45th Letter: "HAPPY THANKSGIVING"

ME FAMILIA!! 

Man how many times do I have to say I love being able to hear from you all!! Thank you so much for your letters and for everything that you do!!! I truly do have the greatest family ever and I mean that!! :) It sounds like everyone is doing great which is good to hear! Keep living the gospel and everthing will continue to go great!! Well I was super bummed to see that you all went to Forgotten Carols without me... haha jk I just miss it!! I am sure it was wonderful as usual!! I am guessing that Amanda and Tiff were still talking about the singer and how wonderful he was! They always did!! Then as soon as they would get home they would I tunes him and become the biggest fan!!

So things on my end have been ok.... This area is tough!! Definitely has been the hardest area of my mission so far. Currently basically the whole zone is really not doing very well. The Stake leadership is super awesome and geared towards missionary work, but man in all honesty this ward and most of the wards in the stake are really struggling with being engaged in the missionary efforts, and I say that even though there are tons of members coming out to lessons with us and they feed us really well. But the one thing that is really holding things back is the leadership of the ward doesn't see missionary work as something to be to focused on right now which is sad! So that has definitely been the number one topic on my mind is how to help get the work moving forward here... obviously! I have complete faith that the Lord is just waiting to poor out blessings into this area and I know that if we just continue to work hard that great things will happen. But the reason I let you all know is because of all of the wonderful missionaries and Bishops that I have in my family. I would love some advice of how that interaction has been for you all. Please!!

So needless to say Elder Black (my awesome companion) and I have been really focused on finding new investigators, which definitely isn't my most favorite thing to do as a missionary, but I know that that is where everything all starts!! And that is where most miracles occur, or at least that is what I have seen on my mission so far. And one such miracle happened this last week as we were contacting former investigators. So we went to this formers apartment whose name was Monica Sanchez, she had a solid teaching record that both me and Elder Black noticed on two different occasions looking through the area book. We both wrote here name down of someone to go see and so we did just that. We knocked on the door and this white lady in her mid-50s comes to the door so I immediately thought this wasnt Monica which is usually the case when contacting FI but we talked with this lady and we find out that Monica moved out about 3 months prior. We did the usual contacting thing with her asking if she was interested in meeting with us and she said "this is a God moment" "last week I was looking through the phone book at the different churches, thinking of which one I should try out but none of them interested me, I was praying that I would know which one I should look more into, and now here you are at my door." She said that we could come back and we went and taught her yesterday and gave her a Book of Mormon which she was super excited to read. She said that since we had left she was researching our church on mormon.org and it answered a lot of her questions. This was definitely a miracle for me!!
 

Well Family I love you a ton!! FYI Thanksgiving was pretty great, definitely not the same, but thats alright!! Take Care

Love Elder Barrus

ps Pray for new investigators!!!!