A good week

Dear Mom, and everyone who reads, (that's a lot of people)

We had a pretty good week. The sick bug has passed over me and Elder T so far, and we're still trying to avoid catching it. There are still a lot of members that are ill and incapacitated, and there are still a few that are in the hospital still. Brother P is in an induced coma, and we haven't been able to visit J and M C for the last 3 weeks since they got moved out of our area.

Our investigators could be doing better. We only have 4 investigators that we regularly see. 2 are R and A, who are waiting for R's divorce papers to go through from his previous marriage. Once the papers go through, they can get married and baptized. The other 2 are J and C, and their only obstacle to baptism now, is health. They don't know if they'll be well enough to be baptized.

We haven't really done much this last week except for trying to find former investigators, to see if they've been prepared, and walking around on the streets trying to find investigators. We haven't had any luck with the finding formers, since all of them are quite content with their current religion. And something Elder T mentioned has stuck with me. He pointed out that every person that has been taught by missionaries is changed in a noticeable way. If they're baptized, their lives get so much better. If they deny the message of the Restored Gospel, their lives become worse in two ways. One is in a spiritual way, in the which they just go downhill spiritually. The other is their lives become much harder temporally. As we've visited these formers, I've noticed the change in their lives. They're not as happy. None of them truly appear content with their religion. And on top of that, we haven't seen ANY of the investigators that Elder B and Elder T found. We've tried to find them several times in the last week, but we haven't found any of them.

A cool story, though. We were walking down towards the southern edge of our area, trying to find a former investigator. We didn't find them, and we started walking towards an appointment. After a little ways, this guy pulls up to the curb and parks, and he's dressed in a white shirt and tie, so we think he's a member. After a moment, we realize that he's a Jehovah's Witness. He gets out of the car, pops the trunk, and hands us two bottles of water. After a moment, a group of people, dressed quite nicely, come walking up. The man we were with asks if they had any luck with the "sheep". The youngest of the group, a little 5 year-old boy, pipes up and says "No. Nobody was home today." And then he sat there and looked sad. The little boy then gestured to us, and asked the man we were with about where we had been working. The man smiled at us, and motioned in the direction that we had come. From the many impressions that I've received about JW's from previous experiences, they are people that are quite genial and kind. The bit that I wanted to get across with the JW boy, was that he's had some pretty good missionary experiences at 5 years old. Just a thought.

I hope you all have a great week! Talk to you next Tuesday!

-Love, Elder Crook