My year mark is tomorrow?!?!? What the heck?!?!?

Wow I'm super exhausted.....

I just got back from walking around the city for the first time in 4 months!! Elder Fuller, who is going home in a few weeks, went to the Statue of Liberty today. Me and Elder Prestwich tagged along so we could come to the city too. We dropped Elder Fuller and Elder Higbee (another elder going home soon) off in Battery Park and then we walked way up to Chinatown, went up to Time Square, then to Rockefeller, then up 5th Ave a little ways, and then all the way back over to the subway station we needed. Now I realize how expensive it would be to go to the city without having a Metrocard. A Metrocard is a little yellow card that you swipe to get onto buses and subways in the city. The missionaries in the city all get money to buy a monthly unlimited pass, but for those of us that are "upstate", we have to pay for individual passes. It costs $2.50 every time you enter the transportation system!!! Crazy! So to save as much money as possible, we just walked everywhere haha...so my feet are killing me. It was a lot of fun still! Oh my word, though.....summer in the city is a little...immodest. Everywhere you look there's some rich white girl or lady dressed in super immodest, revealing clothing. It was bad. I mean it felt like it was 100 degrees and 10,000% humidity...but still...put a shirt and some actual shorts on! Sheesh!

So this week was really good. We got some actual work done in our area! It was a really rough week as far as lessons last week. Only 4..... That's really bad. I'm definitely not a "numbers" person, meaning that I try and not look at the amount of lessons we had that week when looking at success, but that's still pretty low. We're looking to fix that this week though. 

We had three good lessons with people just on Monday! We asked our bishop to put together a little list of people that he'd like us to go visit, so we decided to knock a few of those off on Monday. One was with a super less active family that we had dinner with. The wife is really active and plays the organ/piano in sacrament meeting, but the husband and son are both pretty inactive. It's really sad because this family was like born and raised in the church but something happened with church that pushed the husband and sons off the deep end. They were all really good people. The son definitely didn't seem interested, but we were able to have a nice conversation with the dad.

Something really cool that we noticed was when we got on the subject of family and then into ancestors, the dad just went off on all these really cool pioneer stories from his ancestors. He got really excited and into the conversation as soon as it shifted to family history. It's cool to see how the spirit of Elijah is totally real!! :)

Then Monday night I woke up at 2 or 3 in the morning and I felt horrible. I had that 24 hour flu like really bad. So Tuesday was kind of a bust, but we were able to work out a small split with some other elders so we could still help some members move that needed it.

Hopefully an investigator that the sisters gave to us will work out on Saturday!! Apparently he really wants to be baptized, he just needs to marry his fiancé or move out of the house (which isn't very likely...they have a child together) so please pray for us!! We also might be getting a referral from some members so hopefully that will work out well. Things are definitely getting better here! We just need lots of prayers that we will be able to find people to teach! That's pretty much the biggest thing we need right now!

I'm doing well, though. I got a little stressed out a few times, but that's normal. Elder Prestwich is doing awesome. Training isn't nearly as hard with him because he's already such an awesome guy! I better get going, though. Sorry to everyone I wasn't able to write a very personal email to. This Wednesday was just crazy! I love you all so much! You're in my prayers! Have an awesome week! :)

-Elder Stafford

Oh and P.S. My year mark is tomorrow?!?! What the heck?!?!

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Cade says hi!!  He is at our house having dinner