Hey Mom and Dad and Everybody,
Our work is going good, really good.Wwe have seven people on date in four days. Not too shabby! And I think half of them will be baptized this transfer. We’re going to have to get them to church without fail for the rest of the transfer and they’re going to have to be baptized on March 7th, the last Saturday, which would be awesome because I want to baptize somebody on my birthday. I want to baptize 22 people on my birthday, but one will do. And then a couple of them want to make sure we do it because there’s a pretty good chance that Elder Dunn and I will be leaving the area. So I’ll be leaving, probably, because this will be six months that I’ve been in the same area, minus three weeks in Marysville. That got a couple of them to want to be baptized cause I told them “I’m going to be leaving on the 10th, ya gotta get baptized.” And they’re like, “All right, I’ll get baptized.” It was great.
It’s tough in Mt. Vernon because the majority of people we work with are transient and low income, which isn’t rare for the mission, because the more humble people are more receptive. We try tracting the regular areas, not like the upper-class areas because those are pretty hard, but we try tracking the medium areas, about half-way up the hill and usually aren’t able to get a whole lot there. It’s kind of sad that even the middle-class people aren’t willing to listen. There’s a lot of churches around here too, and I’d say about 75-80% of them are anti. So if they belong to another church, chances are they’re already heard the speel in a different way. So it’s kind of tough, but we’re getting better at it. We’re getting more effective than I’ve ever been. We’re able to have longer conversations at doors.
We have this thing called “standards” in the mission which is the Seven Standards of Excellence and it’s certain things you’re supposed to achieve every week and every transfer and it to make sure the mission is going well and it’s a way to rate ourselves if we’re making standards. Fun Five, talk to 10, that’s number one. Talk to 10 is for two companions, but since we have 3 companions, it’s talk to 15 for us. The second is seven hours of tracting at least every week. The third one is teach 20 lessons a week with at least seven having members present, and for it to be considered a lesson, it has to have a prayer at the end and it has to cover at least two principles and last at least 10-15 minutes, so you can do them on doorsteps, but it’s tough. But it happens a lot. We get three lessons a day, usually with a member present, or at the end of the week we’ll take Priests (16-18 year-old boys) out and we’ll just go tract or to teaching appointments and get like for member appointments in a day. Seven is one baptism per missionary per transfer. Number six is two new people on date every week. Number five is one investigator to Sacrament Meeting who’s progressing, meaning they’re keeping their commitments. They need to have one per missionary at Sacrament Meeting every week. And then number four is find five new investigators every week. A new investigator is someone who has been taught a first lesson and they have a return appointment. So if you do those things then you hit standards, and we want everybody in our whole zone to hit standards every week because we have one of the best zones and all the areas are great and so we kind of push towards that. We made standards the last two weeks.
Elder Larsen is legit! He is one of the best missionaries out here. He’s really humble too, which is the great part. He’s a good zone leader. One of the things we did—cause we have one of the best zones in the mission and we should be the highest performing zone this transfer. And so we made this thing called…it’s kind of like Moroni’s Title of Liberty. We have a Title of Faith in the mission that says we’re going to baptize 1000 people and we had a whole zone conference about it and we talked about how we could do it and set out sights higher and everybody in the whole zone signed this big sheet that had 1000 baptisms on it, and that was like our mission Title of Faith. And we did a zone Title of Success. We had things like working hard, being obedient, having faith, making a specific sacrifice this transfer to reach your baptismal goal on top of being obedient. And we had everybody in the whole zone sign it and we gave each companionship one to put in their apartment so when they wake up they can be like “yah, alright.” So that was cool.
Elder Dunn is a good missionary and is really motivated to work hard and be obedient and have success. He’s really positive. He’s from some city next to Poway in San Diego. But he’s a good missionary.
The ward’s good. We had a Young Woman’s fundraiser the other day to help all these girls be able to go to camp and they auctioned off all these desserts everybody had made and they were going for $20 and $30 and they were making a lot of money. It was great.
