May 23, 2011 - Letter Home

When you get kicked off....
Hey family! It's another transfer today and I have the luck of staying with my awesome companion Elder Persinger in this area for the next 6 weeks! My hope is that I can stay here until The End. I am excited. There are a lot of reasons for wanting to stay here. We had a lofty goal of baptizing this last transfer and while we worked our pants off (not literally like Brendon did though... :P) alot of baptismal goals got canceled and right now we're without definite plans, but we have reason to beleive this next transfer will include miracles. The first reason is because we feel like the Lord is preparing something for us. The second reason is that President called us Friday night to congratulate the awesome numbers we got this whole transfer and promised us that we would baptize this next transfer. Yeah! We're gonna go for it!

We had a couple cool experiences this week, the first or foremost was our visit with Rafael and his family of 5, our next door neighboors, who the missionaries have taught a bunch and have given up on at times, but we had a sweet visit with him where he said he was finally understanding what the missionaries were trying to pass to him and his family and he said he would read and pray to receive an answer about the BoM. If you can just write the names "Rafael and Janice" on the prayer roll at the temple for me I'll be super happy because they need a miracle. We love them and their kids so much we're always messing around with them and we got the 3 kids, boys of 15, 14, and 9 to church and to the English class we teach this week. Sweet! I want to see them all serve missions one day! This week we made a basketball hoop in the front of our house and taught those and other kids basketball and the youngest, Matteus, really loves us and is excited about the church. It would be the best thing to see an entire family like them be baptized!

Weird thing happened with Matteus the other day, we were walking back from our English class and we saw a horse tied up and we went to go pet it and Matteus just got a little bit close to the horse and suddenly it leaps forward and tries to bite him! Matteus fell on the ground and we freaked out and pushed the horse out of the way and got Matteus out of there but it was crazy! One violent horse! Matteus is good now though and we joke with him that he's going to turn into a werehorse at the next full moon. :)

horseness

We did a pretty sweet thing this week. We were with some other kids from the ward kicking around a football (soccer ball) after English class and we saw some other kids in the park doing the same thing so we CHALLENGED THEM! We said that if we won, they'd have to go to church, and if they won, they could take our scriptures... (heh heh win/win) It was a hard game and those other kids were pros, but in the end we pulled it all out and BEAT them! Yeah! It was so sweet! They said they'd go to church - but they didn't - but we see them like every day on the street so something'll come out of it prolly.

We had a sweet super district meeting the other day where everyone in our zone rescheduled their lunch to other days so we could make a huge feast and eat it all together in the chapel. It was fun! We made cookies for everyone. Someone else brought a cool indian food meal. It was Elder Olsen's last district meeting and he's going home tomorrow and it was pretty sad because he's an awesome missionary and was pretty broken up about leaving. He gave a way cool spiritual goodbye talk. After, we played soccer with a basketball in a super slippery smaller basketball court with our church shoes on and with single chairs as goals and it was super fun. "Slipball" we call it. The hardest part of the game was just staying on your feet and not running into others.

Fun times.

Anyway, the work is slipping and stumbling on! Nothing can stop it! I'm expecting big things from this next transfer so your prayers would be super appreciated! I gotta change this area!

I'm SUPER EXCITED about the awesome college schedule my parents set up for me and I am so pumped to get home running! It's so cool to be so close to the temple where we're gonna live! I just can't wait to be with my family but I know it'll come soon enough so I'm gonna just keep running running runnin until that day! I am so thankful for your e-mails and support and hope you all can keep running as well and can really try to think of the example of our Savior as much as possible throughout the day, because there are so many opportunities to serve and to feel His love and that's the only way we will be able to have truly true happiness in our lives. Live it!

Very much love for you all!

Your Elder,
Connor Carpenter
 
P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgOBL1-bwA
http://youtu.be/BX9pPscxlXw  (the view gets better towards the end, be patient)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_NZRDlZ1Q8