May 5th, 2014

Hi family! 

I am excited to talk to everyone next Sunday! I will be on the computer to skype sometime before 6 (4 your time) so plan on that. I will probably throw in a 5 minute phone call sometime this week to plan it more concrete so be ready for that surprise.. 

This week was alright, we made some progress in our zone so that was good. We were excited because we felt like we found some pretty good interested people this week, but the bad news is is that all the people we found didn´t end up going to church so that was a little disappointing.  I have been a little sad in these weeks because I have started to see some of my converts drift away from the church a little and be a little lazy in the attendance. I don´t know if you remember Miriam, Alex, and Shirley, the family that we helped get married and baptized in February, but they haven´t been to church for close to 2 months now. The problem with them is that both Alex and Miriam have jobs now and they work on Sundays every 2 weeks. Turns out that they think it is more important to go on little vacations on the 2 sundays that they have off instead of go to church. It is so frustrating to me. . . I guess I have to learn a lot of patience. We are pretty sure that the family has started drinking again too, so we are sad about that too. We aren´t able to visit them too much because they work so much now. I think it is one of the saddest things in the mission to see your own converts start drifting away from the church. They commited to go this Sunday finally, so we will see what happens. The other frustrating thing is the less active people we teach keep on commiting to go to church and don´t show up either. We have been helping these families so much and it seems like the least they could do is keep their word and go to church! 

haha well enough of my complaining but not sure why people don´t show up as much as we bug them. One thing that I am pretty different from Elder Laws is that I am so persistent when I try and commit people to do things. Maybe it is because I sold pest control before the mission, but when people try and say no to things or maybe don´t want something I guess I try and push pretty hard. Not sure if that is good or bad! It definitely isn´t what Elder Laws does and he has told me that I need to not be so pushy, but I think you just have to figure out the right balance. After all this is eternal life we are talking about and people don´t know what they are missing! 

Well this week we have the leadership conference on Thursday so that will always be good. We also have a zone conference coming up the next week and we are excited for that too. I will let you know how those events go. I am super excited to talk to everyone, and hope y'all have a great week! 

Love,

Elder Armstrong