Two Families and How To Teach Youth

Hi Everyone!

Thank you as always for your thoughts and prayers!

Right now we are focused on two families, who we have been spending a lot of time with to strengthen and help understand the gospel. The first is a young couple named Rafael and Alex, who have been investigating for a while with english missionaries but we're really getting all of what they were talking about (they somehow missed the part about us having prophets and apostles who are living, they got a surprise when we invited them to general conference), and so we've kinda taken them over to teach. They're really cool and are sincerely interested in knowing the truth, but so far they haven't really committed to read and pray with the real intent to act on an answer. We're going to try teaching them out of the Book of Mormon almost exclusively from now on, because we want them to gain a testimony of the book and realize how much we need the clarity of it, because our conversations keep getting stuck in the bible and it's difficult to go anywhere with that. I have a lot of hope that they'll gain testimonies and become really solid in the church, but I think it might take some time.

The other family we're working with is la familia Soto, who are inactive members with a 9 year old girl we'll be baptizing soon. We're trying to reactivate the entire family though, which consists of the parents, the 9 year old girl, a young boy (probably 10 or 11, I'm not sure), and a girl who is a junior in Highschool. With the older girl, we've been discussing what to teach her and how to teach her, and we ran into a question that people have probably been asking for a really long time: "How can we teach the principals of the gospel in a way that's appealing and interesting to a teenager?" We spent some time studying and praying and looking through my Efy participant handbooks, and one of the things we came up with is that it has to do with making the gospel mean something to the individual person. We can teach about a principal all day long but it'll have no effect until we can show how they can use it and why they would want it. It's an interesting thing, because youth (myself included) tend to pretty much ignore and tune out anything that doesn't seem directly relevant or interesting, and we're pretty harsh in our judgement. It's interesting being on the teaching side of it, and I'm excited to see what I can learn.

The weather's getting colder now, and the leaves are starting to fall. I'm really enjoying it, Fall is a season we don't really have in Houston, and the change in scenery is really cool. It's awesome to be involved in the greatest work on earth, to be in the Lord's service. I know that the gospel is true with all my heart, I want all of you to know that. If I didn't know that, I wouldn't be out here and I wouldn't have near enough guts to ask people to change their lives and lifestyles for it. I'm so grateful for the blessing it's been in my life, and for the knowlege that God is there and loves me, and has a plan for us to be able to return to Him. It's the greatest thing in the world, we're truely more blessed than we even know.

I love you all, good luck with everything!

Elder Damon Janis

P.S. Daron and Heather, I got a letter from you recently, but the seal was broken, probably during transit, and so the envelope came without the letter. I'm really sorry about that, if you'd like to email me or send me another letter I'd love that. Thank you so much!