Greetings all, This past week was pretty terrific. We picked up some new investigators and even got a couple to agree to a baptismal date. I have to give a bunch of credit to my new companion, he's great. As far as I can tell we don't do anything much different than I or my other companions have done in the past but it just really feels like the work is flowing right now. We received a random call from a recent convert in our ward saying that her mom isn't a member and would like to meet with us so yesterday we were able to do that and it was a good lesson. The Mom is possibly a member. She recalls being baptized when she was a child but I think they tried to find her records a while ago and couldn't. But she's not totally on board with coming back yet. She is more like a legitimate investigator who has much to learn. We are set to keep teaching her and I think she is much closer to joining the church than turning her back on it. For now it seemed like her biggest issue with the church is that our music doesn't rock as much as other places. We ran out of time and didn't get to teach everything we meant to but we'll get around to resolving her concerns. She raised her children to be Christian in a more non-denominational sense I think and then her son just joined the church a few years back and then his sister followed and now the Mom is looking more into it. The great news is that she already comes to church, she has no problem making it. That is like the biggest problem with investigators most of the time for us. We have two investigators who have committed to work towards a baptismal date and neither of them has come to church. Sometimes it's our fault cause we don't teach the importance of it well enough but that's only because it seems like a given to me. We have to take off quick but this week has been awesome and this one is looking like it will be pretty good as well. We had interviews with President Watkins yesterday and those we cool. The strange part was that a former missionary who was the assistant to president is back and is serving as a secretary to the mission presidency, and so as part of interviews he gave a little presentation. We keep referring to him as Elder but then catch ourselves and realize that we can call him Carlos. Hope you all have a great week. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller

What's up everybody? Well this week was great. My new companion is set on just seeking out the less active members on our ward rosters and so we've had some pretty boring days of realizing that the ward rosters are kind of outdated. Many people don't live where the church thinks they do anymore. It's really sad when we don't find who we're looking for. Often times the new resident simply says that they've never heard of the person and so we have no way to further pursue them. When we report this back to the ward then their only option is basically to send the persons church records back to Salt Lake and say that the whereabouts are a mystery. I've heard that the Unknown file is getting mighty large. It's good for the ward to clear up some of these records though. Cause if we determine that many of these people don't live in the area anymore then that means the records can be sent off and the number of less actives in the area will decrease and so the activity rate in the stake will increase to a more accurate representation of what the membership is in this area. The members here say it time and again that Santa Cruz is a place that members come who want to hide from the church. I think the cause and effect related to that saying should be re-evaluated though. In some cases it's probably more that members come and then get caught up in the way Santa Cruz is and it becomes easy to stop going to church. But then the reasons that one might come to live in Santa Cruz probably would mostly indicate that they're influenced toward being less active to begin with. We had an interesting discussion about this when we ate lunch with our Branch President this past week. They are both from Utah originally but have been in California for a long while. They were actually debating the pros and cons of living in Utah. They ultimately plan on moving and they fear it might be to Utah. They used the word fear because they feel that Utah isn't exactly the bubble that everyone not from Utah thinks it is. In reality you end up with a large spectrum of members and so in Utah there isn't as definite a line drawn for Mormons as in other places. This was particularly discussed in terms of school aged kids and the peer pressure issue. When you're the only Mormon in school the expectations of others can kind of help you keep your standards. But when everyone is a baptized member but half of them don't follow church standards then it becomes harder to really define what a Mormon does and doesn't do. My companion backed this up saying that when he lived in South Dakota it was way easy to know who he was and what he stood for cause he was alone, and then he moved to Utah and it became harder since there are lots of Mormons there that seem to break the definition. I just found all this interesting especially since I haven't lived in Utah and so I was an outsider and one of those naive people who assumes that Utah is perfect. Anyway, sorry to bore you with things that you probably already recognized. We stopped by one name on our list that we didn't know and found the address to be in a 55 and older retirement mobile home community