Oil Lamp

Hey mom, I love you so much.  I hope everything was awesome on your birthday.

I forgot to tell you about a really awkward experience we had two Sundays ago.  Every couple weeks or months here the ward gives us a list of 5 names of less active members in the ward.  On Sunday we had a ward council meeting and we realized that two of the five names on
the list were IN the council meeting.  When it came to our time to talk, the bishop talked about the importance of the ward working with the missionaries to teach investigators and especially the less actives...then he asked us for the "names of the less active members the ward would focus on this month." I was just thinking "ahhhh no!" Luckily my companion is a quick thinker and said, “I just want to remind the council that these names aren’t necessarily inactive
members but just those who aren’t receiving visits from their home teachers."  Then he listed the names...I don’t think the members in the meeting were too offended, but it was a super awkward moment.

This week was pretty awesome.  We got to work a lot with the members here and found some really cool new investigators.  One of our companionship goals is to find more families to teach.  We seem to only teach individuals, but the gospel was built especially for families!  We found some awesome couples who have young kids and would really help out our ward.  Our mission has been really focusing on "real growth" in the church where the people who get baptized stay active for a long time afterwards and do work in the gospel.  We have some high expectations for these families!

Last night was really fun.  We had weekly planning, but we didn’t have any energy in our house.  We only had one flash light and no candles. Being the dedicated missionaries we are...we starting looking for solutions to the light problem so that we could plan an awesome week. Looking around our messy house, we found enough supplies to make oil lamps.  We have these weird tiny metal bowls, and we cut a hole in the bottom of one of them. We cut a t-shirt to get a strip of cotton, and then soaked it in cooking oil. Then we put the strip of cotton through the hole in the tiny bowl and put that on top of another tiny bowl full of oil. It worked! The lamp gave us enough light to plan for the week.  It was actually really disappointing when the lights turned back on like 20 minutes later.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Marsh

They had the oil for their lamps...they were prepared!