Before anything, God wants you to believe on His word

Heyyyy!

Again, it's a little bit late, but I think that's okay. It sounds like you've had a pretty dang great week. I'm a little bit jealous of your trip, but it's fun here, too :). Thanks for the updates, too. That's some pretty exciting missionary and other things news.

I guess the first thing I'll do is to answer some questions! That might be fun!

-The transfer meeting, which we somewhat sacrilegiously call "Transfer Doctrine", is by zone. Each individual zone meets up and finds out what's going down.

-We have not been specifically told how we're meeting our new mission president. What President Toombs mentioned is that there'll be a sort of a "meet the mission" thing soon after he comes, where a couple zones at a time will come and meet President Mendenhall.

-My shoes are doing pretty okay. I haven't been like polishing them as much as I should (i.e. not at all), so they look a little worn, but they're holding up fine.

-And it's been getting dark a bit before nine lately--it's always dark when we get home at night.

-And yeah, people are interested in the world cup. Like everyone.

Well, this week was pretty great! We did some tracting, found a new investigator (Who we may have to turn over to the english elders, she's white but speaks spanish, and her husband speaks spanish, we're not really sure what to do with her right now. But she's cool!), and saw some pretty cool things happen. This is probably going to be pretty brief, because I have like not a ton to share, but here are the highlights, probably:

1. We taught the guy who's been coming to church a lot, twice this week. The first time, we taught, with a bit of apprehension, the Word of Wisdom. He actually accepted it really well. He says he still has a bit of desire to go out drinking and stuff, but he is going to try it. He believes Josephs Smith was a prophet, so he's going to give it a shot, which is just so awesome. The second time, we basically just read Alma 32 with him and his brother. Preach My Gospel recommends occasionally just having a time to read the Book of Mormon with investigators. I haven't ever really done that much, but it was really cool. Reading it in Spanish, both my companion and I noticed something we hadn't really noticed before, but which was awesome. In verse 22 it tells us that God "desireth, in the first place, that ye should believe, yea, even on his word." In spanish, it says that he "desea, ante de todo, que creais", which translates more directly to something like "Before anything, God wants you to believe on His word". That was pretty powerful. It kind of hit me that that really is what God wants for us--to believe, to have the faith to act on His word.

2. So we had an appointment with an investigator that I think I told you about last week--she's got a son who's a recent convert in the YSA branch. Anyways, she kind of cancelled on us, which made me kind of feel like maybe she didn't really want to meet with us, which was a little sad. But that idea turns out to be completely wrong! We were sitting in Sacrament Meeting (we were actually in the foyer, because that's where Bishop wants us apparently, to like make sure kids don't escape), and she totally came! She showed up with about 30 minutes left in Sacrament Meeting, said she really enjoyed it, and asked us whether we could come over this week! So I'm really excited about her, if you can't tell. She has a lot of desire to know the truth, I think.

3. So if you remember that, near christmas, we had a devotional and we got to see that again! He came and delivered the same devotional at our ward building, with translation, so we invited everyone we could to come and see it. Some people we've been working with totally came, and it was pretty cool. Also us missionaries in the ward sang a special musical number during the fireside, which was pretty rad.

I did have a pretty great birthday, although not probably celebrated in the usual manner--we did weekly planning, taught a new investigator, had some really good dinner, so that was great, and then came back and taught our top progressing investigator.

I definitely agree with what you said about coming to see people less as just people, but as children of God. I'm definitely getting to that point, although I'm sure I still have a long way to go before I see people the way God sees them. 

So that was basically my week! It was pretty great. I love you all, and I'm so happy you're doing well. 

Love,

Peter