March 26. 2012

Hello Everyone,

Well this week was really uneventful. Not much at all really happened. There were a few good and a lot of really hard times.

We had a lot of appointments scheduled for this week, but as it goes, most of them cancelled. When people cancel or don't show up for appointments, its not only discouraging that we didn't get to teach that person, but it means that we have to go tracting or street contacting which is basically useless. It's a time filler that only works a tiny fraction of the time that we do it. We've been trying to work throught the branch, but no one really has friends or neighbors to refer us to because all of the fences, spikes and dogs prevent people from interacting with eachother. There are people here who have lived in their homes for years and have never met their neighbors. It's kind of strange. I can't imagine not being curious about who my next door neighbor is. The people here in this area are very reclusive.

There were a couple of good things that happened though. We ended up trading literature with a Jehova's Whitness yesterday and the book he gave us is called "What does the Bible really teach?" We've been reading it here and there and it is completely rediculous. It really feels like a child wrote it. It's funny because a lot of the doctrines taught in the book contradict eachother. If you ever get a chance to pick one up and read it, do it. It's really funny actually.

We also met a few very prepared investigators. The first's name is Tom Celleirs, and he's a methodist, but he's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. I had only met him once and he invited us over for a Braai, which is basically a traditional South African barbeque. We gave him a pamphlet on the Restoration, and he ended up looking up on the internet information about Joseph Smith and the church, which usually would be a bad thing, but he seems to be good at picking out the rediculous claims made by antis. We gave him a Book of Mormon at our last visit and he said that he was really excited to read it.

The second set of investigators are a couple of sisters who actually contacted the President Omer to get more information about the church. It was crazy how prepared they were to hear our message. The main one who is interested is the older sister named Thandi. She had a few concerns from her own research, but nothing that Elder Dalton and I were not able to explain. I can totally imagine these sisters already being baptized. It was probably one of the highlights of my week.

That's about all that happend this week though. Nothing interesting at all happened beside the things I've already mentioned.

I love you all and hope you have an awesome week. I know that the Lord blesses me in all of my efforts to follow him, and I know that it is the same for all of his children.

Thank you for everything.

Elder Balmforth