11/11/13

Dear Family,

So this week has been pretty good. I think last week I talked about Melinda coming to church. On monday we met with her and also on Friday. She is a lot more open than she was a month ago, which is good. I am excited for that. We also had the best Empinadas ever! Sister Hobbs is kinda famous for them, and I wish you could all have some!

Friday was really good too. We met with the Tomeks and Shaunte, she is moving to DHS which is sad but we let the Zone leaders know about that so they can hopefully teach her. Our lesson with Melinda went really well. It was the Plan of Salvation, and she really liked it. When we taught the Restoration, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to her, but she said that this made sense. We went out walking in Joshua Tree, hoping to stop by and see Gina, who is interested, but her family is not so its hard to meet with her. She wasnt home when we got there, so we walked down the street to her neighbors who were outside, they weren't interested, so we walked around the block and knocked on a door up the street from her, no answer but then she called out to us, they were outside. Cree, who recently moved there but has been investigating for a while, just not ready to quit smoking. Hopefully we can keep teaching her and her family. After we saw her, we walked back to our car, and Gina came home, so we were able to talk to her! Her family wasnt there so we were able to talk for a bit, we would have probably taught a lesson, but we had an appointment to get to:( so that was awesome and perfect timing! We went to our apointment with a less active family. We had dinner with the Trammells and Betty and then we watched the Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration with them. Such a good movie. 

Saturday was Betty's Baptism. It was beautiful. She asked me to play the piano, we had asked someone to do that already so I just played the closing song, but I made the mistake of telling her I could play :D Anyways she invited a bunch of her friends and had 6 non members there. They all really enjoyed it, and one of them wants to come to one of our teaching appointments with Betty, so theres potential there.  On Saturday after the baptism we met with Lisa, who is a referral we got from someone my 2nd week here. We have set several appointments with her, but things have come up each time and we were wondering if she was even still interested. We almost dropped her, but we decided to drop by and see if we could set up an appointment or something. She's rarely there when we stop by, but she happened to be there and available so we talked to her for a while and she is interested. We set up an appointment for wednesday.

A lot of our appointments fell out this week,but we were able to find quite a few people. One of our less actives that we invited to come back to church last week was at church this week and has committed to be there each week. His son has been going to both family wards each week and is a great kid, and is doing some great missionary work, he had a friend at our appointment last night.

Things are going well here, we have a Mission Conference on Saturday, which should be really exciting. President Van Cott seems really excited for that.  Running out of time, but I might be coming back later today..

I love ya all

Sister Kellee Gardner