowly starting to pick up in the area. I have realized that last transfer when we found basically no investigators was an anomaly, we are finding pretty consistently each week. Now our issue has been getting people to progress, part of which requires us to meet with them which is difficult when no one remembers you are coming and the fact that we are spending less time in Richmond nowadays. But things will work out for us if we put the effort into the right things. We have a lot of maybe people who are just one or two steps away from something significant- investigating, progressing, baptismal date, etc- but not many who are actually there yet. That is what we spent most of the week doing, trying to get those maybe people to the next step. We had mixed results.

We did find two new investigators who are super cool. They are David and Mischa. We had an awesome lesson with them! Elder Schaeffer and I are really becoming good teachers together and they were really receptive. They are super prepared and the Spirit was strong as we taught them. David is blind, and he is really a cool guy. I am excited to teach them again in the future. This was especially nice because earlier this week we had a very strange experience. We met a referral at a Burger King at the mall on Tuesday. He was a nice guy, but he was really into kind of an anti church. He prayed and in that he asked that God would give us a "supernatural witness" that the Book of Mormon is not true. We shook it off but it was nice to see that although there are many people who have hardened there hearts, there are those here that are prepared for the message we share.

This week we have made it a big point to work with members in the ward, especially sharing with them the ward mission plan. we ask them to prepare a list of 100 people they know and to prayerfully select a few and we will follow up with them and a couple weeks later. 100 people seems like a lot of people, but this is a plan put forth by Preach My Gospel and therefore it is inspired. Among those 100 people there will be at least 1 person who is ready to hear the gospel. So everyone should do that. I am excited to see how this effort will work out, I am expecting many miracles and many great things to happen through these members.

On Sunday I got to go to my first "Why I Believe" fireside. It was awesome! The highlight was that Spencer Hadley, former BYU player and current Raiders player, came and spoke. He gave an awesome talk! He is an awesome guy and I really admire him. He served in Roseville too which is pretty cool. This week is my first zone conference so I am excited to go to that! President Meredith is going home in July so that will be weird. He is awesome. But the future is exciting.

Love,

Elder Hyde