Week 12 Learning to be a Leader

September 28, 2015 Hello family, Well we are already here at the start of another week, and another Monday. It is weird how quickly the time is going by, pretty soon I will have been out for 3 months. Crazy. Also a happy birthday shoutout to Zig, Stephen, Jim, and Andy. What a birthday loaded week. I wish I could have been able to celebrate with you guys! But I am really enjoying my time here and am still loving Crescent City. I have really come to appreciate my bishop, Bishop Ralphs. He is such a great guy and is such an exemplary servant of Jesus Christ. My Ward Mission Leader is also a great guy, Brother Tinsley. He can be a bit over the top at times but he means well and I have heard he is one of the best Ward Mission Leaders in the mission. The ward is awesome too. We have got several members of the Elders Quorum and High Priests that are very willing to go out to lessons with us. I don't want to be transferred I love it here. But I also can't wait to see what the rest of the mission is like. I have heard that it is different up here than every other place in the mission. I don't know what that means, but apparently it just is. I don't know how often you guys see Nick Foster but I would love to hear if he has anybody up here for me to teach that maybe he has taught in the past. Anyways, Monday was an interesting day. I have some good pictures from it. We went down by Klamath, and went to the drive through tree. Yup, the drive through tree. It was so sweet. We drove a car through a tree. Pretty nuts. These Redwoods can get pretty dang big. Pretty cool. We also tried to go to a thing called trees of mystery, and they had a giant sasquatch statue that we got sweet pictures with. It was crazy. Pretty funny stuff. On Tuesday, neither ward really had much to do during the day, so we went tracting in the other wards area right by our house. Pretty uneventful but it is right by the beach so that was cool. Tuesday night we went over to Ervin's again. Everytime we go over there he has a funny or awesome story for us from his "Thug Life" days. I love going over there. I just love that guy, I can't explain it. I'm sure those of you that have served missions know what I am talking about. Wednesday we went up to Smith River and I took Elder Waites. I took him up to the Oregon Border and got some good pictures there. We also gave Velva a blessing while we were up there. She has something wrong with her and the doctors can't figure it out. I hope she is doing well. We also had a lesson with Jonah, the former Jew who is Egyptian. He is a cool guy but not progressing at all. Apparently he had a baptismal date when Nick was here so I don't know when that will be reinstated. That was a long time ago, almost a year ago. We also did service again for the same people, and it was awesome, like a little mini miracle. While we were working we talked about the Gospel with him, as we have the last few times. And near the end, we were pretty much finished doing what we were doing that day, and he said come on lets go inside and have a soda and talk about this for the last 15 minutes or so. It was awesome. He is very critical and cynical about it while we were talking about it, but knows that he is, and is still willing to talk to us. He says that he is very interested in it and so far it seems to him that the church runs a lot on common sense, and that he hasn't found any flaws in it so far. I really think that with due time and studying it out he will come to know the truthfulness of it and be baptized. We gave him a restoration pamphlet and he said he was going to read it and that we can talk about it next time, which is this Wednesday. I am excited for that lesson. We were also supposed to have a lesson that night with a lady that is of the Wiccan religion. It is some different religion thing but she is very nice and is willing to listen to what we have to say. We didn't end up teaching her though, because she was sick, but we are hopefully having a lesson with her on Wednesday. I am excited. Thursday, we had 2 member present lessons, which is pretty dang good. Usually we get about 1-2 during a whole week, so 2 in one day was awesome. Turns out those were the only ones for the week, but it still felt pretty good at the end of the day. One was with our investigator that is progressing well, but we haven't seen for almost a month. She is still doing very well, and is praying about and reading the Book of Mormon consistently. I think she will be the ward's next baptism. She just needs to quit smoking though, but we haven't taught her the word of wisdom yet. That will probably be the next lesson with her. We then had a lesson with a woman that we met at Walmart that came to church last Sunday, and that went well. We had 3 members there helping us out and it was awesome. Some of the members, the Fultons, used to live in Richfield and they say that they used to be in Richard's ward. I wonder if he knows them. Friday, we didn't have much to do during the day. We did a bunch of the district leader stuff that Elder Smith had to do, which was boring. That night we didn't have much to do either, that seemed to happen a lot this week. I don't know if it is me not planning things well enough, or what but it sucks not having anything to do. Cause then you have to just go tracting which is not effective, and you can't street contact here, because nobody is ever on the streets here. It doesn't do much to street contact. Saturday we did a bunch of service. We did almost 3 hours in the morning for a ward community service project down the street, then in the afternoon we went with Ervin and did service for his boss. It was fun doing service with him. He is hilarious. Such a gangster, he was showing us his sweet stereo system in his car. It was bumpin. Sunday we had church as usual. It was a normal Sunday, except we ate dinner outside because the husband was off doing volunteer fire calls, because he is one of the volunteer firefighters for the area. He is a cool guy too. Overall it was a fast week, but the work was semi slow. I don't know if there is something I need to do better, but I am going to keep doing by best and hope to receive answers at general conference. Also, I am betting on the new apostles to be Clayton, Rasband, and Causse, the french dude. Anyways it will be exciting to see who it is. I love you all and look forward to hearing from you all again. Love, Elder Hatch