¡Feliz Cumpleaños Mamá y Papá!

¡Hola Fonzfam!

First off, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM & DAD!!! Together you've reached another year. I hope that you both have a wonderful couple of days of celebration! What a week it's been! We had so many different types of meetings and things going on that I felt that we were hardly in our area but we were blessed nonetheless during the time that we did have to share the gospel.

Two weeks ago I had an experience where I ended up giving my watch away to a guy named Adam who said that I was bluffing and that I wasn't a true Christian. Long story short, we met a totally different guy named Kerry a few days later who ended up receiving my watch as a gift from Adam. From all that we are now teaching Kerry and his girlfriend because of it. We're going to do a church tour later this week and so we're hoping they'll make the effort to actually come to church this next Sunday as well.

During our Missionary Leadership Council(MLC), the Assistants rolled out a new finding change that we've implemented into our ward for a week now. So as a mission we've been doing a pretty good job of teaching the people we find and getting them to the waters of baptism. But we weren't finding as much as we could. With the opportune time to find being from 5-7pm, right when dinner usually is, we've decided to take massive action to get different and better results. That change was formally announced during our zone conference this last Friday. From now on us missionaries will be eating our own dinners from 4-5pm Mon-Friday with only being fed dinners by the members(preferably less-active or part-member families) on Saturdays and Sundays. This is going to allow us to be out and finding when everyone is coming home after school, activities, and work. We've already seen some incredible miracles from talking with people we normally wouldn't have talked to because we would've been eating dinner during those times. Of course we still want to be in members' homes throughout the week to invite the Spirit by sharing a message and to help them with their missionary work. So to help us accomplish this and make the most of our time, our goal is to be in a member's home every evening of the week sometime between 8-9pm to share a short 15-30min message when it's too dark to be knocking on doors. This is different and is definitely a change from the culture that's been in our mission for many years. Having dinners with the members was never about the food, but about the people and missionary work. Just like how tithing is not about the money, but about the sacrifice in order to receive the bigger and better blessings.

Like I mentioned in the first paragraph, this week was full of different meetings. We had a New Missionary meeting up in Cedar Mill for Elder Wilkes that took most of the day, plus the travel time through Portland traffic. It was a good refresher on things that I may have forgotten or could improve on. Also, as I talked about, we had our zone conference where Elder Wadsworth and I, along with the Sister Training Leaders, led a few different trainings focusing on the intensity and purpose of our personal and companionship studies as they feed into the lessons and events of our day. It was fun discussing different ways to do our personal studies to help us think of how we could use that precious time with the Spirit to meet the needs of the people we're teaching. It was a good time and I learned so many new and different things that I've loved applying to my own area and missionary work.

After having our zone conference all the way in Hillsboro, we had to quickly make our way back through traffic to our apartment to change clothes to make it to our next activity. We were one of the few companionships in the mission to pilot a new finding tactic from Salt Lake. We were instructed to dress in normal, casual clothes, without our name tags, and we were told to only go by our first names. We had previously found a location in downtown Tigard(a few minutes west of the temple) where we set up shop. Salt Lake had flown in a huge chalkboard the night before that had four sides each with different prompts like, "Family is..." "I value..." "My purpose in life is..." and "Spiritual." Our job was to get people on the street to simply add their thoughts to the board, become their friend by starting up a conversation, lead it into the gospel, get their contact info, and try to meet up with them again as a missionary to teach them more. The thinking behind this finding tactic is to give people an opportunity to learn more by not first judging our message by the not always good reputation of a white shirt, tie, and tag. By being "real" people first, it's provided us with a new door to go through. If our mission president likes this enough, we may start doing this as a mission more frequently. It was a blast and definitely kind of weird to be called "Branson" for the first time in a long time.

I feel that sometimes we find a hidden switch and all(or most) of the people we talk to are way more open. One of the highlights of the week for me happened as we OYMed a lady on her way to do laundry in her complex. Her name is Vanessa and she moved in about a month ago from Orlando to be here in Oregon for the season change. She shared with us how she saw us a few weeks ago help move some random strangers into their new apartment and that she's never seen any other type of missionaries do that before. Because of our true Christian-act of service, she promised that she would stop to talk to us at the next oppotunity. She had never heard of Joseph Smith or of the Book of Mormon so she was a clean slate. We shared with her the 1st Vision and asked her if she believed that it happened, and she said that she totally believes that God still reaches out to His children in many different ways. We committed her to read the BoM before our next visit and we're so excited to go back!

It's been great serving the Lord and I look forward to the many more months I have to continue to give it my all. I love you all and wish the best this week!

Love,

Elder Fonnesbeck