"We have many promising investigators"

January 24, 2011

Dear family and friends,


We had a very good week. We had a lot of members come out with us and they are fellowshipping our investigators. We have several people who are very promising and are willing to meet with us and do the assignments that we asked them to do.

We had stake conference this week and the theme was "to the rescue." It was about how to bring people back into the church and the gospel who have fallen away. This is a big deal because there are 800 people who are supposed to come into our ward and live in our boundaries, but only 200 of them actually come. Many of them are Haitians and people who got recently baptized. Out of all the Haitians who were baptized in the last year or so, only half of them are still active in the church. It is really sad. Some of them got turned off by Anti-mormon stuff, others just have other priorities, and others have just disappeared and we can't contact them at all. There is a lot of work to do in this area. We need to change things and help the church grow and progress to be the way it is supposed to.

We have someone who was supposed to be baptized on the 30th of this month named Antoniel, but he didn't come to church this Sunday which means he hasn't been to church enough times and we talked to his cousin Isenada, who is a recent convert and she said he has a girl friend here, which is a problem because he also has a wife in Haiti. It is a common problem with Haitian men. Many of them have wives in Haiti and have a girlfriend or something else. Many of them have many kids, which have different moms. We are going to have to push back his baptismal date and talk to him about that on Tuesday night when we see him.

We are teaching this girl named Gennger and her Mom Itasienne. Gennger is awesome! She loves reading and writing poems and she has a lot of questions and understands what we teach her really well. She told us that she gets discouraged a lot and has a lot of confusion from the things that so many people have told her about religion. She really wants to follow God. We asked her if she would be baptized when she knew what we were saying was true, and she said yes. She said that her Mom was okay with it too. We are very excited and we can see so many ways that we can help her in her life.

We are also teaching Natasha, who is the daughter of Elder Rybin's recent convert in Fort Lauderdale. She has a family and she said she wanted to go to a church where people lived what they preached. She had grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness. She agrees that there are so many conflicting opinions in other religions. We told her about how she can receive a confirmation from God by the power of the Holy Ghost and she agreed whole-heartedly to that.

We had another situation where the parents don't want us teaching their children. We had a lesson planned with Daline this Thursday, but it didn't work out because she was still at school. We called her (her Mom is the one with a phone) and her Mom answered. She was telling us that we didn't need to come and visit Daline because she was converted in another church already and that she didn't want her going to multiple churches at the same time. We told her that we aren't trying to take away from anything she had before, but that we were trying to build upon her relationship with God. We aren't very happy with that. We know that Daline still wants to meet with us, but her Mom doesn't like it. We want to talk to her just so we can ask her how she feels and to have her talk to her Mom about how she wants to get baptized in this church, but it is hard because she doesn't have her own phone. If she talks to her mom and she still doesn't let her meet with us, we will let it go, but hopefully that will make things better. We told Peter, who is her neighbor, to tell her to call us when she gets home so that we could talk to her, but she didn't come home until later. We are going to continue to try to get a hold of her. There are so many youth whose parents are holding them back from meeting with us. They think we are there to mess with their minds and force them into joining our church. Hopefully they will find the missionaries when they are older.

I hope I don't get transferred because we have so many people who will be baptized next transfer. I want to be here to see it all happen. I will be very sad if that is the case. We have many promising investigators. We are very excited.

But everything else is going wonderfully. I hope that everything is going well at home. I don't really think too much about that anymore. I love you all! Bye!



Love,



Elder Seamons