Ramona: What's up?

Dear Mom,

That is ELDER to you! ;) just kidding haha so I do have to say that I email in public so a smaller writing on the whole "show me a church" thing would have been nice. haha! welp, It's true so it is alright with me.  That is so
crazy to hear about all the people that are leaving soon! I got a letter from Lindsi Burr saying she is leaving in a week or so.  It makes me so happy to see them make the decision to serve the Lord.

Training is going good.  He is pretty quiet and self admittedly "prefers to be seen not heard" so we are working on getting him to talk. We have had some really fun experiences though! Last week we went out to Sushi! It made
me so happy! I felt at home, but it wasn't quite the same without Ryan or Shaina.

Sushi with some Elders

Right now is Tarantula season so we have been seeing them around quite a bit.  If you are looking for them you can usually see 1 a day.  We found one in the road while we were going up to visit a referral so we thought we

would get some pictures real quick.  As you can see I didn't get too cuddly with it.  I guess I am afraid of spiders that are bigger than my hand no matter how "docile" they are. haha

Yesterday we had an amazing lesson with a less-active member named Angela. She has been struggling with getting the motivation to get back to church and was talking with us about how she wanted to see something like what we read in the old testament.  "If I saw something like Moses parting the Red Sea, then how easy would it be to know the church is true?"  She wanted to see a miracle without exercising her faith.  We then explained to her of how faith is to preceed the miracle.  Something clicked for her.  She had been having the same conversation with her mother the previous day where she said the same thing we had.  Pretty ironic that in order to increase her faith God had used the miracle of us following the Spirit to repeat a lesson to her she had learned the previous day. haha She explained it as being a "God wink". One of those moments when Heavenly Father is telling you that he is there listening to you.

Tonight we have an appointment with a family to start the missionary lessons.  It is always daunting to have a lesson like this one coming up. We as missionaries beg for these situations.  They have a very close relationship with a member in the ward, they have accepted the missionaries into their home (after close to a year of invitations), and now all we need to do is give a good enough impression to have them want to meet with us again.  This opportunity is coming through nearly a year of work and it all adds up to tonight.  I know that we will be guided to know what to say and how to present the Gospel in such a way that they will desire to come
closer to Christ.  All we need to do is allow the Spirit to direct us.

I love you all very much!

Elder Ethan John Rowbury