Sept. 13, 2011

Dear family,

This week has been another excellent one. We had to say goodbye to Elder Hopkins, which was sad, but every good greenie grows out of his trainer at some point. My new companion is Elder Kang, from Toronto Canada, by way of Sydney and south Korea. He is great and very experienced, he only has three months left, so I am excited to see what i can learn from his wisdom. This is the closest he has been to the beach on his mission so his reaction to the big blue thing to the west of us is pretty funny. We still live with the Zone leaders but one of them got transferred as well. Things change, I guess.

I first have to say that I am extremely impressed by the family's ability to blog so much all of a sudden. It is crazy. I also have to say Happy Birthday to anyone that I have forgotten to lately. I know that includes you Deborah, Chris and Annie. Missions are just one big blur so they all seem to run together. Well, Happy Birthday.

The big news this week was that we lost power Thursday evening. Apparently along with most of Arizona. It was pretty exciting times, although the looting was disappointingly limited, looks like we might be doing some good after all. I also wish that I could top Leah's story and tell you about what all the crazy Californians keep in their homes, but they never really let us in to find out. We have run into a couple of hoarders that keep some very interesting things, and I am pretty sure that we are on the verge of finding some underground pit bull fighting league. It truly is somewhat disgusting how many dogs there are in orange county.

Well as for actual missionary work. Things are looking up. We had another awesome lesson with the Duncan's this past week. I don't know if you remember but Brother Duncan is the very first person I invited to baptism. At first he was very cold, cordial but cold. But know he participates every now and then in the lessons and even admitted that he enjoyed them. It has been great to get to know them and I look forward to the day that he can enjoy baptism, and all the other blessings Heavenly Father wants to bless them with. We also were able to meet a couple of potentials so we look forward to meeting with them later this week.

Well I hope that y'all have a great week. Continue to work hard and doing the little things that keep our testimonies strong. And remember to always be valiant to our testimonies of Jesus Christ. He truly is the Son of God, and our Redeemer. Love you all.

Elder Bevan Blake