4 weeks and 3 days to go!

April 16^th 2012

You know mom it’s kind of funny that you should mention the Ghana thing. There is a guy in my ward, Brother Cobbinah who taught our Sunday school class one week and he is from Ghana. He was there when all of that happened. He is in a book that the church used to make that talks about it. He was the second person in Ghana that got a book of Mormon for the group. He said on the first day the church came there 82 people got baptized. They had full on branches and stuff before the church even got there. So that is pretty cool. It was there family that we had Easter Dinner with. They are a super cool family, maybe I’ll introduce you to them when you come here. They always make me sing my Phantom of the Opera. So about the dinner thing. It is against the rules unless i get permission for it which probably won't happen. When the Reidheads came i just didn't ask but i am trying to be obedient till the end so i don't think it would work out. And i don't think they would let you take Elder Stradling and Elder Jones out, but you will get to meet Elder Jones. So that is a bummer but we are blessed for our obedience. Elder Heaton does just about anything anyone could think of. He played Football in high school as a running back and he did other sports. But he is also a fitness and health fanatic. He is from Idaho Falls, Idaho. So yeah thats that. This week was great! A lot of things have changed in the mission over this past week which i am totally stoked about because now i can work a ton harder! Also Elder Heaton and I made some new awesome friends. Last Monday night we had dinner with the Pinnegar family. Now there are like fifty billion Pinnegar families in our ward. The parents who are kind of old. Then they have three married sons who all live in the ward and they all live on the same street... So it’s pretty confusing. We had dinner with Jason and Anita which is what i will now refer to them as from here on out. So they had signed up on our calendar and in talking to them we realized that they were actually pretty cool. So that was cool. Towards the end of dinner they said they would take us for dinner that Wednesday because we didn't have a dinner so that was real cool. On Tuesday we worked our butts off. We were told sometime in the morning that someone from the MTC was visiting and was giving a training to President Lewis and his assistants and one of them wanted to come out with Elder Heaton and i to teach people and then to come home with us and plan at night so we cleaned our apartment during lunch. Well they said that President Lewis was the one that would come with us so we met a couple of people that day and set up some appointments for that evening and they were really good. The first was Tina who had taken the lessons from the missionaries before but she couldn't quit smoking so she stopped taking the lessons. We had a good lesson with her but she canceled our return visit later in the week and said she wasn't ready yet. Then we taught Larry who was a guy we had knocked into. When we had first met him he was super great and asked a lot of good questions and was excited for us to come back but when we came back he didn't want to meet but he let us in any ways and the first thing he said was that he would say no but he wanted to know why we thought he should join our church. Well we went in and started talking and found out he didn't believe in God so we talked about that and he started asking some more questions again. He asked why we do what we do and what incentive there is for us and we told him why we were there and what we believe and he was amazed. The lesson was good but when we offered to come back again he said no and that he didn't want us knocking on his door anymore but we persisted and finally got him to let us come back just to say hi. Well when we went back later in the week he warmed right back up to us and invited us in and we had a great conversation on repentance and forgiveness of sin. At the end of that lesson he told us we could come by anytime so things sure changed. I think the spirit worked on him. We had our District Meeting on Wednesday which was good. Elder Heaton prepared a cool training so it was fun. When we went to dinner Wednesday night Jason and Anita said that they were going to cover for his parents who were supposed to feed us on Saturday but couldn't so they were asking what we wanted to eat and we asked what was an option and they said well our breeding rabbit outside is infertile so we are going to eat him soon so you want to have that. Well Elder Heaton has killed and eaten a lot of Rabbits so he said he would love to and i have never had rabbit so i said of course as well. Well they had never butchered a rabbit so Elder Heaton offered to teach them how so we went back on Friday and had a hay day. I actually killed it... We stuck a bar behind its head and i grabbed it by the back legs and pulled it real hard and it broke its neck. Then Elder Heaton taught them how to do everything else. So that was fun. Don't worry, i got a lot of pictures. We had it for dinner on Saturday and it tasted amazing! It was like a really good moist turkey. So i like Rabbit and they said it’s the most lean meat. Well in being around Jason and Anita so much this week we realized that they are super cool people and they are now our friends! We love them. But Jason is leaving on the 26th or 28th i can't remember. He is in the military and he has a 6 month training in i think Georgia so that’s a bummer but we still have some time left with him. So they are now some of our best friends. On Thursday the MTC guys gave a training for all the District and Zone Leaders. It was awesome. They were freaking hilarious and super bold with us. They said our mission is having a lot of pointless meetings which is true. They said they noticed that we even had some meetings to plan for other meetings that we weren't even supposed to be having. So they cut out a lot of our meetings. They said our leaders were doing way too much administering rather than ministering. They told us what our new role as Zone Leaders is. Basically they said just be the best missionaries in the mission. They said our first focus is to baptize in our area. Then to bring other missionaries into our area and show them how to baptize. We don't do anymore trainings at District Meeting. We actually don't even meet as a zone anymore except to play sports on pday. They want us to rotate each week going to the districts district meeting. So it’s pretty cool. They took away a lot of Managing responsibilities and are just having us lead by example. They also told us to stop focusing on baptismal invites which is funny cuz i just talked about it last week. They just want us to baptize people. They want our mission to double our baptisms and i am going to do everything i can to do it in my area till i go home. I asked President Lewis if i could stay and he said he wanted me to but i couldn't. So I’ll be coming home the same time. So yeah that was basically our week. We are super excited to work hard and baptize more people. So yeah. I love how all of the previous email talked about Porter. He sounds like a stud but i would like to hear about other people. I now i am coming home soon but i like knowing what’s going on. So yeah. I love you! Bye!

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Love, Elder Tyler Pete Arnett