Greetings From San Jose

Hello Everybody,

This week was pretty good. We are working with a guy who doesn't seem to have much going for him. I think he's been homeless for much of his life and is just recently living in a group home type place. He's really nice and easy to talk to. It just seems like his disadvantages in life are now disadvantages in accepting our message. He never received a very complete education so I have to really think about everything that I say and try to make sure that it is in it's simplest terms possible, and even then he just naturally agrees with everything and probably doesn't want to feel stupid for not understanding something. So it is a real challenge working with him and helping him progress when he hasn't really found the motivation for him doing this for himself, if that makes any sense. He's just a really very nice and likeable guy so everyone around him wants him to want the Gospel but he's getting in his own way. He has no problem coming to church but he won't commit to be baptized fully yet. The member who gives him a ride to church every week was telling us that he sees our investigator as one who will come to church for like a year before they fully realize that they want to be baptized. I hope that's the case and that it's just a matter of time.

Other than that our most devastating news is that the little old Tongan lady who is in charge of our dinner calendar is moving to Hawaii and so there may be a rough transition period in which no one is bullying the relief society to feed us, but we'll survive.

We had a lesson/meeting thing at District Meeting in which we were encouraged to try and use Family History as a means to contact people, and we were also told to invite the members to do the same. So for my little after dinner message with a family I shared a scripture about geneology and then asked the family how familiar they are with it. Unfortunately it was more of an elderly couple and they then spent like a straight 15 minutes just relating their experience and family history and other peoples family histories and it was kind of bad. But it all worked out and I encouraged them to share what they just shared with someone who might find it interesting and want to learn more.

The shut in guy that we teach, I think I just realized that he could probably be diagnosed as a hypochondriac, just had a heart test conducted and said that he was perfectly fine as far has heart disease goes but he feels he has a weird skipping beat and that compounds with this condition where his chest wall tightens up and he can't breath and so that's why he's never come to church. Anxiety causing situations set it off and so he doesn't want to come to church and risk socialising to set it off. But he did go to general conference six months ago and hopefully he'll go this time as well. General conference attendence counts as attending church. So then we'll just have to wait another six months for him to go to April conference again and he'll be eligable for baptism. Except he also has a bit of a problem with tithing. Long story short he's full of problems, as is everyone though.

So I'm having fun working with these, different, people and it's rewarding. They are all great people but have their own hang ups and it's a challenge but cool to work on them.

I hope everyone has a great week. We get to visit the Temple on Wednesday and I'm looking forward to that.

Sincerely, Elder Miller