built around an old mill. There was a sign that read "Ye Old Mill" and it was pretty cool. The lady we visited was like 80 years old and her husband has never been baptized. She joined the church in Argentina while they lived down there and her husband was the financial officer for a company that was building Argentina's first highway system in the 60's I think they said. She said the missionaries knocked on the door and gave their approach in Spanish and she said to them they better try again in English or move along. And they were relieved to have found some Americans being two guys from Utah or Idaho or somewhere. Her husband was awesome. He came in and had this really deep voice like a radio announcer. The lady had recently had her hip replaced and neighbors kept bringing them food so they sent us off with like two boxes of cookies. They were super nice and we'll be sure to visit there again. She told us her husband is a devout Agnostic, which perhaps I don't know the full definition of the term but I thought it meant that the person is basically undecided as to whether they believe in God or not. It sounded funny to me that someone would claim to be devoutly uncertain. Anyway, I guess this lady was active up until about a year ago when perhaps she called it quits just due to medical ailments. So we're having some fun and a little success. More to follow I'm sure. Another inactive fellow that we have been meeting with has assumed that we mainly come over to play on his pinball machine. I can't lie and say that it isn't pretty awesome. So we teach a lesson and then don't want to disappoint him and so play a round or two with him. I view it as bonding time. President Hinckley said "Every new member (or returning member) needs 3 things,a friend," and then I forget the rest but I think he also mentioned something about a job and perhaps he mentioned that everyone needs a good pinball opponent as well. Well I'm out of time. Have a great week. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller

Hiya, Well my new companions name is Elder Hammond and he's from Pleasant Grove Utah. He's lived in a variety of places and I wouldn't call him the cookie cutter Mormon boy so it's annoying for him to have to introduce himself as from Pleasant Grove and just see everyones assumptions fulfilled. We had a good first week together. Did well. It's kind of neat how some of Elder Hammonds strengths are my weaknesses so we compliment the work in the area pretty well. Well actually he's just an all around great missionary so it might not be an equal relationship cause I'm not certain I'm offering much to the efforts that he's not already good at but still it's good to be working with him. About the most exciting thing we did this week was we were let into the houses of some less active and part member families. The one part member family that we visited we got talking to the wife who is a member outside for a while. We couldn't go in cause her husband wasn't home and so she walked her dog and we strolled along beside her. Very friendly, and then her husband came home and he's super nice as well. It was a hot day and so they invited us in at this time and offered us some water, thank goodness! And then we just heard all about them. It was a long visit, much longer than we are supposed to take but we were kind of trapped there, without objection, for a long time. The husband is into hunting and guns and manly stuff in general. Just in their little living room they have six motorcycles. A big old harley davidson sits against the wall and then against it lean a couple of dirt bikes, and there's a smaller couple in the corner and then a little kids one by the door as you walk in. At one point we were invited upstairs to check out a big three foot diameter saw mill blade that they had had painted with a snowy wood and deer scene by their neighbor. The blade was in the man cave room along with a huge book case full of ammunition and a gun safe. We got to see some of the guns that he has rebuilt and they were pretty cool. This all reminded me of that movie Tremors, with the character Burt who is a survivalist expert and his home is all protected and he's prepared for everything, everything except that is "darn underground monsters". We also managed to meet with a less active guy who speaks about no English. He gave us some cola and was very nice. My companion asked for his bible and just shared a scripture in Spanish with him and we couldn't exactly elaborate on it so just left it at that. It was an interesting encounter. I can only imagine he doesn't come to church just cause it's all in English and he'd have to travel down to Watsonville to go to a ward he can understand. My last companion called on Thursday I think it was. I was surprised sort of. We got a call from an Illinois number during a lesson so I didn't answer it but called back afterward and it was former Elder Miller. He was calling because he was wondering if he had left his underwear behind. When my new companion was unpacking his stuff he found the drawer full and I was wondering why my last companion left it. He was a very meticulous person so I assumed he hadn't merely forgotten it but had left it for some reason, but it turns out he just forgot about it. Overlooked the drawer I guess. I offered to mail it all to him but he said that he would buy new ones and he didn't want to continue the embarrassment by having his underwear mailed to him. So it's been a good week. I'm not sure what this week will be like but it should be better since we're doing some grocery shopping today and won't have to eat out as much. I didn't realize how understocked we were before I got my new companion. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller

