June 8, 2010 - Week 43

Subject: ITS MY BIRTHDAY!!!!

Hello Hello Everyone!

How is everybody doing? I am having a fantastic day today. I woke up and Elder Wagner cooked me pancakes that were awesome and then I went downstairs and opened up all my birthday presents. Thank you all so much for everything. Everything fits and everything is perfect and I love it all. You guys are right, I bet it is hard to buy stuff for a missionary, but you all did a fantastic job haha. It was all great. Ya it seems really weird to me that I am not home to celebrate my birthday with the family. For some reason it seems even more weird than Christmas or something else. Being 20 is cool I guess. I just feel like the same ol person. It’s weird though because I can remember when Nick and Lyndsie turned 20 and I thought that they were so old. That’s probably what Aaron and Cassi think of me now haha. Well the rest of today is going to be pretty good. We picked up some other missionaries in our district and they gave me a birthday present. It was some left over candy and an old dirty tie that they got from one of their investigators. Oh and they gave me a reused birthday card haha. They are awesome guys though, but I would have to say your presents were much better. I think today is just going to be a normal p-day. We are probably going to go to lunch and then I think bowling. Later tonight we are having dinner with one of my favorite families in the ward. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Well I guess a lot has gone on since I last emailed. I am now with Elder Wagner. He is an alright guy! Definitely different from serving with Buchanan, but he is a good missionary. He has been out for 21 months and Dayton will most likely be his last area. It is a good area to go out on. He is from downtown SLC, but his family moved to some place called Bennington, Idaho. He is a really sincere kid. I will have to send you guys a picture sometime. Sorry I don't have one of him yet. Well Buchanan left this area straight out dry. We really only have 2 investigators right now and really only one of them is progressing. I still feel like this area is prepared to receive the gospel. We have been doing a ton of street contacting, well as much as we can in our little town. It’s crazy because I know a lot of the people in the area. We will just be walking and I'll see somebody I have already met so we go talk to them. I have realized that I can talk to anyone now. It’s really not that hard at all. I like to just talk to them and get them to feel comfortable around me and then our conversations always turn into a gospel conversation somehow. It’s awesome. We are meeting with a couple good people this week that hopefully we can start teaching. As a district we are doing a thing called 10 x 10. This is where we go 10 hours of tracting a week and we talk to 10 people a day on the street. I don't know how that’s going to go here, because if we really do this I will have talked to probably the whole town in 2 weeks haha. I'm really excited for it though and I know we are going to get some new investigators.

Not much else is going on. We are teaching Laurel Bloomfield still. She has come to church 3 weeks in a row for all 3 hours and she really likes it. We just introduced them to another young couple in our ward and they hit it off great. Laurel said that she just keeps on expecting to find something completely crazy with the church, but she just can't find it. She is doing great and she is currently praying about setting a date for June 26th. I have a lot of faith in her. We have been meeting with a former investigator of ours. Bobby Jo Strickland! He is the black guy from Mississippi. We have been helping him cook some food for a BBQ one of the members was doing. We helped him marinate his ribs and chicken, and oh boy were they good. Probably some of the best ribs I have ever had. He is a great guy, he is just comfortable with the church he is in now. Right now we just want to show him that we are his friends and help him out in any way that we can. We are surprisingly staying very, very busy. We are finding new ways to find people to teach. Missionary work is definitely not just tracting and teaching. I'm loving it right now. It’s great to just be able to talk to people about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Well thank you all for the wonderful birthday. I hope everyone is doing as good as I am. Have a great week.

Love,
Elder Jared Garrick, the 20 year old missionary!