Happy Falll!

This is down at the tip of Maryland down at the Ocean. It is across
the entire mission which was so much fun to drive down there and see
the sea and stuff!

Making trifle for Elder Archibald's birthday

A little boy that just moved into our ward. He loves to play with our name tags
 

Elder Archibald's birthday stuff

This is a map of our area. The blue lines are areas we have tracted.

Dear family!

This week has been such an amazing week! First to start off, they finally gave us our iPads. It has been nice because there is the area book app on it and it is so much more convenient to do the work. We also found out this week that the mission is going to start to try to initiate Facebook back into the mission. Elder Hill and Elder Archibald didn't seem to happy about this, I think most of the missionaries just waste lots of time scrolling on it. 

Friday morning we got a call from the Visitor Center sisters asking if I could play the piano for a duet at the night of inspiration. That is October 11th so everyday I am allowed to take some time and practice for that! That was really cool, but at the same time super weird because they said they would look at the roster for my email to send me PDFs of the music. I then was like "wait I didn't sign up on any roster" then Elder Archibald said that Sister Cooke signed me up because she knows I play piano. 

Another cool thing that happened this week was I was able to go on exchanges with Elder Hill my District leader. We had an appointment with an African named William, it was our second lesson with him and Elder Hill looked at me in the middle of the Lesson and said "Right now" so I invited him to be baptized and he was more than excited to say yes! Right now he has a date set for October 10th. He just has to come to church every Sunday between now and then, and he can be baptized! He lives with his Brother and his Sister-in-Law. His brother is in the military and is at a Training. So we thought that his sister in law was his wife because he calls her wife. I guess in their culture if your brother marries someone, everyone refers to her as wife. He has a wife and kids in Liberia, he is working here and sending money back to them. It was a great experience to invite him to be baptized!

Sunday night we had something called "Why I Believe" it is something the VC puts on here to invite others to come hear testimonies about some of the more famous members. The speakers last night were John Smith and his wife Hannah. He worked at the White House as the lead lawyer to President Bush for homeland security matters; at a major law firm in DC. He is also a direct descendant of George Albert Smith. Hannah served two clerk ships at the Supreme Court for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A Alito Jr.  It was really cool because we have to invite less actives and investigators to it. Every missionary is supposed to invite somebody to it.

It was Elder Archibald's Birthday on Sunday also! We surprised him with balloons and presents. We then had Trifle, except for the fact that we did this all Saturday night because we had Why I Believe Sunday night. He said that it was one of his better birthdays which is really good!

When we got our iPads we had to go to a Specialized training where President Cooke and Sister Cooke have us talk with the APs about the struggles that some of them are having with their companions. Elder Paul and Elder Fisher were there and it was awesome being able to talk with them for a little before the meeting started. I am blessed that Elder Archibald and I get along well because some of the other trainees and their trainers are really struggling so that was a blessing.  I also saw Elder Fisher at the Why I Believe, he is such a great guy! The ZL Elder Parker told me that out of the Trainer pool that was set for the group of missionaries that came out was not the best, but that I got lucky with Elder Archibald. 

We do a lot of tracking. When we don't have anything to do we tract. We find a lot of people that way because they see the devotion. We have area book apps on our iPads, we also have gospel library where we have all the Mormon messages that we can share with the investigators. We also have the lds tools app. We are also allowed to email from our iPads as long as it is the P-day. Most missionaries like to just email Sunday night because they are out and about on Mondays and don't have wifi. The church has a lot of restrictions on the iPads, there is a chip in them where it restricts most of the apps. Basically just the things that are gospel friends are not restricted. 

I am glad to hear that everyone is doing great in Utah!

Love,
Elder Bentley