We invited two investigators but neither of them showed up, but we stayed for a while and we were sitting in the back and every family that was there had these little silent auction things with their names on it on like a popsicle stick, so they could hold it up during the auction, and we didn’t have one, so I grabbed this big heart off the table (it was on the Friday before Valentine’s Day) and I wrote “The Elders” on the heart and I took a fork and poked it through the bottom of it. A lady gave us $20 a while ago and we’d spent $12, so we had $8 and I said, “Elder, we’ve got $8 and we’re going to start auctioning, but we’re not going to start at $2.” So at $8 we’d put our heart up and then somebody would go to $15 right after that, so we never actually won anything. And then after that we started holding our car keys up and they all cracked up. It was pretty funny. And then because of our efforts, people would start bidding, and they wouldn’t really want them, but then they would just bring them over to us. There was this platter of chocolate covered strawberries and somebody won and brought it over—it was awesome. Then we got a cake and a pie and another cake. So we had four platters of dessert out in front of us and there was Elder Dunn, Elder Larsen, me, Elder King and Elder Simmons from the Mt. Vernon 2nd Ward. We’re all there just chomping down. It was great!
There’s a girl who’s 14 in the ward who comes to church every week. She goes to girls’ camp. She in Young Women in Excellence, she bears her testimony, she gives talks. She’s not a member though because her mom won’t let her get baptized until she’s 18. The mom has a big-time chip on her shoulder because she got a divorce from her husband who was a member and so it’s her against him, and if her daughter gets baptized then he wins. So she’s being very childish about it. Missionaries have tried getting her there in the past, but the mom flips out the harder the missionaries try, so we’re just talking to the daughter and talking to the fellowshippers and playing it cool and fasting and praying for her and hoping that her mom softens up cause we heard news that she was softening up a couple of weeks ago. We’re hoping that as we do these things, we can help speed up that process and get her baptized before we leave. If her mom said “OK,” she could get baptized the next day and there would be no questions asked, so we’re going to work hard towards that.
I went on exchanges with Elder Kinzer, one of the guys in my room from the MTC -- it was great. Last week he put nobody on date, he taught seven lessons, he found three new investigators, pretty low numbers, so he definitely didn’t get close to making standards, and then the day I went out with him, we were still on a bike and we were walking around tracting and we taught five lessons with two recent convert less-active lessons, so seven lessons total. We found three new investigators and we put one guy on date, so it was a great day and he was amazed at the potential of his area. I’m like, “you can do this every single day. You can hit standards, no problem, and if you can get five lessons in a week that’s great” That’s better than our area. We rarely get over four. So that was cool to go out there and help him out. He’s still kind of struggling. And then there’s another young companionship in Anacortes that we’re going to go on exchanges with. We’ve gotta help our zone.
I forgot to mention that I had a really cool experience the other day. I was tracting with a Priest and we were knocking on all these doors. We had been knocking on doors for 40 minutes and nobody had really been interested. We’d given pamphlets out, we’d stretched out conversations for like five minutes, trying to give them lessons. We were kind of giving up realizing they just wanted to close the door, and we hadn’t had much luck at home, and a lot of people weren’t home, so we knocked on a couple more doors and then nobody answered and I was trying to focus on being positive at the door. I was having to work for it. So we walked away from a door and I said, “Alright. One of these next houses is going to be money. It’s going to be great.” And we got all excited about it. “Yah, it’s going to be sweet.” And then right after that, this garage door opens up at the house across the street and this dude is standing there and we walk over to him and we said “Hey, we’re missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we want to share a message about Christ with you.” And he’s like, “Yah, sounds great. I’d be happy to have you guys over later.” And so we got his contact information and we’re going to see him this week. He seems really cool and really solid. So it was awesome. It was awesome!
I went to the San Juans last week to help out a senior couple who didn’t have a lot going on, and we put a couple of people on date and saw some people and taught some lessons. But it was snowing out there. I went out there and thought it was going to be like sugar cane and gumdrops and children dancing, and it was snowing, and we were in a trailer park. And it was still good though. We were kind of ill-prepared for the snow. We walked around getting snowed on. It wasn’t the first time it happened and it won’t be the last.
Thanks for the letters. Thanks for the support. I love you all. Thank you all for the support. Thank you for encouraging me to go on a mission. This has been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve learned more than I ever have before. Even if it were to end today. If this mission were to get shut down and I went home, I would be a different person. This has been great. I’ve grown a lot and I’ve grown to appreciate the Gospel and my upbringing more because of it.
But thanks for everything. I appreciate everything. Camille: good luck with those babies. I know you’re getting pretty close. And Sam: good luck with those babies, and Connie: good luck with those babies, and Jeff: good luck with those babies. Everybody else: good luck with your current endeavors. Good luck with Lakeshore Dad. Sounds like you’re working hard on that. I hope it works out. Hope all your hard work pays off. It will.
Thanks everybody and GO GET ‘EM!
Love, Elder Packer
