June 8, 2009

Note from Bryan's dad: Sorry it's been awhile since I've updated the blog. I'll try to do better about being prompt getting information out here.

Hey, so this week has definitely been interesting. No baptism still. We're just going to have to wait on Matt to work things out himself. He did however say that we could go up with him to Woodbury to help demolish whats left of his parents trailer and then help them start framing a house that their going to build there. So that'll be fun and hopefully it'll help him out. We've given him the stop smoking workshop and it did absolutely nothing for him, or I guess I should say he did nothing with it. He doesn't have a desire to quit smoking, but he does have a desire to be baptized so instead of trying to get his desire to quit smoking to grow we've decided to make his desire to be baptized grow until it'll overpower his smoking habit. I think its in Alma, I don't know the verse but to paraphrase it it says, the word of God has a more powerful effect on changing someones behavior and desires then anything else including the sword. So that's what we'll be trying to do. We've been printing off conference talks and giving them to him to read and we're trying to get a DVD made of a handful of talks throughout the years on hope and enduring and the atonement's power to help us change. Hopefully he'll latch on to something that we teach and will be reminded of the Spirit that he felt when President Monson spoke. So that's the update on Matt.

Ben fell off the face of the earth again and we assume that he's in California because he didn't come to church yesterday. Then Tommy is visiting his mom in Kentucky, and Barbra and Norman were taking care of their grandchildren last week so we didn't get to see them.

So the real kicker for last week was this. On Wednesday we had district meeting and Elder Pearson (The other district leader) was in charge and he went over about 30 min, and then the other companionship in his district and the sisters in my district HAD to use the library for some stuff. So we didn't get out of district meeting until an hour after we were supposed to. So we were super late for our appointment we had after district meeting. So we jump on our bikes in our suits and rush over there. We know that Thomas (our appointments name) cant meet with us right then, but we want to set up a return appointment. So we jump off our bikes run up to the front door as he's leaving walk with him around to the back where his car is, talk with him for about 5 min set up a return appointment. When we walk around to the front of the yard my bike was gone. So someone ran up and stole my bike during the 5 min we were behind his house. I'm really sorry that we didn't have it locked up, we filed a police report and they said they'd be on the lookout for it, but for the time being I don't have a bike. So we spent the last half of the week walking everywhere. One of the members in the ward said that they have a bike that I can borrow for a while and they also said that the mission might be able to replace it because her son's bike got hit by a car and they replaced it. I'll talk to the mission president about it this Wednesday at zone conference. Then Leah, our neighbor, she works as a manager at two apartment complexes and she said that every summer they do a clean out for their bike racks and they usually end up with about 10 bikes that no one will claim. So she said that she'd give me one of them and then wanted to donate the rest of them to the mission. So I have a few options for getting a bike for the rest of my mission at least. I'm still really bummed out though that the one we bought got stolen. So again I'm sorry I didn't lock it up, at 2 in the afternoon I figured that it would be fine for 5 min or so. I guess I was wrong though.

Well I love you guys and thanks for your words of encouragement.

Love Elder Carpenter