In general, people really do want to be better.

Hey!

It sounds like it's been a pretty great week for you guys, and it's been a pretty great week for me too, so you can stop worrying now :).

I'm glad you've all had fun with cousins--It's pretty crazy how sometimes when you've lived somewhere forever, you forget that there are actually some pretty cool things to do there. I'm pretty dang jealous actually. Especially of the whole Salt & Straw thing. I've actually been missing Portland a little bit more than usual lately--there's this family in the ward who are from Portland, and we were like reminiscing about Voodoo doughnuts and Mothers' Bistro, it was basically pretty great. Kinda bizarre situation--both of them are white, but they served Spanish-speaking missions in California, and I guess just decided that they wanted to always go to Spanish wards. They're in their like 30s, and they said they've been to English wards for a total of like 1 year.

The area that I'm serving in covers most of the Aurora South Stake, and the Arapahoe Stake. So still not in Denver city limits most of the time, although that is what our ward covers. Mostly I'm in the City of Aurora (fun fact, the walmart that we usually go shopping at is in the same shopping center as the Movie Theater where that one shooting took place! yay!)

In terms of physical size, yeah, it's about the same size. The other ward covers 4 stakes, and so does the this ward. In terms of active membership, the this ward is quite a bit smaller. But it's still great. There are a lot of really great members, and lots of work to do.

For service, there's a couple of projects--There's a huge food bank called the Food Bank of the Rockies, it's kind of like the Oregon Food Bank, and then we also sometimes go to a thrift store to help out. We've also been doing quite a bit of service for members, as well, which is always cool.

This week was pretty normal. I know that's not what you want to hear, but sometimes it does really just seem like things are mostly the same. We went to the Food Bank for the first time on Tuesday (because it was the first time any of us have had the miles to go), and that was pretty fun. 

One pretty awesome thing: Last week, this lady came to church for the first time in a while. Her husband's a member, but she isn't, and he's pretty less active. We'd been trying to see her for awhile, but hadn't been able to find her at home. So then this week, we stopped by and taught a like 15-minute lesson with her and her husband, and he said he really knew he needed to do better. We set up an appointment, and we were pretty excited about things, but then they completely bailed on us! Lame! So at that point we were kind of thinking about how flaky people are and how annoying that is. BUT THEN two days later both of them totally showed up at church! I think that'd been the first time that he had been to church in quite a while. So moral of the story: Sometimes, you really have to give people the benefit of the doubt. Also, this is something I've been trying to get into my head for a while: In general, people really do want to be better. There are very few people who actually want to be bad people :).

Another kinda cool thing, we went on exchanges on Saturday, which was pretty cool. I stayed in the area (kinda stressful having to like "take over" the area for the day after being there for only like 3 weeks, but it was great), and it was just generally pretty cool.

Some pretty cool things coming up: This week we have zone conference, our first one with President Mendenhall, and then sometime in September, we're going to have mission tour, which as I understand it is where basically a seventy comes and inspects the mission. Elder Lawrence of the Second Quorum of the Seventy will be coming, pretty cool.

Also something I realized this week: I depend a ton on my watch. It ran out of batteries on Friday, and it was kind of really awful trying to survive without it. Just a kind of funny experience.

I love all of you!

Peter