We have one really promising investigator, his name is Dylan. He is the person that contacted us a few weeks ago and asked to meet with us. We met with him on Wednesday morning with David, and it went really well. Apparently he is friends with some members in a nearby ward and so they told him he should call the missionaries. He is really smart and catches on quickly and he seems really open about the whole thing. We put him on date for November 29th for baptism, and as far as we can tell that won't be a problem. We have another lesson with him tonight and we'll set one up for later this week. Also, he came to church on Sunday, which was super awesome. But we soon realized that this week was Fast & Testimony Meeting which always puts a little bit of fear in a missionary's heart from what Dad has told me. But it was actually a really good meeting, no 20 minutes stories with no point or anything like that, just a lot of members of all ages who got up and shared their testimony about reading the scriptures or praying, which is really cool because those are the things we're asking Dylan to do. We'll see tonight if he has read over the chapters we asked him to, but I have a feeling he has, he seems really committed. When the Sacrament was passed around he didn't take it, but he leaned over and told me "I'll wait until after I'm baptized to take it." He will get baptized as long as we teach him well and he feels ready to make that commitment.
As for the rest of the week, there were a couple other cool experiences. One night we went by a less active member that we had been asked to visit. She was really friendly and told us all about her conversion story and experience with the Church. She met David O. McKay when she was about 10 years old, and she wasn't even a member at that point. She just always went to church with a friend, and their family had 8 kids so people barely even noticed one more she said. It was also really good timing because she is having surgery soon and she wanted us to make sure that she was able to get a priesthood blessing beforehand. So we are working on locating her home teachers.
We get a lot of members of the high priest group that go on splits with us. Normally we have one of them out with us once or twice a week. That's nice because a lot of them have lived in this ward forever and as such know a lot of people we don't and can help a lot with the reactivation part of the work. We normally just take them along as a team-up rather than splitting up because we don't have a lot of specific names to go by and we feel bad just driving around to a bunch of places where people might not be home.
Also, exchanges were really fun. I was on exchanges with Elder Ferrin again, but this time I went to his area. That meant I had to spend the night at a different apartment for the first time, which was a lot of fun. He lives in a 4-man with the Temescal Valley elders so we had plenty to talk about. It was sort of hard to be in a Spanish area and not know any Spanish, I mostly just talked to members' kids because they know English and Spanish. But we also just did some walking and talking for a couple hours and if I understood right, the standard conversation started out with Elder Ferrin saying something along the lines of "You speak Spanish? Whoa, me too and I need to practice! This kid doesn't know any Spanish though, haha." I thought it was sort of funny, and I can understand quite a bit of the easy conversational Spanish but when it comes to speaking I'm too shy and over think it so I didn't try to speak very much. That was the day we went to In-And-Out, and for dinner we went to Temescal Valley's Halloween party which was a lot of fun. They had some really awesome costumes as well.
On Halloween we had a Zone Activity starting at 6:00. So we all went to the stake center and played board games and card games and basketball and frisbee and whatever else people felt like. I learned how to play some fun games from Elder Meacham, Monopoly Deal and Five Crowns. He also has Bang but he didn't bring it to the activity. I can't imagine what it must be like to be in a mission where your area might be as big as an entire zone is here. We see other missionaries pretty much every day, but in some missions they probably only see other missionaries at activities and meetings.
I did receive a bunch of mail on Halloween. I guess the Zone Leaders had made a trip up to Riverside recently so they picked up all the mail for us and delivered it after the blitz. Thank you for everything in there, it gives me more stuff to put on my bulletin board (I'll take a picture of it next week and send it to you. I also got a letter from the Perkes, Sister Foreman, Corban, and Scott that day.
On Sunday we attended the baptism the Corona Sisters were having. It was for a 90 year old lady named Betty. Apparently a lot of her kids and grand-kids are members so the room was full of all her family and ward friends which was really awesome. I was part of a musical number. I played the piano while the Sisters and a couple of Elders sang 'A Child's Prayer'. I thought it was really awesome. There's nothing quite like going to a baptismal service to get you excited as a missionary.
See you soon,
Elder Cornaby
"Get on your knees and pray, then get on your feet and work." -Gordon B. Hinckley