We actually had a pretty solid week this week.

Hi Mom!

We actually had a pretty solid week this week. It was a little disappointing because we have zero progressing investigators at the moment, but that sounds a lot worse than it actually is! The disappointing thing is that all the investigators we had before aren’t progressing, but we found new ones this week! And interestingly enough, most of our success came from tracting this week! Towards the beginning of the week, we found a 21 year old college student named Thanas. He was really cool. He’s the only young man I’ve met so far that has told us that we should be living the Law of Chastity. Weird. He explained to us, “We Albanians don’t do a lot of things right, but we do have one thing right and that is that we consider family as a holy thing. We have a tradition that we should marry a girl who is a virgin and start a family with her.” Yeah that has basically not happened at any other time in my mission so that was cool. We had a great couple of lessons with him, but he’s leaving back to his house after he’s done with his tests for school. That’s the problem with summer. All the people that come for school leave back to their homes. But that’s okay. We’ll keep in touch.

I went on exchanges to 4^th Branch with Elder Skousen on Thursday and so obviously Elder Monson and Elder Hagen—who stayed in our area—had to get in like three times tracting. They found a man who let them in who ended up not really being interested in experimenting on the word and meeting and reading and stuff, but his daughter said to them, “Don’t worry, I’m interested.” So we had another meeting with her and the sisters on Saturday and kinda handed her off to them. She seemed really legit. She loved the scriptures. Ha ha it made me happy cause I shared the scripture in 3 Nephi 14 where Jesus compares prophets to trees and shows us that we can know them by their fruits. She loved it. She laughed and said, “That is an awesome analogy! Really understandable.” And I was thinking to myself, “Well it was Jesus. He was a decent teacher.” But it was good to see somebody with a love for the scriptures. As for mine and Elder Skousen’s exchange in 4^th Branch, not as immediately fruitful. We were finding all day and I think I got tanner. ;) But I found out that they found two new investigators off of the numbers we got that day so that made me happy.

Then last night we finally got to meet with Ergi! Ergi is the brother of Megi from 3^rd branch. His girlfriend, Helena, has been taking the lessons for some time now and just set a baptismal date for July 11^th. She is awesome and super ready as far as I can tell. She’s told the sisters that her and Ergi want to get married in the temple and stuff and so we’ve been trying to meet with him for a long time, but he has stood us up a bunch and just been really hard to get a hold of. So yesterday the sisters sent us a text when we were in church saying that Ergi was at 3^rd Branch for church and didn’t have work so we could probably meet him. So we called him and set up a meeting with him for 5:00 last night. We ended up waiting for him until 6:00, but we met him! Helena had come with him and so we got to teach them both at the same time. She seemed a lot more ready than he is, but I think that with some work, he will be great as well. He’s a lot quieter and I just think he’s kind of embarrassed to talk in front of his girlfriend because he knows almost nothing about religion. But we got him to talk a little bit last night so we were happy! We even got him to say the closing prayer which was really good. With a little practice he’ll have it right on. Helena is a really good example for him and so I hope he realizes how happy she is because of the gospel and how happy they could be together in the gospel. His sister and mother are awesome examples as well and have been blessed tons by the gospel in their lives, but I think Helena has a more powerful influence on his heart than they do right now.

So that’s how our week went! How was yours? It’s been raining over here a lot. How’s the weather been treating you over there? Is it any more like summer? Anyone else getting married? It seems like there has been someone new that’s getting married like every week. Kiersten’s brother, Sam, was this week’s news so make sure you tell them congrats! How is the house without us chillins there?

I love you mom! Have a great one!

-Elder Swenson