11-7-12

Hola Familia,

This week has been pretty good. I hope that you all had a great halloween and that you have enough candy to last until next year.

The work has been going pretty good. We have a younger brother of one of the recent converts that is reading and progressing, but we are trying to make sure that he is doing this because he wants to follow our Saviour's example and not because he just wants to prove to his brother that he can learn faster then he did. So we are planning and following what the spirit tells us to really help he be baptised for the right reasons.

A lot of our investigators have stopped progressing lately so we are t going to try and if they don't want to progress we are going to have to drop them and find a bunch of others, but that is just the phrases of the mission work.

We have been working on an idea from President Douglas about how we can help the less actives and working with the ward to help them reactivate. We have been working with that for a while now and we are starting to see the results. We have had a couple less actives coming to church and changing their lives. One is Alcenio and he is really progressing. He has to change a bunch of stuff in his life but he is making the changes and has been coming to church for a month straight now. This last sunday the elder's quorum president was giving a lesson about the importance of home teaching, and was saying how important it is to keep visiting them even if you don't see any progress in them but keep visiting them. Alcenio then commented how many times different members had passed by his house and he wasn't ready at that moment to change and come back to church. Then he said, "These two young men, even though I had never met them in my life before were prepared by God to reactivate me and they came just at the right moment in my life when I was willing and ready to make these changes." It was pretty special for me to see how that process works. First we heard the capacitation from president Douglas to talk and pray with the president of the branch and ask for three names of priesthood holders who we could help reactivate. We found the other two but couldn't find Alcenio partly because we didn't know where he lived. We kept trying to schedule a time to go with the branch president to show us where he lives but one day we went on our own asking where he lives. We found him and just got to know him. Then in the next lessons we had planned, and when we started the lesson I felt prompted to flat out ask him about the word of wisdom and we spent the entire lesson working out a plan so that he could change his habits with lots of drugs. We made the plans and then things just started falling into place. He was able to find a job that he works most of the days, and he moved and was able to find an apartment. We bought him a white shirt so that he would feel comfortable to come to church and now he brought his slacks and tie to his house and now he even has church shoes. It has been going great. The members are now more excited to work with us to try to reactivate more of the less actives. With the new changes in the branch elders quorum and mission leader we should be receiving more support from the branch so that is going great.

On Saturday Pres. and Hermana Douglas made a surprise visit to our zone leadership meeting they said that after the "Day of Cleaning" They checked a couple of the houses and they were horrible so they gave us all cleaner and sponges, and told us to clean our house really good because Elder Cornish is going to chech a couple of them. So that was pretty funny with the missionaries saying things like wow how imbarrassing that the mission president has to give the missionaries soap to clean their houses. It was pretty nice because we had just a little bit left so they gave us some more.
Sounds like everything is going great at home. I hope that you guys eat as much candy as you possible can just brush your teeth good. I finished all the chocolate that you guys gave me which was really nice. Keep up all the hard work with school and instruments and sports. I love you all tons and hope that you have an amazing week this coming week!
Con Amor
Elder Cannon