Week 28

Hi All ~

Kevin's mission cut their P-day time because the numbers are down in the mission.  I am going to include an excerpt from my letter, that talks about the mission and my concerns with him getting enough food.  He loved the box with all the birthday cards!!  Thank you to everyone!!!

You really need to understand Mexico to understand why things happen the way they do, and what people are doing, and whats going on. Yes I am lighter mom, but I really am not suffering for want of food, that is not the problem (although quality is a bit of a problem at times). We are under an incredible amount of pressure from our zone leaders constantly to be baptizing, which is good, it keeps us motivated and makes us work harder. That said, for example today they said well your numbers are down so we are going to end your pday at 4 and we are going to go to work. I handle stress very well, I just want to do what God wants me to, I really do not care about what the other missionaries think of me, I just want to do whats right. But here in Mexico everything is about how good are your numbers and so it is really really different than other missions. I am working as hard as I can mom, and I am going to be honest, I go into peoples homes and tell them that if they do not follow up with their commitments their family will be broken up when they die (which is completely true although difficult to accept).

Our investigators this week just are not progressing, they drink or aren't divorced, or wont go to church, and its really tough because you really grow to care about these people and their families, and you know how important the gospel is for them, but they wont accept it.

We have been working hard, but really having a hard time finding new people to teach, which is means we need to contact and look a lot more, but we get distracted from that trying reactivate people, like the wards here in mexico are gigantic, 1000 people or more, but usually only 20% go to church, which is the problem.

I have been studying in preach my gospel, and it says that one of the main responsibilities of ward councils is to ensure that the missionaries have investigators and to check how their teaching is going; but it also says the missionaries should be there to help reactivate less actives and work with recent converts, so I really really hope that back home the ward council helps the missionaries, that all of the members pass along at least one reference to the missionaries (it might go nowhere, but you never know).

Right now the weather has been great here in Veracruz, and everyone is gearing up for Christmas. I hope you all got to see the devotional, when I saw that, I just felt the strongest desires to help anyone I could. I dunno, I really have just come to love so many of the people here, especially the hermanas, they work so hard for us, that I would just do anything to help them out.

I dunno, enjoy Christmas, go visit the temple, its beautiful, and I really want to go look at the lights, oh well, will do in a year or so.

Love you all