February 10, 2010

Hola familia y amigos,
I hope this letter finds everyone alive and well.
First I have some remarks to make:
1 - ERIC, CONGRATULATIONS! Dude, NC! That's so cool. I'm really excited to hear how things go. I'll write you a letter and talk more, but I had to make sure you got this soon cause I'm stoked for you man.
2 - JED, SWEET! Louisiana, that's so awesome! Doing this work in the field is really something unique and awesome. You'll love it. I know I do. This is such an exciting time.
3 - Devon, Taylor, Kelvin - Happy Birthday! On the 1st, 1st, and 11th respectively. You're all getting too old. Also, I don't know Devon's departure date, but I believe Kelvin's is the 16th..? Either way, good luck to both of you in Cambodia and Japan, that's way exciting! I wasn't sure if Taylor has gotten his call yet, but if you have I wanna know where and when!
4 - Family, glad to hear that Kailee is growing on you. Glad to finally find out about her too haha.
5 - Rylee, I'm so excited to hear about you getting your Patriarchal Blessing, that's a really big step of your life. A little advice that I've gotten and that I really enjoy is that when you get your blessing written, cross-reference it with scripture and study it daily. It's really cool to find the correlations between scripture and personal revelation. Treat it as sacred and don't share it with others outside of the most intimate and sacred moments.
Now that all of that is out of the way,
What to report? Well, things are really good out here. I'm still enjoying the work. I had a really cool experience a couple of nights ago that I'd like to relate:
My companion and I had predetermined to knock a certain street in Itasca, and so following our plan, we went there at the designated time. When we got there, we knew that wasn't where we were supposed to be. We chose instead to leave the area and head back toward Bloomingdale and Addison. As we drove, we started looking down streets and apartment complexes. We weren't quite sure where we should go.
At about this time I was feeling a little discouraged. It seemed as though we had been doing a lot of knocking doors and none of it seemed to be very fruitful. I voiced this to my companion and he said to just have faith. So we got out of the car and started knocking doors in a circle, but I still wasn't very satisfied and knew we needed to be somewhere else. So as we were knocking, I had the impression that we should go to a certain woman's house, whom we had taught on my first night in the area but hadn't taught since. So we finished our knocking and went to her house. She was home, and it almost felt like she was expecting us. We had a great lesson with her and some of her kids. Afterward, we got out to the car and my companion had the impression to go visit a less-active member. We visited him, he was there and we had a great lesson with him.
No great miracles happened, no one ran up to us in the street screaming that they wanted to be baptized, but I learned a lot. I learned that if we walk by faith, and act in accordance with our faith, we receive inspiration as to how we ought to act. We receive direction from our Heavenly Father, but only after we Show a willingness to act on our best knowledge. Then God does all the rest, so long as we submit.
Tonight, my first ever baptismal candidate will be having his baptismal interview for his baptism on saturday. Trinidad is very excited. He knows exactly what he wants. He is already telling us that he wants to go to the Salt Lake Temple in order to receive the other ordinances, because he loves the pictures and beauty of it. Maybe it's a little selfish, but I hope he gets them done here in Chicago, because then I'd be able to go with him in a year. Either way, this investigator is prepared. He's already had a calling for about a month to serve on the activities committee, because he asked for one. Also, he is singing with the ward and stake choirs and goes to help out with the mutual activities and all of that kind of stuff. He's awesome.
What else... we got 6 new investigators this week. We seem to have a trend going on: we teach a lot of prophets. Right now we are teaching Moises (Moses), Trinidad (the Trinity), Efrain (Ephraim), and I think one or two others, but I can't remember them all at the moment.
Anyway, things are great, life is great, and I'm about to send back all that important paperwork today.
I'm going to talk to dad though now, so I'll write again later!
Con Amor,
Elder Green.