A letter from Elder Pelton July 11, 2011

This week has been a push since it is close to transfers. Everything always slows down in the last two weeks so this week was full of tracting and not much teaching again. It really sucks because this message is so amazing - people here really need it! I will be patient with this area. I know the Lord has something in store for this week!
Speaking of being patient, goodness! My companion drives me crazy all the time! "Mister -obey- the- law -of- the- land but not even driving the speed limit!" He bothers me all the time, but am not judging him. He is a good guy. Sorry back on topic: the 4th was very uneventful cause in this town, you can't have fireworks that fly and explode in the air. All the good ones are out, and we only heard what was going on cause it doesn't get dark till almost 9, so we were still up doing our planning. That same day, we had a 3 hour lesson with one of our investigators. I tried to end it 3 times but it kept on going. We did have a drunk guy walk into the church on Sunday that we talked to on the street a few time. He lives down on the river in a tent and we had an appointment with him but he never showed up and we have not seen him around town at all. MOST of the days are filled with failed attempts to see people.
We had our Zone Conference this week and it was very humbling and spiritual. It covered a lot on our teaching as companionships and our attitude. One of the classes talked about how we can control our attitude towards the day and what thoughts make us down. We can not control the elements and how much people yell at us, but we can control how much of an affect it has on our mind and attitude. That one really helped me out because I get flustered a lot now. The other class was on how much doctrine are we teaching during the lesson. If we are having hour long lessons, we need to cover all the doctrine. All the lessons can be taught in less than three minutes so we should be having more lessons that are 30 minutes long. It helped me realize how much of the doctrine I really don't remember. They used the example of the pearl of great price - how the doctrine in the lesson is the pearl and the added on words is the box the pearl is in. We need to be teaching more about the pearl and not the box. Then President Bunker got up and talked about Jonathan and David in the Bible how close they were and how jealous Saul was for David's success. He related it to how we should not be jealous of other missionaries successes and how our companionships should be knitted together like Jonathan and David.
We have had a lot of success tracting, surprising isn't it? We have picked up a lot of really awesome potential people that we have return appointments with for this week. So this week should be good but I am not promising any really awesome stories for next week. I did get yelled at when we knocked on some guy's house. He came to the door and said " I don't want to talk to you. I am not interested and go away and never come back!" That might not be an exact quote but close. I was going to put a card on the door because I asked if I could give him one before he closed the door but he said no. So I was about to leave it on the door handle to his screen door, when he opened the door again and yelled at me to not leave anything on his door. I pulled it away before he opened it all the way so it did not look like I was leaving anything. That was fun. That is the excitement for the week! I love you all and God Bless. Andrew