Musical Fireside

Hello Everyone,

So on Sunday we performed at a musical Fireside that was put on my my zone. It was the sister missionaries idea and they did most of the work. We had four or so practices and frankly I felt we sounded terrible and wasn't looking forward to performing in front of anyone, let alone our mission president who was coming. But we invited a number of people that we have been teaching or are trying to teach. The musical fireside was just all about Christ. Being only and english missionary who can't really sing very well I only had to participate in the group songs, one to kick it off and another to end it. But throughout our zone we have a sister who is from India and so sang in Hindi, and then we had Spanish elders, and Chinese elders and also the American Sign Language elders. Then there was a member couple who sang an operatic type hymn in Italian. And then the master mind sister Robson is pretty awesome at singing so she had a couple of solos. And between performances we played video clips or mormon messages from mormon.org. So of all the people we invited one came but she brought her boyfriend and afterward we got to talk to them for a long time and many of our ward leaders and our old bishop chatted with them and it was great.

During most of the night I sat next to a flutist and when she learned where I was from she said that her husband grew up in Beaverton and went to Beaverton High School. But he wasn't a member until he was converted in Paolo Alto. But she asked if I knew the Miners. Which doesn't sound familiar to me, but she said that they were in one of the ward bishoprics many years ago so I thought I'd throw the name out there and see if anyone knows them.

So last night was pretty great, but Sunday we had our primary program which we encouraged everyone to invite their friends to. And one member actually did and now we will be teaching her. She sounds like she's already converted. The only problem is she didn't sound too enthusiastic about how her husband would feel. So it won't be choice to only baptize one member of a family but we will try and hope that the rest will follow.

And then we also went through a list of less active members that our Bishop gave us and found a man who is married to a non-member. We come accross a lot of them but this guy is totally friendly and even said that he's been meaning to get back to church. But we got invited back to teach them and we hope that we can reactivate him and perhaps get his wife and even her two daughters interested. It seems a long shot but it's not like we have much else to focus on. That's one of the great things about being out here and knowing your purpose. As a member you generally don't want to be too forward with people. Your goal is to be their friend and then slowly get them to come to church and whatnot. As a missionary everyone already knows why you're at their house so you might as well just spit it out. I'm not saying that I've totally lost all sense of tact with people but it's a very freeing thing to know what is expected of you and to know that everyone knows it as well.

Well I also finally found out that my sisters' new baby is a boy named Benjamin. I wasn't hurting too bad from info lag until I knew that I had a new baby something on Wednesday but had to wait until Monday to finally find out that it's a nephew. I still have no pictures but I'm glad I no longer am anticipating something. I was hoping I'd get an express letter in the mail. Overnight delivery or something, but I guess it doesn't exactly matter.

Have a good week everyone.

-Elder Miller