Dear Family and Friends, This last week had A been much better than previous weeks. Although we still didn't have too many lessons, we were able to make a bunch of great contacts with and visits with people who we never had been able to make contact with them, or it's been a long time. For family home evening on Monday night, we went to the and had a fun time playing a Bible Edition of Apple to Apples that we got at a Christian store here. We are trying to help their son want to go on a mission right now instead if the military, and will try to get him to come out with us sometime. On Tuesday morning we went and had a lesson with Brother Strattman and showed him the Will of God Mormon message which is another one of my favorites. We the meet up with the Sister missionaries and did some ward roster work. Just going through it and identifying and talking about the people we visit, who we didn't know at all, and those who are do not contact. We only got about half way through the 28 pages of members, and there are still quite a few who we realized we didn't know about. For the rest of the day we spent some time trying to contact a bunch of this people, and all of them had moved out of our area. We had a great combined zone district meeting on Wednesday. Probably one of the best trainings/role plays I've seen on extending a baptismal date. We also talked about the goals for number of baptisms for the month of June for the Zone. The goal it ten baptism and there have already been five, and as of right now ten more have dates set for this month. In the evening we had three great lessons. The first was with the Perez family. It's been a while since we had been able to visit with them and the kids we super happy that we came by again. It's hard to go and visit them since we have moved farther away and that they aren't in our area. We did a handoff lesson with the Bradenton elders, but when ever we are close by we will stop and visit with them to check and see how they are doing. We then went and had a lesson with the Innes' which are another one of my favorite families to go and see. Last night we gave Sister Innes the missionary library so that she could read through that. Hopefully we didn't overwhelm her with so many books, but I thinks that she will love reading them. Tonight we read through the 13 Articles of Faith and talked about them as we did so. The last lesson of the evening was with Kyle over Skype, and we read through Mormon 6 with him. This was the chapter that the missionaries in Virginia gave to him to read, so we read through that and talked about how blessed we are to have the words of prophets from generations ago, and then gave him some more chapters to read. Thursday morning we went and helped Elder and Sister Greenwood cut down and clean up some trees at Sister English's home. Doing service projects is one of my favorite things to do, and we are always looking for different ways to help out. After that, we finished up our weekly planning, and went less active contacting the rest of the day. Once again, just about everyone that we tried has ended up moving out of the area to who knows where. We did get in with one less active who we have just talked at the door previous times. We stayed there for about twenty minutes and just got to know him some more. He shared with us some great stories about how is was able to receive his testimony of the truth and he had some pretty incredible experiences. We had another service opportunity to help Sister Brooks move things from one trailer, to another one right next door. It was a pretty warm and humid day. It's close enough to summer now, and tomorrow is officially the first day of summer. We went and visited with Leroy in the afternoon and had a good lesson on he plan of salvation. Leroy really liked learning about the spirit world and what happens after death. That he will be able to see his parents and his little kid that died again. We committed him to coming to church and he finally committed to come this time, telling us that he needs to start coming. So we set up a ride to go and pick him up Sunday morning with Brother Gheldof. In he evening we went and visited with John again. He was telling us all about his Bahai Religion again and we couldn't get much in. He absolutely loves Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and D&C. We started reading from the beginning in of he BofM then he started jumping around in lots of different chapters telling us what they meant. He is a super nice and awesome guy, but we probably won't be spending too much time there. Brother Hoynacki was gone this week for ward correlation, so we just got together with the Sisters again and finished our ward roster work. Finally done with going through who everybody is and figuring out whose area that they live in. For dinner we went to Bro Balle's house. He is the Elders Quorum President and a super awesome guy. He invited one of his friends Brother Brown from the Palmetto ward to the dinner as well. We talked about missionary work and what they can do to share the gospel with their friends. Like creating a Mormon.org profile and posting it on Facebook so that all can see it. Brother Balle also asked about people he could help fellowship, and about people on his home teaching list. The rest of the day we didn't have too many lessons, but we did have some good contact with people we hadn't gotten a chance to meet yet. I'm still pretty tired from waking up at 4:45am yesterday morning. We had a Stake and Ward Council training at 6:30am for all of the ward councils in the stake. President Cusick and Elder Thompson gave the training on how missionaries and members can work together. That members don't have to make time for us to come by, but just need to invite us to their daily activities. For example going to members work places, or joining families for activities such as soccer games and concerts. It was a really good training and I enjoyed listening to both speakers because they were energetic for it being 6:30 in the morning and having to keep everyone awake. Leroy, as well as a bunch of other investigators and less actives didn't show up to sacrament meeting today. We thought that it was going to be a great day today but we thought wrong. Leroy was ready to go and said that he wasn't feeling too well to go to church when we stopped by to pick him up. Both of the appointments that we had scheduled this evening canceled on us, so we went and visit with Sister Innes and answered some of her questions from reading through True To The Faith. This morning we went out to Myakka State Park and just got back from that. We had a bunch of fun going out and seeing parts of Florida. We saw one wild boar, some small fallow deer (about the biggest deer I have seen in Florida). Just today alone we saw 18 alligators, the biggest being about eight feet long. The count for my mission is now 53 gators, and 2 crocodiles. I will send a few pictures in a different email for you. Loves you all, and I pray that everything is going well for you. Lover, Elder Leavitt
