Jay Family Missionaries

Hey everybody,

We have been working on getting visiting teaching functioning here.
When you are working witht the wards you have to have patience that
lasts for weeks, but eventually it gets somewhere. We have been
telling the Relief Society president that we want to help get visiting
teaching going since the transfer started and now we have set up to
meet with her tomorrow to get things going.

Yesterday at church was kind of crazy. We got there really early
because we wanted to talk to the Relief Society president and she is
usually early, but she actually wasn't yesterday. The good thing was
that we got there and opened the doors before anyone else got there
because the elders called us at about nine o'clock and said that the
branch president wasn't coming, (and one of his counselors is in
Greece, and the other one is inactive) so they said they would be a
little late and they were trying to find out if someone from the
district presidency would be there to conduct. The branch president
asked the elders to conduct, but they didn't know if that was okay.
Luckily, even though he was supposed to be in a different brach that
day, someone from the district presidency was there and he conducted
and spoke. I think somebody got sick and that's why he was still in
our branch today. Church went pretty well though. I wish that I had
to deal with the problems that Tom has. Some people in our branch
have kids but they don't bring them to church; they find somebody to
babysit them and leave them at home.

One of our investigators, and older guy named Ifrim, is really
attached to the missionaries and I have been trying to make him be not
so attached, so on Saturday he called us and said that he wasn't going
to come to church the next day because we don't care about meeting
with him. He said if we're only going to meet once a week we might as
well not meet at all. Sora Bedebone was really upset, and I think she
was really mad at me for having tried to distance ourselves from him
(even though we were still definitely meeting with him more than once
a week and talking to him on the phone at least every other day). The
next day she told me that he is way too attached to us though. We
will have to get him coming for the right reasons, not just because of
us. He has a girlfriend that he hasn't been spending time with
because we told him he needs to keep the law of chastity and he said,
"I haven't been spending time with Doina because of you guys, but you
guys haven't even been making time to meet with me, so now I have no
one." I guess he wants us to take the place of his girlfriend in his
life. We told him a million times that he doesn't have to break up
with her, he just has to keep the law of chastity. And he knows that
the missionaries come and go but he said that he will be okay with any
of them. We have been trying to get members to come to the lessons
with us for the past couple weeks but it hasn't ever worked out. We
will probably meet with him once more and then let him go for a little
while, or try to get the elders to work with him.

We were teaching English class on Tuesday and we hadn't planned very
well what the spiritual thought was going to be so we decided to talk
about the apostasy (because we're good at it) so we planned a
scripture beforehand and just winged it. Our spiritual thoughts
usually go really well and you can feel the spirit and see that the
students can feel the spirit. As I was starting I told them that I
wasn't really sure what to talk about that day, I was holding a bible
in my hand and one of them said "Just flip open your bible and that's
what you should share." I held up my bible and let it fall open (sort
of planning on getting close to the verses we had planned in 2 Thes 2)
and I had forgotten that I shoved a scripture marker in there when we
had planned right before class so it actually opened up exactly to the
verses that we planned on sharing. So I read the verses and went
right into it. A lot of the members of the class seemed awe-struck,
and then we again felt the spirit really strong as we talked about the
apostasy, and you could see it on the student's faces. The spiritual
thoughts from this transfer are probably the best ones I have had my
whole mission because we have just been teaching them to be good and
making them want to find out more instead of just teaching them the
first lessons in little bits. There is a group of older women that
all come together and their leader completely agreed with everything
we said about the apostasy. I was able to give some good insights too
because I just finished reading about it in Jesus the Christ. Maybe
if we can get her the others will follow. It would probably triple
the size of the relief society.

We met with one of our English students at his clinic this week. He
is an optometrist. He has come to church a couple of times now and he
really likes it and really admires what we do. He said he can meet
again this week too.

Well, my time is up.
For all of those who don't know my departure date is the 31st of
August (Mom said a lot of people have been asking). So I'll probably
be back some time after that. And I'll be in this city until the end
of my mission.

Love,
Sora Jay

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