Teach People not Lessons

The mission field is great, and the investigators are coming along fine. I'm still getting along with Elder McHan well. The bike is holding up, but we bike a lot and my butt is often sore. I actually didn't eat fried chicken this week. That's great about Ryan I actually never even heard of Roseville.  

We are currently teaching one family who wants to be baptized really, really, really badly. However they still needed to learn more about the restoration before we could baptize them. Telling them that we have to postpone their baptism was the hardest thing I had to do, we thought that they would get upset and stop investigating the church, but this is the Lord's work and he calmed them and we decided to set the Baptism date for the 17th of August. But we only did this after they had a talk with the Bishop and had the seeds of their testimony of prophets be planted ( hopefully permanently).

     

We also are teaching a newlywed family with husband inactive and wife is nonmember. They have no furniture in their apartment ( not even an actual bed) and today a random neighbor knocked on our door and said he was moving and had a spare bed and other things that I think they could use. We could have as many as 5 baptisms this month which is super rare to have that many in one month if everything goes well.

The ward is smaller than in Utah, and it's very fluid because the ward always has Marines and their families coming and going. I would hate to be the Bishop in this ward trying to make callings. Our Sundays are busy in the morning we actually have to wake up even earlier than usual ( ugh) but  we have no meetings in the afternoon, so that's usually when we do our studies and the evening is just normal proselyting. 

Other than the Military base there are not a lot of interesting places. Despite the fact we are so close to the ocean I have yet to actually see it. The military owns most of the coastline around here and unlike California, people don't tend live next to the beach anyways. I have yet to take that many pictures there has not been much worth taking pictures of. Don't misunderstand me I love Jacksonville its just not a tourist place, it's almost the exact opposite of it. I did hear about the alligator but I have no idea where it was at.

All the wards celebrate Pioneer Day with a multi-ward BBQ. I didn't go to it, we had some lessons and appointments during that time. Thanks for this week's message, it's told a lot because it so important. We often say "Teach People not Lessons". Thanks for the updates I'll talk next week.

Love

Thomas Lakey