She's felt the Spirit

hey, ya things are going good! I'm loving the area. Hey I wanted to tell you thanks real quick for those general conference CDs (I think it was y'all that sent it.. everything was jumpled together so I forgot exactly what was from who.) Love those talks. Especially Elder Dube. he reminds me of the my last area with his thick Nigerian accent. Ya you can just send those packages to the same address. It's the mission office and we go up about every week so it'll be the same. We do have some investigators we're working with. This ward has a lot of less-active members so that's a big focus but as far as investigators go we have the Soto family--They're a family of 6 that moved here from New York. They're great! They're getting baptized next week. Then we have Taytay and Stanley. Taytay is from Tennessee and is the biggest hillbilly I've ever met and then her boyfriend Stanley is a big military guy, just got back from Iraq. We spent New Year's eve evening with them. We ate a soup with beans, cabbage, and jaw bone in it and then "tater-tarts" (which were fried cornbread biscuits pretty much). They're an awesome couple. We're also working with a few others that we've only met with once or twice. We're working with a lot of less-active members. This is random but I just remembered and have to tell y'all, it was 30 degrees this morning!! aigh! crazy. We were freezing. It better get warmer soon. anyway. Ya a lot of the less-actives that we've talked with are great people, they are just not coming to church for a small reason but they mostly have great testimonies and are so close. Our goal is to have all of the less-actives in our area become active. We had a really cool experience with one less-active lady the other day. We were teaching her the message of the restoration of the gospel and we had Peter (this awesome RM that was staying in the area with his parents--who are in our ward) and the lesson didn't really seem like it was going anywhere. The lady's kids were being kind of hyper and distracting her and I thought that she wasn't really paying attention but at the end we bore our testimonies and Peter asked her if she'd ever thought about coming back to church. She broke into tears and told us of how she knows it's true. She's felt the Spirit. She just doesn't know why she hasn't come. Peter's mom is going to start taking her to church. Some people just need a little love and support. That makes all of the difference. Same with another guy we talked to. His name is Brother Hammond. He's an awesome guy, he has a really crazy conversion story and life story. He's been through so much. After he told us all that he had been through it was just more than we could ever imagine and in most eyes it would seem that he had no logical reason to come to church or to trust in us or anyone. We prayed for him we just listened to him and he came to church the next day. He's such a great guy. We're seeing a lot of progress. I love this area. We've been soooo busy. From 6:25am to 10:27pm when I hurry and change and brush to get into bed before 10:30  (which is when we're supposed to go to bed) and say my prayers it's just a rush with no free-time. Life is great though. We see a lot of good things, blessings, and miracles. I love it!

Love y'all!

Elder Russell