September 17th 2012

Hey mom and dad,

Thats good to hear that you guys are having a good time going bowling and stuff...its obvious that you guys are improving, keep it up! and doing service is always a great thing, it just leaves you with a happy feeling. For instance, a while back(about a month or so ago) I had the chance to help someone clean out their garage!!! it was super messy but I knew that she definitely needed help so I took charge and we cleaned it out, at least the best we could with the time we had...but things like that are always rewarding because you know that you made someones day a little brighter.

Thats too bad that you got cut one of your zoology classes, but hopefully your new pre-ap class will be good too. Is it nicer having a smaller amount of students? It seems like it would be much easier to teach for there understanding.

As for me...in response to the question you had, the family from egypt are christians. I think what they said was, egyptian orthodox. But we haven't met with them again yet. At the time they were very excited to read and study the book of mormon beacuse they hadn't heard much about it until they came to america. BUt yeah, this week was pretty good...It was actually really busy, on tuesday we went to the temple..sadly we were late to our session so we got permission to do baptisms until the next session, so that was pretty cool. On thursday we had a half mission conference where we met in meniffe to listen to Elder Pieper of the seventy. I really enjoyed learning new things from him, especially since i've been looking for answers to things lately, and he was able to help me answer some of my questions. On saturday we attended a funeral for a lady from one of the other wards in the stake, Elder Alo used to serve with her and so we came to support the event and it was actually a very nice service, its sad to see death but this family understood the plan of salvation well and because of it they were able to cope with the pain a little easier. And then yesterday we had a missionary fireside, which was way cool, there were many converts throughout the stake who gave talks and bore their testimonies, its a blessing to be able to see that happen. So yeah, we had many events take place this week!!! It made it more difficult to get work done...but we were still able to teach 20 lessons in the week, so i'm happy about that. This morning I read from Alma 5, its a blessing to have the scriptures and as I read I felt good, It poses many thought provoking questions...but I find it a great way to evaluate how things are going so then I can improve, so i'm excited about that. Elder Alo and I are gonna do some great work this week.
I know that the only way to succeed is to keep your eye single to the glory of god by reading the scriptures, so my goal is to find news way to incorporate scripture studying throughout the day, we'll see how it goes. But i've gotta get going now, thanks for the news...and have a good week!!!

Love, Elder Farnsworth