First of all Happy Birthday to the most wonderful sister is the whole wide world! Officially a teenager. Those were the days, not a care in the world. Dad said you're getting as tall as Mom. That's crazy. You're not supposed to change until I get back. Anyways Happy Birthday and hope it was fun. So another week in the mission. We actually had a pretty good week. We made our new trimester goals for baptisms in the next four months. Our goal is to have nine, which is a pretty high goal for this area. Right now we only have four people on date, and two of those are maybies (they could be eternal investigators, they've been investigating for a while). So this past week we worked on helping our investigators understand that they need to be baptized by the proper authority and what promises we make during baptism. Pretty much everyone we teach is Christian and has already been baptized so it is hard to explain the importance of being baptized again. Yesterday we had a confirmation that I was able to help perform for a Sister Meise who got baptized the first week I got here. This week I have my first baptism. It is for a white mother and daughter named Thelma and Charnee Armstrong. They are golden investigators, the mother is divorced and her birthday is on Sunday so it is a perfect day for her to get baptized. The daughter is 18 and has a son and they live together in an appartment close to the church. Charnee asked me to baptized her so I'm pretty excited. Also quick note, I can't put pictures on this computer but I'm going to try and put them on a CD at one of the photo places and send it to you. The branch I'm in is pretty small. Since we're in town we have a good mix of blacks and whites, but a lot of the members are older and have been members for a long time. Our next door neighboors, the Jubbers, are part of the temple presidency so that's pretty cool. We only have one counselor in the branch presidency. I guess the work in this area has been hard for a while. The two Elders who live with us have more success in the township that they serve in. Anyways we have a teaching pool of about 20 progressing invesigators who we want to put on date, but it's really hard. There is one family, the Vulshank family, who reads The Book of Mormon like crazy, the dad Villum even got in a fight with a Jehova and gave him one of our pamphlets. They haven't been to church yet though and we haven't brought up baptism yet. They do smoke, but the other day he was having a hard time believing the Book of Mormon because Nephi killed Laban and the Lord says thou shalt not kill. He said he needed a sign to keep reading the it, so I gave him Alma 32 to read when we left and he said when we came back that that was the sign he needed. So hopefully we can get more people on date soon. Anyways Elder Albertson is awesome and is hilarious. I'm going to have pretty sweet abs when he leaves from laughing so much. There are certainly some characters that we teach and a lot of the members of our ward. The scripture from my study this week is from Alma 37, 35-37. We must always have our thoughts directed towards the Lord and He will direct all of our doings, and if we allow Him to lead us we will be lifted up at the last day. I love you all and hope everything continues to go well in all of your lives. I will continue to pray for all of you and may the Lord bless you in everything you do.
Love,
Elder Chandler Kendall
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