Changes are tomorrow!! we kind of have changes but not really. they are dividing our area and we are going to go to the side we haven't worked very much and the house we are currently in isn't on the side we are going to so we are going to change houses today. they are going to put sister missionaries in the other half so this means that all of my areas so far now have sisters in them. it is weird to know that I can never go back to one of my old areas unless they close the area and put Elders back in. I really hope they are good sisters because we have soooo many investigators in the area and I want to see them all baptized. it also means that we are going to go to the changes tomorrow to help make sure they get back to their house with out a problem (losing about 2-3 hours in the process).
this week was interesting. we have been preparing to change houses and divide the area so it has been really busy with things other than missionary work but at the same time we were able to teach more lessons with members present than I have had in any other week of my mission. If I have one tip for any missionary about to leave on a mission it is this: "work as hard as you can and when you think you are working the hardest you can, work harder." I have found that when I accomplish things that before I thought impossible it becomes easier to do it the next time. for example, a few weeks ago i thought that contacting 100 people in a week, and having 20 lessons a week was imposable. I now feel like I'm not working at all if I don't have AT LEAST those numbers by the end of the week. those are now easy to goals to reach. we have even had weeks where we had almost 40 lessons and over 200 contacts. My first rule for missionary work is NEVER SAY IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!!! as soon as you say that, it is.
this week we found what looks like a "golden family" they went to church last Sunday and all but the wife came this week (she had to do some legal stuff with her son who is in jail). The dad is a less active but the rest of his family aren't baptized yet. we had a lesson with them during the week and when we asked them about the Restoration pamphlet we left them the wife said they hadn't finished it but they had read a little. she had read up until it starts talking about Apostasy. we read the pamphlet with them and when we got to apostasy we asked her what she had learned about it and she basically said that all of the churches have fallen into a state of apostasy because they have changed some of the gospel and fallen away from God. This really surprised us that she came to this conclusion all by her self with out any help from us (we hadn't taught the Great Apostasy yet). she is a catholic so that was something that to me made it even cooler because she basically said that her church was false because it has changed some of the Gospel. It was a really cool lesson.
Elder Jason Blanding