Greetings From San Jose

Hello Everyone,

This week has been pretty great. We did a better job at evening out the efforts in each of the areas that we are supposed to work in. We cover a very small singles branch and thusfar we were afraid that they felt like we had been sort of ignoring them and not doing any missionary work with them in mind. There have been three baptisms there fairly recently but still they felt like we were overlooking them. But we have great branch mission leader in that branch and he got us working on trying to just find a bunch of single adults in the area and seeing if they wanted to come or even if they just lived there at all anymore. It's a struggle to try and do more work to show that we care about one unit of the church without affecting our efforts in another unit. Actually it's kind of impossible to be perfectly equal. We have to just try to always be conscious what's happening in two units at once and make it work.

We did what we call a blitz where all of the companionships in the district work in one companionships area for a couple of hours. The point being to jumpstart or scrounge up some work in an otherwise struggling area. My companion and I kind of cheated in that we took the opportunity to look up more of the young single adults that could be coming to our branch and live in that part of the stake boundaries. Not really cheating we were just helping ourselves at the same time as helping the missionaries there. A win-win situation. It was kind of fun though, I hadn't been to that section of our zone yet. A tiny little town called Felton in the San Lorenzo Valley. Houses we visited were just way up these hilly roads. My biggest fear was that we would just find some one coming in the opposite direction on the tiny practically one lane roads.

We also had quite the adventure just sitting in our apartment trying to call some of the people that we couldn't visit. My companion got into a pretty tense texting conversation with a guy who was very verbose and had a lot of things to say. It seemed like he refused to talk over the phone but seemed to be enjoying texting us pages of thinly veiled threats and triumphant points that made my companion kind of angry. Although the guy first sent a text to tell us to never attempt to contact him so my companion was kind of asking for it when he responded.

On Saturday we helped a family move to a new place. Let me tell you, king size mattresses just aren't worth it. Going up a flight of stairs it seemed to get jammed in like 4 different ways at the same time. The edges got pretty dirty and I felt bad about that but I'm not sure there was anything else we could have done. I don't see why someone would make a perfectly square mattress. There is no alternate angle to try with one of those. It either fits or it doesn't, don't try to move it any other way cause it's still the same size. Anyway, we got doughnuts off of that gig so that was a bonus. It's a really nice family too so we loved to help them.

We are struggling to find new people to teach so far but we're not giving up and I know someone will fall into place. There are a number of less active families that we are hoping to work with and we are having a bonfire on the beach this Saturday that should draw them out and have them socializing with all of our ward members who will do an excellent job of making them feel at home and inviting them back. We are looking forward to that and perhaps some members will invite their friends as well and they'll enjoy it. We don't really have a program for it, we were told that you don't need one. People will just come and do beachy things and the kids will get into playing random things and basically you just can't not have fun at the beach, especially when there is a huge fire. And tiki torches.

I hope everyone is doing well and having a good end of January.

Sincerely, Elder F. Miller