Sept 14, 2015

Love the pouring rain!

Dear Family,

Yes I have been able to find names to take to the temple, we still have another month before we are able to even go to the temple to do the baptisms. This area that we are in is a car area, but I do have my bike and it is all set up. We still ride our bikes though because we only have 850 miles a month to do the work that we need. And since we have to go to all these meetings around Maryland, we have to be careful with the miles that we do use. We also are saving miles so we can go down to the tip of Maryland to Look Out Point, so we have been saving alot of miles for that as well. 

This last week was supposed to start to cool down, most of the week was still pretty hot, it was high 80's and low 90's most of the week, but then on Saturday we just had a down pour of rain and it cooled down to the 70's. When it rains down here, it pours, we had planned to go out tracting and since it was raining we got to go out into the rain and tract for a little, the rain stopped pretty quickly and we realized we had already tracted those houses. We left that area and went to go check up on some of the potential investigators that we had. The lady Elsa is now an official Investigator and we have another appointment with her this week.

That same night we went and contacted a referral that we had received and he just wanted a bible. We ended up teaching him the restoration and gave him a Book of Mormon as well. He was searching for the truth and had been going to different churches trying to find the true one. He was more than willing to come to church the following day, but he ended up not coming. We have an appointment with him this Saturday so hopefully we can find out why he wasn't there.

I went on Exchanges with one of the zone leaders this week and we were out tracting an area where a bunch of Muslims lived. He was very great at starting little conversations with them and one of them invited us into his house. It ended up being that he was telling us about Islam and his religion, but his wife made us smoothies and we were more than willing to listen. Hopefully since we listened to him, he will want to listen to us. He said that he really respected Mormons and that he liked them as well. After about an hour in his house, he gave us both awkwardly long hugs and sent us on our way. 

We also contacted a less active member who we though was a member, but he ended up having a record because his mom was LDS and so when he was born he was given a record, but he never got baptized. He had so many questions when we met with him that we were able to answer. His dog had flees, and we were pretty sure that they had bed bugs so we had the whole bed bug experience stripping down after the lesson and had to take scalding hot showers. We talked with him for about an hour and it put us past our curfew, and Elder Archibald's blood sugar was getting super low so he was feeling dizzy and that made it so I had to drive. We are not supposed to drive until after 12 weeks in the mission, except for an emergency which this was.  

We had this thing called the Global Gala Saturday night. The ward threw this big dinner where they had dishes from all over the world and the gym was decorated with each continent's things. It was lots of fun because we got to mingle with the members and got to know some of them better. We also got a lot of food from it so that was always a bonus.

We get our iPads this week finally, it will be nice to have access to our own area book and to be able to use it as a teaching tool. We have to watch every Mormon Message and learn them so we can apply them into our teachings. Elder Archibald said that that was one of the hardest things to do just because there are so many of them that it is hard to remember which ones is what off the top of your head. 

This week overall has been a great one. We got fed most of the nights so that was nice to get to know the members really well. We ate Sunday dinner last night with the Atkinsons and that was a blast because they are a great couple just to sit down and talk with. We ended up being there for 2 hours last night and when we were done we did not have that much time to go out and proselyte so we did a call wall.

This last week I got a letter from Brian, Shanna, and the boys which was really great. Writing them was just so much fun and after I sent it the letter last night it reminded me how much fun hand writing letters was!

Love,

Elder Bentley