12-6-08

Hey Everybody,

Things are going well here. I want to respond to the last letters and tape before I tell about my week. Happy Birthday, Camille. I can’t believe you’ll be a mom in 4 months. Dad, thanks for your letters and other stuff you sent me.

My Thanksgiving was good. We ate at a member’s house who, luckily, is a good cook. Thanks for the genealogy. It’s interesting. Kenneth Merrill looks like you, Jay. And good try on the lunch idea with me, oh well. Thanks everybody for talking on the tape. Sean, nice work on being a Priest—that’s cool. I’m sure you’re bigger than I am by now. Funny story about Drew. For now, Scott, you’ll have to fill in for my position of “big cool guy” with the cousins. Good luck with all you’re doing right now, Scott. Everybody else, thanks for the letters.

This week was another good one. I’m not sure if I wrote about Mike’s dream already. We saw Mike and his family a few days ago and he told us about a dream he’d had. Before I tell how it went, I just want to say that I’m not adding anything into it. This is what he told us. It starts out and he’s on a path and behind him are demons that are trying to grab him and stop him and he’s running away from them and he sees this light up ahead. He’s trying to get to the light while he’s struggling to get away from the demons. As he’s going up the path, he sees trails off to the side and some of his old friends and gangster buddies are on them and they’re calling him over. Mike said he knew he wanted to get towards the light but that he ended up getting sucked into a few of these trails that went down and away from the light. After a while, he got back on the path and was determined to make it while the demons were still after him. As he got closer to the light, he could hear my voice and Elder Martineau’s voice inviting him in and he heard his kids laughing. The dream ends and he wakes up and was freaked out. He said he was sweating and then he got this calm feeling and knew that he was doing a good thing in getting his family into church. Then he went back to sleep. Pretty nuts. I’m not sure I would have believed this story if it was anybody besides Mike telling it. He’s a pretty straightforward guy. When he told us he heard our voices, Martineau and I looked at each other with did-you-hear-that looks on our faces. We’ve been talking with the whole family and teaching them and they’ll all be baptized here pretty soon, which is exciting. They’re an awesome family.

A guy we were teaching and taking to church about two months ago, Denny, has had a pretty rough time lately. We took him from the homeless shelter to church a couple of times and we were talking with him a few times a week and then he started getting shady and would avoid us. This was about 6 weeks ago. We’re teaching two other guys in the same shelter so we would see him occasionally, but for some reason he didn’t want to talk to us anymore. We found out yesterday through the guys we’re teaching there that he’d started drinking again a few weeks ago and that he’d gotten caught and kicked out of the shelter yesterday, on his birthday. I was bummed out to hear that. Last night about 9, I got a call on our phone from Denny. He was using a phone at the fire station and wanted to talk with us. We went back downtown and talked with him for a while. It was pretty sad. We couldn’t help him with a place to stay, and it gets cold at night here. He showed us pictures of him when he was a rock star in the 1970’s in NYC. He used to play shows with the Ramones and Blondie back in the day. Hopefully this rock bottom will get him going in the right direction again. There are a lot of homeless people downtown and I know almost all of them. I have a much stronger testimony of the Word of Wisdom because of this place.

On the brighter side, things are good up here. Christmas time is great. We got a tree at Goodwill for $10 and some lights for free, so it’s nice and festive. We should get snow in the next few weeks, that’ll be cool. I’m learning a lot.

Love,

Nate