Jones, Talmage T

Our missionary manual, called Preach My Gospel, is what we refer to as we teach and serve as missionaries. It contains counsel and wisdom from leaders in our church on how we can best serve like the Savior, Jesus Christ. On Thursday, we received word that there is a new edition being released! This is so exciting, and I've already been reading some of it on Gospel Library. Also, our area records app, previously called Area Book, was renamed "Preach My Gospel" and shows Jesus being baptized! Our Church is putting more focus on Christ as we serve missions, and I support it fully. I love these changes! As for friends, we brought a member when we visited Adrian and Raydel. The five of us talked for a while and laughed with one another for twenty minutes. It's good to be real friends with those we teach. Once we had been getting to know each other better for this long, Raydel asked if we were going to teach something! He was alert to our purpose, which we loved! We told hi...

I had a fantastic Father's Day! Our branch made each father, or man for that matter, feel so loved. I got to talk to my Dad and tell him why I love and appreciate him, which was so uplifting! Heavenly Father is also a father, so I gave thanks to Him too.  We met with Adrian, Raydel, and Russell twice this week! We're going to do this moving forward, which is exciting! English class and regular lessons are the purpose for the biweekly visits. They really enjoyed learning some English. We are hoping to get a member to our lessons too. On Thursdays, including this past one, we do service at the Seattle Washington temple grounds! There are three nonmember latinos who work there, and we get to interact with them while we work! We seek to talk more about their Book of Mormon copies and things like that. We are working on answering more of Imeldo's questions on Wednesday since he canceled this past week. We pray that Adrian, Russell, Raydel, and Imeldo will continue to progress as...

This week was one of miracles! Last week, I wrote about how we were deciding to stop visiting and teaching Raydel. Well, if you watch one of the videos in the weekly album, you'll see that things have turned around!!! We went to Rayel's apartment on Tuesday; if he wasn't home, we would have moved on and stopped meeting with him. It had been 8 weeks of no contact or teaching! However, HE AND HIS TWO ROOMMATES WERE HOME!! This was the most last-minute revival/turnaround ever! We entered their apartment and got caught up to speed on how they each were doing. We read Alma 40 about the spirit world and also a few articles of faith. Adrian and Raydel sat and listened, and we discussed some great things, such as family! Russell, a second roommate, was preparing some bomb tacos for us. The only bummer about this was that he wasn't listening to everything we were teaching, which is OK. We want him to read and learn with us though, too. Those tacos he made were really good! Rayde...

Bueno, ¡feliz lunes! Es duro creer que casi hemos terminado el primer semestre del año. ¡Guau! Anyways, hello everyone! What a week.  We got in contact with some young couples that are super awesome. We look forward to meeting with them. Their names are Steven, Jeimely, Ronald, and Daniela. As for Raydel, we haven't had anything with him for 2 months, so we unfortunately will have to stop teaching him if we don't have a lesson with him tomorrow. It's hard to move on, but we need our friends to value this gospel like nothing else.  Imeldo is still flaky on when we meet with him, so we're going to see if he commits to baptism in the next two visits or not. We had a talent show with our branch and an English ward--combined. Super fun! Three or four investigators came, which was great. One of them--Steven--did a talent!!! His was a fun little dance, which I got a video of. It's in the weekly photos. He is so funny. These last few days have been sporty. We had soccer Sat...