Week 9? Happy New Year!

[Here's Ralph's message from New Year's Day.]

Hey everyone, weekly email time, hope you all had a great Christmas!

Since I told you the gist of what I did on Monday and Tuesday in the call, I'll just start from after our call. So, after I finished talking with you guys over FaceTime, we went back to our apartment.

Thursday we helped the Sisters with an investigator (or tried, they were busy), then did some less-active lookups (unsuccessful ones), did our weekly planning, did some online proselyting, then had dinner and went home.

Friday was a good day, we taught 6 lessons! I was on a split with Elder Higbee, and we taught 3 people on buses, went over to a member named Andy's house for lunch and taught him (after getting hopelessly lost trying to get there), then we did less-active lookups and someone actually let us in! Her name is Rachel and she works over 80 hours a week (yeesh), and we visited with her and left her with a message. We then went and did some online proselyting, and found a recent convert from the YSA ward to teach! It was a great experience being able to have stuff to do all day, and I'm grateful for Elder Higbee's example. We were really blessed with the people we were able to talk to. We then went to Shake Shack for dinner, then went home.

Saturday was also good, we did some more unsuccessful less active lookups, then went and visited Emmanuel and his wife. We taught them about the Restoration, and showed them the Restoration DVD in French (his wife only speaks French), and then we taught them a bit about the Book of Mormon, read a little, and then invited them to be baptized. THEY BOTH ACCEPTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I still don't understand the sheer excitement that comes over me for them when they agree to be baptized. Their date is set for February 8th, so we;ll see how it goes!
We had an appointment with Isaac immediately following that, but he wasn't there, so instead we went to church early to prepare for our lesson with Joseph and ran into the Yamadas (they were doing church cleaning). We helped them a bit, and then found out that President Morgan was going to be in our ward the next day. Yikes. We hadn't heard anything about that beforehand, so it came as quite a surprise. After that heart attack, we got to teach Joseph, we're still slogging our way through all the new member lessons and did Service. We also found out that he was speaking in church the next day, so we helped him prepare for that. We then had dinner and went home.

Sunday went pretty well, we were on the way to ward council when we were informed that it was cancelled, so we hung out at church for a bit preparing gospel principles and stuff. At sacrament, we actually had 3 people come! One of them was a man named Parker, who was a referral from another ward, then we had Judy, who was someone we had talked to when we worked at the soup kitchen on Christmas Eve, and then Isaac came out of nowhere! Elder Wang was busy teaching a lesson to Parker, so the Zone Leaders taught gospel principles for us. Oh, Joseph gave an excellent talk, although a little off topic at times. For third hour, President Morgan instructed the ward on what we do in online proselyting, and asked them to help support us. After church, we had lunch, then interviewed the Hermanas, then had an online event. We had somewhere between 10-15 people show up! Thank you President Morgan! It was great, went on for about 2 hours. We then had dinner and came home.
Monday was alright, we had district meeting, played some more ping pong, got instructed on How to Begin Teaching, had lunch, studied with the district a little, then did a split with Elder Higbee to go visit someone they'd contacted in our area, but they weren't home. Elder Marshall then split with Elder Higbee, so I got Elder Wang back. We visited Isaac and taught the first point of the Restoration, then went to the Porters for dinner, then came home.

Yesterday, we went to the Union Square chapel to prepare for our APF (drawing New Year's Resolutions in the square in chalk), then went to lunch, got mail, then did our APF. After we'd sufficiently froze to death, we went to dinner at IHOP, then went home. Happy New Year!

Today, we went to Costco (only to find out it was closed), then went to the Temple to play basketball with the zone. We then came from there to here! We have a dinner at 6, so hopefully that'll go well. I've got a cold at the moment, so I'm hoping that'll go away soon. First day of wearing contact lenses again!

Hope you all are doing well! Also, wrote out some replies to the letters I got for Christmas, but haven't finished them all yet. Hope you guys have a great New Year!

Elder Ralph Smith