February 29, 2016

Dear Parents,

This week was slower but still good.  We didn't have a ton of appointments but we met with some of the Bishops in the other wards to discuss how to work with the YSA’s in their wards. We got some good input and are going to contact some of the inactive ones this next week.  Some of them are only children of record and haven't been baptized yet.  We also just had a call from Elder Nockai. He is serving in this zone and had a referral for us.  A YSA kid who said he wants to join the church!  He is dating a member but hopefully he is still sincere.  I is out of town right now. He is going to be gone for a couple of weeks which is always worrying but we hope that as we stay in contact over the phone that we can continue to encourage him in his progression.  Dstill hasn't been able to meet and we are losing hope that he is ready right now.

I can't wait to see the house. I wish I was there to help.  Even more I wish you were here to help with our place.  It is in terrible shape and pdays much more packed now that we are near other missionaries again.  Oh well, I'll probably get it clean by the time I leave.

My new favorite thing is watching guys in the ward try to flirt with the girls.  Some kid will walk in to sacrament meeting and spots one of the girls.  He'll dither for a moment and try to work up the courage and then go over and sit next to her.  So far so good.  Now he just has to open his mouth and say something smooth and cool... and then he starts talking about anime.  We have a weird ward.  Its a lot of girls from Utah with soccer scholarships and then a bunch of older guys who are looking for "a girl who will just love them for who they are".  The dynamic is pretty funny.

I made maple bacon cookies this week.  They were weird but good. Thanks.

Cool to hear about Mariah.  

Sounds like Nathan is going to beat me home.

Sorry, but I can't think of anything very interesting that happened this week.  Love you all,

Elder Stapley

February 22, 2016

Yankton District 

Yankton Font

Zone Temple Day

I didn't thank you last week so I will now: Thanks for the presents.  I use that pen all the time and even wrote in my journal just so I could use it more. The Star Wars shirt is also getting used.  I can't remember right now what other presents I got but they were all good.

 

We weren't able to see D this week but we met with another investigator.  His name is I.  He is trying to figure out if he is on the right path and decided to investigate the church.  He promised to read and pray and seemed really sincere.  The only problem is that he lives an hour away and there aren't a lot of YSA's near him.  He was planning to go to church yesterday in Atlantic, the closest building to him, but we haven't received word whether he did or not.

We were able to go to the temple on Friday.  One of the nice things of being back near Omaha.

We had a really busy week but in spite of that we didn't make a lot of progress.  I have rarely felt the opposition more clearly than in this area.  I hope that the difficulty means that we are on the right track.  A lot of the people who have joined the church here in the past went on to serve missions and serve actively in the church.  I think that the adversary really want this area to remain unproductive.

We have seen a number of miracles last week.  We are focused on asking for referrals and talking to every YSA (Young Single Adult) we see.  Some of the members we are working with couldn't come up with any names of people they could invite, even with us asking specific questions.  We promised that if the focused on sharing the gospel as they read and prayed that they would know who they should invite.  Yesterday we saw that invitation start to bear fruit.  One of the members had been approached at work with questions about the church a few days after we had invited her to find someone to share the gospel with.  Then during a meeting with another member at the student center we were interrupted by a former investigator we had never met who wanted to talk to us.  He didn't have a phone but he committed to come to an activity!

Love you,

Elder Stapley

February 16, 2015

Hey family,

I'm sorry I don't have much time today.  We have a pretty busy week, which is great but we didn't have a solid p-day when we could prepare for it.  We have Zone conference tomorrow and a temple trip on Friday!

We just saw D today.  He is black and French and awesome.  We set him for baptism next month and gave him a French Book of Mormon.  He speaks great English and seems genuinely interested in learning more.  We invited him to ultimate frisbee tonight and he is planning on coming.  He mentioned that he has a friend who used to come to our church who he might come with.  We are so excited for him to get involved with the ward.

Thanks for the gifts. The food was a really good idea.

We are working on getting a solid core of missionary minded members that we can start building up the ward with.  We figured that was the best way to overcome the mistrust of missionaries in the ward.

Our apartment is tiny and old.  I'm hoping we get a new place.  I'll send pics next week.  Sorry again but I'm out of time.

Love you,

Elder Stapley