Warming up a bit - 48 degrees today!!

But more snow coming!

10 March 2014

It's finally warming up a lit bit up here in New York.  It's so nice!  It got up to 48 today!!!  I can't wait for the muggy super humid summers to come back! New York gets you to appreciate those lol.  Anyways this past week has been interesting.  Last Wednesday I was on exchanges with Elder Hirschi and I got to experience what a day of biking is like.  It was pretty cold and it got switching from snowstorm to sunny so it was kind of a typical New York bi-polar day.  But yea it was pretty scary.  I'm just glad that I didn't get hit driving in the city as we can't use the sidewalks as they were covered in snow.  Ice can be pretty scary at time especially when you're driving along and a car doesn't want to stop because it's so icy on the ground.

I got to finally meet this really cool less active guy that they're meeting with who loves football (the real kind) and we talked about all the premier league teams and he was really really into it.  I was impressed to find someone like that in New York where baseball and American football are what everyone talks about.  We connected pretty well and he's coming out to church! 

We are continuing to make our way through the directory as this ward’s directory is 22 pages long so we have a lot of people to get info on.  We did a lot of people that lived in the city and it actually was pretty enjoyable as most people in the city were way nice and didn't mind talking with us.  Some parts though are still pretty rough and you wouldn't want to be found carrying your Ipad around especially in the evening.  It's surprising how long some of these members have been without any kind of contact.  Some people had moved from the address 5 years or so ago and were still on the directory so it's pretty inaccurate.  The city has a major issue with people moving around in it as well so it's pretty difficult to keep tabs on a lot of people especially the inactive ones.  We also went through the area book too and found a few more people to teach so we slowly but surely getting our teaching pool bigger.  

Felicia is going well!  We went with her home teacher and did some more of the new member lessons with her again.  She also wants to go out to the sites at some point so we will hopefully be doing that sometime soon.  We also found this really cool less active guy called Bob.  He plays the base at his mother’s church on Sundays which is why he can't come out but he still considers himself Mormon so we are going to be seeing him Tuesday and fix up his computer.   Also today we went and saw our recent convert (Jacob Norris)'s mom in the hospital.  She had a pretty nasty seizure.  She's having some kind of brain surgery tomorrow with coils and stuff.  I don't know too much about the brain but those kinds of surgery are usually pretty intense.  

We also had stake conference this weekend.  It went really well.  It was based on hastening the work of Salvation and it was really good in showing how we all as members should share the gospel with our friends.  The one thing that stuck out to me is that we should always be constantly praying for missionary opportunities and realize that the worst thing that someone can really do is say no and that you will be blessed even if they say no.   They also brought up that if all the members of the stake that they had were active they could split their stake so we also should strive to reach out to those members through home/visiting teaching as it really does make a big difference.  We had a few recent converts give talks and their conversion stories were pretty neat!  The Lord if preparing his people and the field is truly white and ready to harvest!  This one guy had contact with members 23 years ago and that lead him down the path of his conversion so you never know what kind of role impact will have with people even just from talking with them about the church a little bit!  Missionary work really is changing and transforming and the Lord is really hastening his work with these new tools of reaching out to people!

We're supposed to get a pretty big snow storm that's bringing 10-14 inches on Wednesday so it will be fun!  At least it will hopefully melt off quicker now though.  

 Elder William James Jones

Rochester, New York