October 10, 2011

Dear Lovely Parents,

Well, today was a transfer day. I was right for once! I'm staying here in Clearlake. Elder Gardner has moved on. It was sad to see him leave after being with him for 3 months. I'll hang out with him when I'm back in Utah for school. He went to Sebastopol to be an AP. My companion is Elder Brady Anderson. He is an OLD missionary! Not in the sense that he's been out for a long time, but in the sense that he's been alive a long time. He's 27. He has been out on his mission for about 14-15 months. So far, for the few hours I've been with him, he seems to be alright. I heard he can cook pretty good! :)

I'm surprised the Cards have made it this far! I'm excited. I wanna go to a game.....Go BYU! Who did they play? Neither of you told me. Who did OSU play? Who did the Colts play? What about the other NFL scores? Any big upsets in the NCAA?

Anyway, Elder Anderson is from Denton, Texas (wierd, huh?) but he doesn't have the accent, unfortunately. This was a huge transfer. Every companionship in the zone changed except 1 so we now have 4 new missionaries. Elder Blake is training, which is cool.

Now to answer questions about drugs and such. I'm not sure how this area turned out like that. It's just a VERY poor town. Countless people don't have jobs and just sit around all day and do drugs and they are paid by SSI. My guess is that they're all just bored and don't work so they drink and smoke weed and do meth. There are many houses here that are scorched and burned because meth labs have exploded. It'd be easy to think that I'm joking, but I'm not. Gotta love Clearlake.

The zone as a whole is on a downhill right now. My first transfer here, we baptized just about every week as a zone, and about 3/5 companionships were teaching 20 lessons or more per week. Last transfer we baptized almost weekly, but it was only our Ward. Gardner and I baptized 3 and the other companionship baptized 2. Also, last transfer only 1/5 companionships were teaching 20+ lessons per week (and that 1 was Elder Gardner and me). This last week was the first one that Gardner and I didn't teach 20 lessons - we taught 19. As a zone we have 3 investigators with baptismal dates. When I first got here we had 8. So now we are going to focus on finding. It starts with the basics. If we find investigators we will teach more lessons, and then we will have more people with baptismal dates, and then we will have more baptisms. We've been doing a ton of tracting and we've picked up a few solid people. We should be getting a few more with a date this week.

Well, it's time to embark on another 6 weeks. We'll see what happens. This place is interesting for sure. In 2 days I will be at my 9 month mark. Crazy, huh? I love you guys! Enjoy your week.

Love,
Elder Brennan