Reactivating Siblings

Hi Everyone!

I'm still getting used to the new area, although I'm getting my head around it more. The little branch is really cool, me and my companion are focusing on strengthening it so it can support new growth, as well as tracting and finding people. There's a lot of less-active members who have a lot of potential to get back into church, a lot of times in the Spanish work people go inactive due to pure laziness or lack of feeling the spirit, so we're hoping to bring the spirit back into their homes and motivate them to come to church.

There's one less active family we're working with that I'm really excited for, it's a brother and his two sisters from Honduras, who are separated from their parents right now so the brother who's about 25 is taking care of them. They came to church for the first time in a really long time last week, and Oscar, the brother, even bore his testimony! The girls are 18 and 15, and all three of them are awesome kids. We're doing family home evenings with them and supporting them, I really hope they keep coming and can have the spirit really powerfully in their lives! The cool part about teaching them is that they're around my age and I can relate really well with them, which makes everything a lot more meaningful to me and want to help them out so much!

I don't have many interesting stories for this week, we've been tracting a lot but it's been a lot of standard Catholics we've run into who don't care much for religion except for tradition, so even the ones who let us in are pretty closed-minded and don't really take the commitments we give them seriously. We're sifting through a lot of old referrals from the referral center in the MTC and Temple Square, the missionaries haven't focused on them in a while so there's a lot of people to be contacted. We're also working with both branches to sort through their records and find out if people still live here and if they'd like the missionaries to teach them again. We looked up one inactive with the 1st counselor in the English branch, and the lady had passed away last fall! It was sad and kind of interesting, we had no idea who she was but felt bad about it.

I love being a missionary, I wouldn't trade this opportunity for anything! Even when things are slow or hard, the Lord is always there to help you out and teach you, I'm growing more here on my mission than I ever could have imagined! Sometimes I wonder how much of a mission is to change the missionary, and how much is to change the people he serves. Whatever the case, I'm so happy to be here serving the Lord, I have so many experiences that strengthen my testimony that this truly is the true, restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and that it will bring us greater happiness and joy than anything else in this world if we will put our will in line with God's and let Him shape, guide, and teach us.

Have a great week, thanks so much for all your prayers and thoughts, God blesses us as missionaries so much because of your faith!

Love,
Elder Damon Janis