Hello All, Things are going well around here. I say goodbye to my companion tomorrow, but the sadness will last only a short while as they force the transition on you quick. I'm not sure if I wrote about this last week but my companion had always been eager to sit in on the meetings held by President and the Assistants to determine who gets transferred where and so he asked if he could sit in on one before he goes home and so we were invited to do that on Tuesday and it was neat. Not exactly as inspirational as I think my companion was hoping but it was just plain cool to get the scoop on transfers way before the rest of the mission. We actually don't know that much, we sat in on the first meeting but they had a couple more on different days to solidify the whole process. We just caught the initial ideas and placements when it may all be changed around later. Through this though I think I'm much more prepared to guess who my new companion will be. I'm going to put it out there and guess that I will get Elder Fields as my companion next. We may likely e-mail tomorrow to update our families on this new change and so we'll see how good my predictions are. I already wrote about this I think but on Monday we had a lesson with the girlfriend of the less active guy that we got coming to church very regularly and he's completely invested and active now. The lesson went well and we have determined she's a new investigator. We haven't met with her since and part of the problem there is that she actually lives in Fremont and just visits her boyfriend very often in Santa Cruz. Well if any of you recall, Fremont was my first area and so I asked which street she lives on and the answer was Decoto. I remember that street very well, not because I drove on it, in fact I never went on it, I remember because apparently there is a huge church building on that street that everyone would ask us about, or when we were trying to tell people where we meet for church everyone would assume it was the Decoto road building cause they all noticed it cause it kind of looks like a taco bell they would say. The reason I never saw the Decoto building is because it is actually out of our mission. This is the age old missionary dilemma. Well not actually age old cause I think back in the day they didn't exactly have boundaries and no other mission president would get on your case for stealing investigators cause they didn't have mission presidents, but we do now and our new investigator I think lives in the Oakland mission boundaries. Not only would we be stealing her from some other missionaries but we'd be stealing her from missionaries that aren't even in our mission. Normally I think I would just keep this under wraps but our mission President recently had to deal with some other case where missionaries baptized a lady that didn't live in the mission and so he made sure that everyone knew to tell him if we are teaching someone that doesn't reside in our area. So I'll try and talk to him about it at transfers tomorrow. Perhaps my favorite thing this week was service. We got to dismantle a walk in refrigerator that was at the police station. It was pretty neat. The evidence department had this huge refrigerator in case they had perishable evidence they needed to keep but they found that the fridge actually had too much moisture and damaged the evidence so they donated this thing to the local soup kitchen. We got to walk past all these file boxes labeled by year, like on the tv show Cold Case. We turned right when we came to the corner stacked with rifles and a sword and then started unscrewing this fridge room box thing. It just broke down into wall sections and corner pieces. We had a professional guy taking care of unhooking the cooling unit and sucking the freon out of it and whatnot and we just did the heavy lifting. I just thought that was pretty fun and interesting. The things you learn on your mission eh. When I get back and any of you need help dismantling a big fridge room, then you now know who to call. Other than that we were able to meet with a bunch of less active members and just offer some help. One lady was doing pretty well coming back to church and then we didn't see her for like 4 weeks and so we stopped by and she had been sick so we gave her a blessing and we hope to see her next week. Stake conference was this weekend and it was pretty good. My only issue is that they had a man speak who only knows spanish and so they had an interpreter and they alternated, the man speaking a sentence and then the lady interpreted it in english and that was just a long talk to endure. I could not pay attention to that, especially since the man was just basically reading out of the book of Romans I think and not even expounding upon what he read. I had to resort to one of my favorite church zone out habits; staring at the carpet and letting my mind make up images in the random pattern. We were singing with the stake choir and my companion spoke a bit sharing his conversion story since it was his last Sunday here. Today is just a bunch of packing and cleaning for my companion and I. We are looking forward to a lesson we set though. It's nothing too exciting, just an active great family in the ward but we have tried to meet with them for like the whole two transfers that Elder Miller has been here with me cause this family is the Miller family. It's been delayed and put off cause I'm sure people are just scared not knowing what will result from the awesomeness of The Elders Miller meeting with the Millers. It could get explosive. But I'm sure the saying is true, you can't have too much of a good thing. We were supposed to meet last week and they forgot and took their daughter to the movies instead during that time. Anyway, this week should be good. Normal stuff going on, and I'll find out soon what my new companion will have to offer the area. Mother's day coming up as well, on Sunday I should be able to skype home which is exciting. I hope you all have a great week. