Doing Fantastic !

Hey Momma, its super cool to hear about Ryan and his band winning in a battle of the bands competition!  (Ryan’s college band was in a Gorilla Battle of the Bands in Salt Lake City and will perform again in May.)

Also with Elder Lott leaving that is a sad time, but hey I heard John Stanley got his mission call to Hungary. Crazy business... 

How is it going? Its not really cold here ‘cuz I wear long johns all the time, it is just rainy. Really, really raining.... a lot.... like, you have no idea how long it drizzles here.... it goes for 5 hours, takes a 15 minute break then the sky seems to forget that it was supposed to be raining so it starts back up super hard for like 2 minutes then goes back to drizzling.

I'm doing fantastic here and we have discovered the miracles of obedience, more on my part mostly with meals with people lasting only an hour, that has been really hard because, heck, I love to talk and listen and am a slow eater (when its not pasta) and we have had some amazing meat and potatoes, and Chinese takeout here is cheap and heavenly its like 8 bucks for the weight of my head in food.

Yesterday (Sunday) we were pretty much perfectly obedient and we saw many great rewards from it. We met someone who wanted to be baptized during our first 6 minutes of talking with him! It will be in February, a guy who works at a restaurant and is a Bouncer/ Security guard at a club. His name is Nickolas, we joked about stopping by to say hello.

We had 4 other lessons that day with people that we knocked on their doors tracting and one lady was from Venizia Italy who came to Virginia and she wanted to learn more and had already been given Il Libro Di Mormon (Italian copy of the book of Mormon) so I gave her a promise by reading aloud both copies side by side entirely cover to cover that she will be able to know English almost fluently.

We met some other kids playing soccer who are in 9th grade who were from Sicilia and Morocco who their parents had moved here for better education and stuff. There was also a man named Dion who we couldn't get in contact with for the past month but we prayed for a miracle and we were able to see many miracles, including teaching him about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he said that he partied on the weekends a lot and found that he was not as happy as he knew he could be. We told him that there is always help from God waiting for each and every one of us to seek it. He fully knows that we came at the right time and wanted to have us know that we were there for a reason, to help him.

Here is some street art we found. Super crazy things in the downtown.

We have been going out on Mission exchanges a lot with two young men, Hidden Canite and Shown Canite where I will go with Shown and we will tract and knock doors while Elder Hopkins and Hidden will go teach someone, then we will switch off and it is really cool to see the improvement that we all get from the experiences we get from sharing the gospel. Hidden is super excited to go on his mission March 25th to Columbia. There was one person we were knocking on his door and he opened it, smiled and said Goodbye then closed it quickly. we started laughing after that happened, it was super funny.

I am learning so much about the blessings of Serving others and have the attitude of "Go and Do" instead of "sit and stay" because that is the only way I know of that things will actually get done and people will be blessed, whether it be the go and do person or for the receiving end.

 A super interesting ride we saw

We were in the downtown area of Richmond to contact a referral and I think we were there for another reason we went there, to talk with a college student at VCU named Lauren walking home. She had given Sister Missionaries her contact info and said she wanted to talk more but never got the sisters contact info so she was extremely happy to have their info when we gave the referral to the mission office.

Love

Your son

Elder Day