Hi Family!

Life's great in the mission. I got your pics of Lori's lil chunk o Guatemalteco and Lisa's letter about their latest exploits on the east coast. Thanks. We're teaching people. We had just started talking about agency yesterday to Floyd Craigs and his wife and he stopped Sis Cornell and said ?Wait a minute, so somebody told me, that after I go to your church you're gonna want to get me baptized? Is that correct? Sis. Cornell's face was priceless, but she did a good job about not beating around the bush. She told him our purpose is to bring others to Christ, through faith, repentance and baptism, but that it would be his choice and something he would need to study and pray about. He seemed fine with that and he?s going to think about it. That was really neat.

We also taught a lesson last week with a woman named Teri. She didn't go to high school, but is a hard worker and very sweet. Her best friend dropped by half way through the lesson and we invited her to join and summed up the first half and we finished up and challenged them both to read and pray. We made an appointment to teach Teri again, invited Laura if she wanted, went last night and BOTH of them were there. After knocking doors all afternoon without seeing the slightest glimmer of interest in one person and then have someone voluntarily want to be taught again without even having set an appointment with her? That's a BIG deal. It was great. We kept the message simple and she asked great questions, like "What is repentance?" and "Where did the Book of Mormon come from?" Really essential things that told me she was listening. And Teri gave the closing prayer. It went great.

I also taught my first lesson in Spanish the other day. We only have a few female Spanish speakers in our ward, they are all busy a lot of the time. So we brought a 17 yr old with some high school Spanish (bishop's daughter) and a DVD, so I wouldn't be talking the whole time. We get there and there's no vcr or dvd, just Margloria and her cute baby. Which is great, because they don't have that sucking up their time, but I decided, okay first lesson it is, I'll just ask a lot of questions. The answers: "si, no, no se." I had had to talk 30 mins and I felt I explained things pretty well and the Spirit was there during the First Vision and Alicia's testimony, especially. We have return appt. But I have nooo idea what she thinks about any of this. She's so shy, hopefully we can just teach her again and maybe she'll start to open up a bit.

We're also teaching a man who is the retired head of the Classics department at KU and taught Western Civ, we didn't know any of this at first, just that he was very smart and didn't like the BOM, but was willing to meet with us again. We took Sis Murphree the smart Sunday School teacher and it turned out she had taught the exact same class he did using his curriculum. They hit it and talked for an hour about the
Dead Sea Scrolls and Virgil and the Enlightenment and Sis Cornell and I just sat there, happy to not be the ones on the other side of that kind of conversation. Then he opened the BOM and translated the first line into Hebrew and said that doesn't make sense, the syntax is all off. She convinced him to try reading the BOM like a novel, without a lot of analysis, to try and enjoy the story, and then see how he felt. Sis Cornell said something about faith, I said a prayer and we left. We saw him at the hospital yesterday on his way to senior exercise, he said hi and wanted our view on some Church History stuff. He didn't run away. Yea progress!

So we're teaching some really interesting people Latinos, academics, Africans (really-Tanzania and Kenya), people who's lives seem perfect until they tell us why they really let us in the door (divorce, laid off, death in fam), WWII vets, lotta Navajos/Pawnee, working class mostly though. It varies so much going from one door to another and it's hard to really figure out which part of the message they need to hear first. It's called GQing, golden questions, like "What?s my purpose?", "How do I
balance my family and work and beliefs?", "Why does God allow so many bad things?", "Does God even know me?". So I've been trying to figure out in 3 seconds which one of those questions matter the most to the person I'm talking to and I'm figuring it out. I mean, I can't teach without the Spirit, but just by seeing someone's face and asking them how they're doing today, you can kind of figure it out and bring up the issue. We're teaching the members to do that when they give out passalong cards. It's pretty neat.

Anyway, it's hot, it's August, but the Church is true and the answers to those GQs: Yes we have a purpose, Yes the Gospel blesses families, Yes we can overcome challenges and progress with Christ's help and Yes God knows each of us personally, cares about us and everything we do. He wants us back.

I love you guys. Thanks for the letters (even the semi-annual ones, Dad). Sorry the financial office has messed up and is sending my financial card tomorrow. I tried not to use too much on the debit today. I took some cash off just in case. Love you.

Hermana Deb