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller

Hello There, This past week was pretty good. I am not currently recollecting much of it so hang in there... oh yeah, one great thing was this lesson we had in which we invited a senior missionary in our zone to come. He and his wife are genealogy specialists and so we brought him along to talk dead people with the non member wife of a less active man that we had visited once before. It went amazingly well. This senior missionary is a great guy and he actually was serving as a mission president a while ago but was removed due to medical issues. He got right in there and we just sat back and munched on some interestingly delicious french toast custard dish that was quite good. The only problem was that I kept blowing on it to cool it down and that would disperse powdered sugar all over me. There wasn't much of a lesson taught, the senior missionary just got their basic family information and got working on their lines and there was just a wonderful spirit felt as they were able to work together to do family history work. At the end it was revealed that the wife has been reading the Book of Mormon and has been considering joining the church for quite a while. They had a daughter that desired to join the church but passed away before she could. So we're letting the spirit of Elijah handle this case until it's ready for us to teach a little more. Another new development occurred on Sunday. Everything just kind of worked out for us to finally get around to teaching the girlfriend of a less active guy that has been coming to church regularly now and bringing his girlfriend along. Sunday was mostly normal except that our mission president was the guest speaker along with his wife and my companion. So our less active friend brought his girlfriend again and she was able to attend sacrament meeting and hear the good talks given by these three people. After the meeting the branch hosted a dinner and so we all hung around and ate together and so it was just good to have the girlfriend getting to know everybody better over a meal. And then that night was the outgoing fireside for the missionaries going home. We had our less active friend offer to give us a ride (in his girlfriends car cause his is on the fritz) So the girlfriend came along as well. On the ride up I was given the front passengers seat due to my leg proportions and so my companion sat in the back with the girlfriend and worked wonders in just being friendly. At the fireside she was bombarded by testimonies of missionaries and recent converts and then on the ride back we basically taught her a bunch of principles. We set up to teach a more official lesson the following evening. Monday, we had a beach activity with the neighboring zone. So we all drove down to Monterey, or Carmel I think technically and had a few hours fun on the beach. The beach was not quite so nice as the beaches in Santa Cruz and I found myself upset with the lack of frisbee playing space. But there is always sand to dig in and structures to climb on and whatnot so we made our own fun. Lots of missionaries that I don't know so well and didn't bother to really get to know better. That evening my Irish companion was severely sunburned and I was but unaware for a while. We had the lesson with our less active friend and his girlfriend and it was good. Her main concerns are just a difference from what she's grown up learning being Catholic and then although we didn't teach it, she is aware that members of our church don't drink or smoke or party so much, or have pre-marital sex and so her worry is just changing those things while she considers herself to be in the prime of her life when that's what young people are "supposed" to be doing. She understood everything else and is a great investigator but much depends on just whether she really wants this. She's seen her boyfriend make a lot of changes and that may be the source of both her intrigue and trepidation when it comes to learning about our religion. We look forward to teaching her more and it's great to finally have an investigator, that is more legitimate than many others we've had. The difference is made when they have a tie to a member. They have a measuring stick into the church. "Well he's normal so his church can't be too out of whack." Makes a huge difference. Anyway, I lose my companion next Tuesday and I'm not excited. I always dread transfers. I guess for all the things I say about investigators being afraid of changes I'm not all that much better myself. It will be good though. One more companion to come and finish me off. Have a great week everyone. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller