Goodbye to August...

Dear Family,

Well the month of August has come to a close. Last week was crazy busy and pretty tough. So the tranfer ends in 2 weeks (sept 13). Elder Heywood and I have no idea what will happen.

Last week we had Zone conference in Mckinney, so we hosted it. It was really great. President Smith talked about how the gospel is all about 'becoming.' He also talked about how when we are brand new missionaries we do lots of uncomfortable and hard things, so we grow a lot and very quickly. However, when we get comfortable, we aren't pushed to our limits and we stop growing. So his challenge to us was to look for opportunities to 'be uncomfortable' or to look for challenging things and do them. He mentioned 'walking into the wall of flames' so we can be refined by trials. It was a great talk. I'm going to push myself even harder to do those things that make me feel uncomfortable so I can continue to progress and grow.

We also had interviews with President Smith and while he is interviewing, we, as zone leaders give a training. We decided to train on finding because it is something our zone is specifically struggling with. Elder Heywood loves fishing so he compared finding to fishing. We as missionaries have to be in the right place,right time and use the right lure to find people who are ready to hear the gospel. It was a fun training.

There were quite a few hard things that happened last week with our investigators. Adan ended up going to chicago on saturday because the job he had here was temporary. It was sad but we gave him a map with the closest chapel in chicago and we'll be sending the missionaries to visit him. Ana, a lady who had been coming to church and who wanted to get baptized, had moved out from living with her american boyfriend, but she moved back in because he promised he would change. The thing is is he wants nothing to do with us or the church. But people have agency I guess.

Odilon is doing well and will be getting baptized saturday (maybe by raul...). We should be setting some other baptismal dates this week and hopefully finding some new families to teach.

I'm excited to hear how Marissa likes school and I want to know what classes she is taking. Take care.

Love,
Elder Wagner