6 months!!!

Wow, can you believe that I've been out for 6 months already? I guess it's not official until tomorrow, but still. That's nuts! I was thinking about it, and it honestly feels like it was just a few days ago that I was telling you all goodbye and walking into the MTC. Wow.

So, this last week has been pretty awesome. We had to drop Mark,(which is not part of the awesomeness) who was the guy that had all the questions about the Book of Mormon. We called him to see if he had done his assignment we gave him, and the first thing he said was, "Hey Elder Hammer, I'm just going to stick with the Jehovah's witnesses" Then we talked for about 20 minutes about random stuff that he still had questions about, but it didn't really accomplish much. One of his questions was "where in the Bible does it say we can't drink caffeine?" I told him that it doesn't and that caffeine isn't even against the Word of Wisdom. That seems to be a common misconception people out here have with our church. But yeah, we ended up dropping him, but invited him to still pray about the BoM, because he still hadn't done that.

We also have another investigator named Marc, who is the husband of a member in our ward. She just recently came back to church after inactivity of 30 years, so now we are teaching him about the gospel. He says he can't see himself getting baptized, even though he really wants to be sealed to her. He said there are some things he just won't be able to give up. But, we've been meeting with them weekly for a few weeks, and he is starting to progress, but at a very slow rate. He's been at church the last two weeks, but hasn't stayed for the 3rd hour. But he says that he enjoys the Gospel Doctrine class, and he has some really good insights that he shares with us. We are taking it pretty slow with him, because he still thinks that he is fine, plus he's really big, and intimidating, so we don't want to say anything that might scare him away yet. But, he's been at church so that's great.

Most of the awsomeness comes from this last week at church. In addition to having Marc there, we had our Cambodian investigator, Saroun there for the first time too! I'm not sure how much of it she understood, but at least she was there! We went to her house before church to have her follow us there in her car. We also have another investigator named Leandro, who lives right across the street from Saroun, so we called him and told him we had a ride for him. haha. So we made our Cambodian investigator, who doesn't know English very well give a ride to our Brazilian investigator. haha. It was pretty funny, but quite effective. So, we had 3 investigators at church this last week! AND, we had an inactive (due to sickness) cambodian lady there for the first time in over 2 years too! So basically, we had a 300% increase in Cambodian attendance. haha. It was awesome. I don't remember if I told you about Donna. She got super sick about 2 years ago, and went to California for some reason. She's been there recovering, and she found some sort of "miracle pill" or something, and now all of her symptoms and diseases or whatever she had are gone. I'm not so sure about it, but I guess it works. Anyway, her family owns a Cambodian store here in Lynn, and they have always just given us chips, drinks, food, etc. when we go in to say hi. But she has never been there, until last week. She invited us over to have dinner and a scripture study at her house. It was some pretty authentic Khmer food. rice, soup, tofu, pork liver, mudfish, and fish paste balls. haha. It was actually really good....for the first 5 minutes, then it cooled off, and wasn't so great anymore. But, I think she wanted us to make it a weekly thing so every wednesday now, we are going to her house. Sweet. Plus, after church, we had Donna and Om Sen (only active Cambodian member in our ward that feeds us every friday) help us teach Saroun because she was struggling to understand about prayer. It was a really great lesson. We are going over to Saroun's in about an hour to teach her the Plan of Salvation. Oh, and she did accept August 22nd to be baptized last time we met with her! I'm so excited! So basically, we are finding more and more opportunities to teach in Khmer, and hopefully we'll be able to continue doing so.

Well, that is about all I can think of that has happened this last week. Thanks to everyone who has written to me recently (mom and nate). I got your package Nate, and I must say that it is pretty awesome! I love the shirt. And I also got dad's letter about all the craziness happening in the College sports world. Sounds intense. Well, we're off to teach now, so, until next week... Goodbye. Hope you all have a great week. I love you all!!!

Love,
Elder Hammer