October 28

Hi y'all!

This last week was kind of a crazy one. We went down to Charlotte for meetings twice and we will again on Thursday. I guess usually there aren't this many meetings in one month but we have to get up an hour earlier than usual to make it to Charlotte in time and on Sunday for Ward Council or PEC, so that isn't super fun getting up earlier than 6:30 but sometimes we sneak a little 15 min of our lunch hour if we're home for a nap. I honestly don't have too much to say for this last week so it might be a very short email you get. We had to drop one of our investigators because he just wasn't ready for it come to find out and two of our other progressing investigators (maybe not so progressing) we have a hard time getting a hold of now and haven't met with in a week. So it's kinda back to square one in a way and more finding needs to be done. Here's the thing though, we'll have a much better time if we and the ward members are all doing finding and getting referrals. If you have any ideas on ways to build up the ward's trust in us or to get them more pumped and fired up to do missionary work let me know because Sister Whitmer and I want to get things rolling instead of just feeling like we take up space in the ward. :)

Some of our tracting has been interesting this last week.... we found a super sweet older lady who is Hmong (some sort of Asian nationality - I really have no idea because I haven't heard of that until I got out here in NC) and she hardly speaks any english but we showed her the pamphlets and she loved the pictures of Christ and was excited to pray with us. She has a Bible and goes to a Baptist church and we told her we'd get her a Hmong Book of Mormon and pamphlets in Hmong. Well, just yesterday, we sent the Hmong Book of Mormon over with the member who lives near her, and the member came back with a letter for us. I guess that this older lady had a friend over who could translate and supposedly she wrote a note for Yee (the older Hmong lady) saying that Yee didn't want to have us back. Sister Whitmer and I both as soon as we read the letter felt like those weren't Yee's real words and that even if she wasn't interested she wouldn't just tell us to stop coming back at all like that. So we had set up an appointment to come back tomorrow and we still are going to see what is up.

Also, we had a person who we knocked on their door and they were listening to us share our message. Suddenly, whoever else was in the house told them we were Jehovah Witness or something and so he shut the door and locked it without even glancing back at us or saying anything in the middle of our sentence. Totally caught us by surprise but I hadn't been rejected like that before. It's the worse because we get someone to listen to us but they are confronted by others and are convinced to not give us the time of day anymore. Talk about frustration! Oh well, this was prophesied about in 1 Nephi 14:13-14.

I am slowly starting to feel more and more comfortable leading out on lessons and talking with people but it is still hard, hard, hard! And it will probably never really come 100% easily. We do meet some great people though who value families and some of the recent converts and less-actives we work with are just fantastic and sweet. We're hoping to get a temple prep class going again in the Hickory ward because all the recent converts and less-actives we have met so far haven't even been to the temple for baptisms yet and that's so key in convert retention!

Well, the work is hard but it is great and marvelous that's for sure and I'm so glad to be a member of Christ's church and to help in the Kingdom.

Thank you for the prayers and if you could pray for those we are meeting with and finding too that would be so wonderful!

I love y'all so much,

Sister Amelia Rust