911, What's Your Emergency?

Letter dated Sept. 16, 2013

Como estan?! Bien? Que beuno!

The thought just came to me, I hope my family is prepared for me singing Church hymns constantly for at least the first two weeks after my mission. That will be mostly because of habit. But, hey, there are some great hymns!

My first full week with my new companion has gone by and it's been going spledidly! He loves to clean our apartment a ton and I love to sit and watch him do it. I don't know about him, but I think we are a great team! No, I do my cleaning part too but he does seem so far to be much deeper with regaurds to the cleanliness of things. Voy aprendiendo! ;)

Elder Chilcote and I are doing better at contacting more people and visiting less active members. It is challenging at tiems to try and figure out how to help specific people with there gospel related problems and questions. Especially when yo uare used to only dealing with one specific kind. For example, a less active man in his twenties is dealing with the question of whether God really exists or not. It's different becuase 99% of the time we work with people who already have a faith in Jesus Christ. But it's nice to have to apportunity to pray and study for different people everyday. My companion is great and trying to focus in on the needs of specific people. He teaches me a lot!

Now on the side of intersting experiences we have, last night we were able to have one that involved a small kitten, hispanics and a police officer. Basically we were walking thorugh an apartment complex when we saw a family trying to get a small kitten out of some bushes. Turned out that the kitten was actually inside a hollowed out railroad tie that was used as a wall. It was dark and the kitten wouldn't come out and we didn't know what we could do. So the hispanic family decides to do the best thing and calls 911. What's even better is that because the parents don't speak english and the kids I guess don't like tlaking on the phone, they handed it to me. So I had to explain that our 'emergency' was a kitten who would come out of his hidey-hole. In the end a friendly officer was sent over and basically said that we should just wait for it to crawl out itself. Hah, I felt bad for making him coem over but he was nice about it.

One more thing we were able to do this past weekend was attend the funeral service of the Second Counselor in our stake Presidency here is the Roswell Stake. I had never met him but it was a beautiful service. He passed from cancer that he had been fighting for a year. He was high up in the ranks of UPS so there were many of his co workers as well as family and friedns at the church for the funeral. From everything that was said about him it is easy to have no doubt where he is right now. And for those of you who might still have a little doubt about where he woudl be, well, I'll tell you that he is in the Spirit World continuing the work of salvation with our kindred dead. Never heard of that before? Want to know more?? Mormon.org is a great place to start ;)

I love you all and pray that you are fiding an increased desire to come closer to Christ is your own lives! Until next time,

Elder Vance