First Week in DC

Dear Mom,

 

We are staying in a city named Laurel just north of DC. The metro went well. Since it is the summer, alot of people in the city are gone so they just wanted us to try and talk with people on the metro and if the chance arrives to just talk with them about the gospel. President Cook is a great guy! He kind of reminds me of Papa Whittle in a little way just by the way that he looks and acts. 

My new companion and trainer is Elder Archibald. He is from Pleasant Grove and he reminds me of Brady so it has been really easy to get along with him. He is sending you pictures of the week because I forgot my camera today and so he sent them from his iPad. That is good that Interns were able to get to our house safely and that they are doing well. Most of the nights here we have eaten with members and so I have been able to get to know some of them. There is this family in the ward named the Siads, they speak french and fed us Sunday. They have a little kid that just was wanting to play with us so we threw a ball around with him for a short time.

The area here is really good, we still have a lot of work to do, but we slowly take a chunk at a time so that we can get it done. Tracting was quite the experience for the first time. The first time that I had to knock on a door and talk all by my self was very tauntilizing, but now it is really easy to tell them who we are and why we are at their door. 

The first night in my area I went on splits with Brother Jensen and we went and visited a member who is not able to get to church because she has a hard time getting around. But it was cool that the first night I was able to go and teach someone. There is this member in the ward named James, he is such a cool guy, and we are 95% sure that he is one of the 3 Nephites. He says that he served a mission in 82-84 but he does not look like he is that old so there was only one conclusion...he is one of the three. He has not told us whether or not he is one, but he does not deny it when we say he is one. It is nice that we can joke around with the members here.

I got to see Elder Fisher and Elder Paul, they were at the transfer meeting. It was a blessing being able to see them because it just calmed my heart to see them. I will send a picture next week hopefully if I can find a place to send pictures. 

There are two other elders living in our apartment as well, one of them is a trainer and he is having a hard time training his companion because he doesn't really try to keep conversations going and he just wants to talk about himself. Luckily we are there with them in the apartment so we can talk with him when he is having a hard time. We are hoping this week to find some new investigators so that we can start to fill up our schedules with appointments, which means we will be tracting a lot this week. 

There is a lot of good work going on here in Laurel, and we are here to try and help it go along. Our area is just half of the ward, the east side of Laurel. 

 

This week has been full of ups and downs, it is really hard watching people say that they don't want to hear our message because I know that it would make them so much happier! But mostly in the field right now we are going from meeting to meeting with some appointments at the night time. We go out tracting when we don't have anything else to do, and that is quite the thing because you knock on every door but alot of them either are not home or just don't want to answer the door because its the missionaries. Most of the gospel messages that we have shared have really been with members of the ward that feed us dinner, so free food is always nice!

Tracting is really fun at the same time though because Elder Archibald and I just talk and joke around as we are walking to and from the car after we finish areas. We play a lot of would you rather games to try to keep our minds positive as the doors are slammed in our faces! Our first night tracting we had no luck until we were walking back to the car. A catholic guy stopped in his car and was telling us how great we were because we were out sharing about Christ. He asked what it was about us that was different, so we shared a pamphlet about the Plan of Salvation with him, hopefully he looks through it and calls us with questions.

Love Elder Bentley.