A Long, but Pretty Good Week Overall.

Elder B** and I at the Food Bank Volunteer Appreciation Day.

Hey family and friends!! How is everybody doing this fine day? It’s good to hear from you yet again, and I always enjoy reading the emails I receive from you guys, so thanks again! Congrats to Haley with her mission call! That's awesome she will be an amazing missionary! How is Taylor doing?

Well, we had a long, but pretty good week overall! I will try my best to explain everything and have it all make sense. To start, I want to talk about how amazing the Lord really is! I have been pretty depressed as of late since my area doesn't seem to improve no matter how much we try to find and keep new investigators. In the end, they always seem to drop us or vice versa. However, yesterday I decided to fast personally for my area and to find new investigators this week. I decided it was a perfect opportunity, and it was the last thing I hadn't tried. So long story short, last night we found 5 new investigators—3 are Spanish and 2 are English, but all are super bomb people! It was amazing and it truly humbled me to know that God is always here for us as His children. We sometimes forget that, especially in missionary work. He made it clear to me that it’s all because of Him that we have our success as missionaries. So, it was a Sunday night buzzer beater that really made our week that much better. The names of the people we found are M**, M**, C** and H**.

M** was a pretty good Restoration lesson even though she would NOT leave the privacy of her "Vador door" to greet us or participate, but she liked what we had to say and told us to come back tomorrow, so hopefully she will be more chill and not be so up tight. We found M** and C** by going by some potentials and they were sitting outside. We had a great 20-minute conversation about Mexico and the people there. They were shocked about how much we both knew of the country and also how they were speaking with white boys in Spanish! Overall, both were good lessons and we are excited to pass by tomorrow night with members to help us teach them.

Ya gotta love breakfast at the Volunteer Appreciation Day!

Okay, so also this week we performed a ton of service! I think it was about 13 hours of service that we recorded. We helped the food bank, mowed and trimmed a recent convert’s yard, and helped a woman load up her house as she prepares to move out soon. To start off, we had a breakfast given to us on Tuesday by the Food Bank for a Volunteer Appreciation Day. It was great, but once we arrived we realized that we weren't just there for a breakfast, but a bridal shower as well! The head boss lady is getting married and decided to have her bridal shower that day with tons of people, gifts and cakes. Plus, all the older volunteers came so it was a warehouse packed with people. It was pretty awkward especially since we played bingo and then had to write what the newlyweds could do for "date nights," haha. Long story short, the bridal shower/volunteer breakfast was pretty fun to attend. For the rest of the service week we helped J**--a recent convert in the ward--with all her mowing trimming and weed whacking. It was very weird being behind a lawn mower again, and brought back waaaayy too many memories of the countless times I performed the tedious task back home, but all that experience definitely helped out because the yard looks great! As I was using the weed whacker in a really long patch of grass, I clipped a couple of oranges that had fallen from her orange tree and they splattered all over my face and clothes which woke me up for sure, haha.

Besides the Sunday night miracle, which i already explained, the work has been moving pretty slow. We dropped C** the other day because she hasn't really wanted to meet with us and have lessons, so we will pass by later in the future. To answer your question about if we were able to get anybody to church, the answer is no. We invited 30+ people and the majority of them were really good invitations, so I thought at least a couple of them would show up, but sadly it didn't happen.

Chillin' with Elder B**. It's been a long week.

That doesn't mean I’ll stop there, we just need to keep trying this week and I know people will eventually start coming. Elder B** and I are doing well together as a companionship; we are both trying our best to help whoever we have to teach to progress and feel something that will potentially change their lives.

The mission is very tough! I will always agree to that, but it is also an amazing learning experience that you can’t learn anywhere else. But I love it just like I love you all! I hope all goes well this week and I can’t wait to hear back from you.

Con mucho amor!

Elder Woffinden