I'm staying in Van Buren!

A few weeks ago I started joking with Sister Breaux about what would happen at transfer time. The assumption was that nothing would change because she's training me (it's a 12 week program) but I started giving her a hard time and saying that we were going to get another companion and that she'd have to train both of us at once. Well, a few days ago, we got a call from the president's assistants asking if we had room for another person in our apartment! Haha! Saturday night we found out that we're getting a third companion. Her name is Sister Husky. We're so excited that we both get to stay here, plus our zone leaders and the Spanish elders in our ward are staying too.

So this week I found out that the only thing better than seeing your less active members come to church is seeing them come to church twice in a row. We've been working with this older man, Brother Weeks, who is very very stubborn and wouldn't come to church. We finally got him to come last week and he was absolutely beaming. I think I wrote about him last time. When we went back to visit him during the week he totally denied it. We told him that and he said "eugh...I'm always beaming." But then he showed up again this Sunday!! He even participated a lot in Sunday School. We're SO excited. I know he still has a lot of faith in the gospel, he just doesn't want to act on it. But he's come such a long way since we met him.

We have also been meeting with another less active 22 year old, Michael, who left the church almost 7 years ago. We had been trying to get him to sing in sacrament with us because he has a great voice. He didn't really want to and kept avoiding it. But then we invited his friend Tom over who is also less active, and at the end of the lesson Michael got all up in Tom's face and said "TOM. You HAVE to come to church because I'm singing with the Sister missionaries. You HAVE to." I loved seeing what a great support they could be to each other even though they have both been inactive for a long time.

A couple weeks ago at Zone Conference, President Shumway recounted a story where a missionary went to his mission president and said "We prayed for a family to teach, and we got one! They're getting baptized!" and the mission president said "that's great...why didn't you pray for two families?" The message was that we shouldn't be afraid to pray for huge miracles. So we've been praying for lots of people to teach and we got 10 new investigators this week!

One of the coolest of those new investigators is the Rowden family. One of our ward members told us to visit this young couple because she thought they were prepared to hear the gospel. We went over to their duplex but they weren't home. So we decided to knock on the other side of the duplex and it turned out that the young husband's mom lived their with her two younger boys. We taught them on Friday and Saturday night. We gave them a Book of Mormon on Saturday and the Nancy, the mom, told us that she wanted her whole family to read it together. Her 15 year old son, Carneilus, groaned and said "Oh man, this is exactly what happened on that one episode of South Park!" It was so funny. But he wanted to come to church with us and kept showing us different shirts so we could pick out his outfit. Unfortunately, the mom has some really bad health problems and he takes care of her so they weren't able to come after all. But they want to come next week.

Today is Elder Perkes (our district leader) last preparation day so we're about to go play basketball with them at the church. It's so crazy that a transfer has gone by already. Next time I write I'll have another companion!