Families Can Be Together Forever

Letter #19
December 30, 2013
Area: Broadway 2 East
Companion: Galvez

I personally am still trying to get used to the fact that it's December...and now it's almost January!. I definitely had a lot of fun talking to you all Christmas Morning and I had a lot of fun on Friday guessing what the gifts were from my sisters' package.  I read the scripture associated with the gift, and then guessed and opened them, I sadly only guessed a few right, but of course I guessed the Swedish Fish right :) I am glad to say that I did wear my ties from you on the 27th and the 28th and I kept in mind that my "little" sister is now married...(2 ties:  one for when Carolyn was entering the temple for the 1st time, and the 2nd tie was to remember that Carolyn became Ryan's bride in the Oquirrh Mountain Temple.

1) My companion is Elder Galvez and he's from Northern Peru, but he lived in New York for a year and Utah for 3 years.

2) Yes Mom, we are doing Spanish study, so actually recently I've been reading the Life and Teachings of the Prophets: Joseph Fielding Smith for Sunday School and it is really fun! But when the New Year comes, I'm going to read the Book of Mormon in Spanish all the way through, starting with the front cover all the way to the last page of Moroni

3) My new ward is Broadway 2 and it is in the same building, so the Sunday after the transfer I surprised some of my good friends in that ward by showing up at the end of their meeting time before I went to my meetings :) and there are a ton of helpful members, one lives basically behind us and he has gone to at least 3-4 lessons with us in the little amount of time we've been in the ward.

4) I had breakfast with the member that we went to for the video chat, on Christmas Day, and we ended up going to a different member in Elder Galvez's old area for a good amount of the day. But we got to play volleyball with the single-adults and it was really fun and I even saved the game for one game to 10, it was 7-1 with the other team winning and we got it to 9-8 and then almost won, but they got the ball in the right place to get it past us... :(

5) yeah I liked all of my Christmas gifts, and thought that my sisters' package was super cool, but I thought one of the scriptures was different because I read it wrong.  But in defense of myself:) the one I read could have worked for it... I think it was like Mosiah 4:16 or something and I went to 4:6 and it was for the tootsie pops.  Thanks for all of the gifts.  Talking with you all was the best gift.

This week was amazing! surprisingly we found 6 new people to teach even with 2 less days and we got 2 part-member families to church and everything :) we definitely had the Christmas spirit with us and the people were open. one of the most memorable experiences was actually yesterday, we had found a guy on Saturday who lives with a person that the English sisters gave us a referral for and he didn't seem very interested. He was 18 and was going to go to a club with an older friend of his and he said we could come by at 6pm yesterday. We pull up at 6pm and he is with a couple of other guys and they were drinking and we were just talking to them, then we said something about Oriel (the 18 year old that we talked to before) saying we could come by at 6. Oriel started looking for his phone and said "what? it's 6 already?" so he invited us into his house and offered us a beer, but we obviously declined. We talked to him about God being our father and how we are all brothers and sisters and how the gospel can bless our families and we found out that he has a lot of faith in Jesus and he believes God is our father and he accepted it completely. We didn't have much time, but after we told him that we are all siblings, when he called over his uncle, he introduced us as his brothers :) When we said we had to go he ask "already? can you come back tomorrow?". He is super interested and when we met him we thought he didn't care about the Lord at all...

Looking forward to this new area...

Love you all,
Elder Stanley Scott Dye