September 3, 2012

Dear Family,
 
This has been a really good week.  I feel like my faith is always increased when i'm serving around new missionaries.  This week we have been studying PMG chapter 9 which is all about finding people to teach.  The first thing that it says in PMG is having the faith to find.  We have been doing some finding this week and have had good success.  We found this guy named Corey (who goes by c) and we talked to him for a while.  He is in to mixed martial arts and trains at a gym in our area.  He told us that he wanted us to come by his gym and teach all of the kids that he helps with their fighting skills and such.  We dropped by the gym and he wasn't in yet, but we were able to talk with the owner of the gym and he is interested in the gospel now as well.  Hopefully I can follow up with that story as it continues.  We also received 2 solid referrals from members in our ward.  One has been wanting to learn about the church for 6 months now, her friends had just never invited her.  So when we had a lesson with these members and invited them to give a friend a book of mormon with their simple testimony written in the front cover, they gave it to her.  Her name is Rosemary and we have started teaching her.  Just before I got here to the library, we were teaching a lady by the name of Sis Gilbert.  She is a less-active lady who was invited by the ward council to take the missionary lessons again and she agreed.  We taught her the restoration and the spirit was really strong as we taught her.  Plus it was good practice for Elder Taylor!  She also agreed to come to church on Sunday and she is bringing her friend Beverly.  When she comes to church it will be the first time in a long time. 
 
Yesterday we had a labor day taco feed with our ward.  It was fun, we had it at the same park that we did the memorial day picnic.  We also had a salsa contest (the chip dip not the dance) and had a lot of entries.  One of our recent converts one first prize and got to sign the hideous pig.  It's just this ceramic pig that the ward has that they let people sign when they win a competition of sorts.   Last time they did it was for a chilli contest.  On Saturday we had a lot of rain come down.  We were actually in a hurricane watch and had to text our zone leaders every hour on the hour so they knew that we were safe, but it wasn't that bad.  By the afternoon it had stopped raining and we were playing soccer with some investigators outside.  I guess it did get pretty bad in some parts of the mission though.  We needed the rain however so it was good to get it.  We've been starting to get fed a lot of corn again recently and it is really delicious!  The peaches and cream variety is my personal favorite.  We had a part member family come to church on Sunday.  The Neyens are their name.  We have taught them twice now.  She went to BYU idaho after she was baptized and really loved it there but then moved away and got married and fell away from the church.  We have started getting her husband interested.  They had met the missionaries before but he didn't like them and didn't want to meet with them because they had no sense of humor.  So when I and my companion came over, he at first didn't want to talk with us or anything and we were just talking with his wife, but after we cracked a couple of jokes he joined in with us and came to church on sunday.  They actually weren't able to attend our 1 o'clock block so we went with them to the 9 o'clock sacrament meeting with the Bettendorf ward that meets in our same building.  In 2 weeks they will be able to come at 1 though which will be good.
 
Well Elder Taylor got his bike in the mail today so now we can start biking around instead of just walking.  So now we can go farther and get places faster when we don't have the car.  Also when the other elders had the car on Saturday someone ran into the back of them because of the slick roads and got the corner of the bumper all bent out of shape and the light is broken.  So we will have to get those fixed and we will be without a car for even longer during that time.  Just more time to allow the Lord to make my weak things strong unto me.  I was reading in the general conference issue of the ensign recently about a talk that speaks on real growth.  That is something that we are implimenting in our ward and we are really trying to retain all of our members that have started coming back.  This church is true and i know that as we experience real growth in the church we will be the happiest we have ever been!
 
Love, Elder Peterson

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