Hey family! sorry for writing you today instead of monday. Today was the famous temple pday! It was awesome. The Los Angeles temple I think is my most favorite temple. It is gorgeous and I love going back to it. It was Elder Lee’s first time going to the temple here in Los Angeles and he loved it as well…..It is great news that Aunt Louise is out of the hospital. I am glad that she is doing better. It is a blessing that she is better. Prayers are going out to her from the temple here as well….. I can’t believe it is almost a year for me. I am turning old out here in the mission. I can’t believe Brett has hit his year mark. The Gillette’s hit their year mark earlier this month and Landon Brough hit his year mark in October. Haha. So my friends are turning old in their missions as well. Have you heard anything about Mitch if he has gone back out on his mission? I pray for him everyday. He is a real good friend of mine. Spencer Willett is gone? geez. Where is the world coming to? Time flies so fast… Well I am glad that the kids are still doing good. Sounds like they are growing older and older every single day. Before you know it I will be home and they will be in kindergarden…… Good for Douglas and Nikki to move out. The man that threatens to shoot people at the mall lived below them? that sounds like my area haha. Hillary and Mitchell got another pet pig. Geez a lou. haha. Well sounds like another busy week this week. I thought you had gone to LA this past week. I guess you are going to go this week? Fun fun. I am right next door if you need me haha.

Well family a lot has happened this week as investigators go. The area is getting a lot more success. I am just going to talk about them seperately.

Chu Chu: Chu is doing great. She did not go to church this week because she had some trainings for her internship this past weekend but still is progressing strong for her baptismal date. She is getting baptized on my birthday! haha. She told us that she wants to get baptized on Saturday instead of Sunday because she has a lot of people coming into town for the weekend and she wants them all to see both the baptism and confirmation. She wants Elder Lee to baptize her because she thinks it would be cool to have the ordinance done in chinese and Elder Lee can speak a little bit of chinese. I am happy for Elder Lee. He is excited to do it. Chu is awesome. She sent us a text at like midnight last week sometime saying in her english,” I am so thankful that God sent you two missionaries to me. One was sent to baptize me and the other was sent to tell me the day that I needed to get baptized.” It made me realize that God has special reasons for all of us missionaries to teach certain people. Chu realized that she was getting baptized on my birthday before I did. She realized that that was the day she needs to get baptized. It made me feel so good that she saw that as a message to her from God that she needs to be baptized on that day. Chu is awesome and we love teaching her. She is really really progressing.

Rosa and Claudia: So last week the spanish elders gave Rosa and Claudia to us because they preferred english church over spanish church. They speak perfect english. They are identical twins that live with each other. They are about 37 years old and they went to church on Sunday to the Adams ward. Rosa was telling us that she took lessons from the Elders about 20 years ago and she said that she wasn’t ready. So a couple weeks ago the spanish elders knocked on her door and she told them that she was praying that the Elders would come back. So she recieved an answer to her prayer. It was cool hearing that story. It is interesting how God works. He sends the spanish elders to go find them but he wants us english elders to go teach them. They are pretty large latin women but super sincere and they were well fellowshipped in the Adams ward. They have baptismal dates on the the 13th of February but it will probably change to a later date. Nonetheless they are committed and so awesome.

Tenchi Gao: Another young chinese girl that we are teaching that came to the USC ward on Sunday. We have been teaching her for the last couple weeks. She is a lot like Chu but more amercanized. She has a clearer accent in english than Chu. She was a referral from a member that lives in Hawaii. She stayed with a mormon family in Hawaii during winter break and read the whole Gospel Principles manual. She is catching on quick. Our ward mission leader is fellowshipping her really well. In fact we had dinner with the ward mission leader on Sunday after church and to our surprise he invited Tenchi to dinner as well. So we had another good lesson about the church and she is planning on coming to church this Sunday as well. She doesn’t have a baptismal date yet but she will. She is very promising.

Carly Sanchez: So how we met Carly is really wierd. She actually lives in the same house as Tenchi, so when we went over to teach Tenchi she decided to sit in on our lessons as well. Supposively she had had lessons with the missionaries about two years ago so she has already read the Book of Mormon. She even had a leather bounded copy. Elder Lee and I were so surprised. Anyways we didn’t notice for too long and continued with the lesson. We taught her and Tenchi together for the first two lessons we had with them but we decided to meet with them seperately because Tenchi is pretty new to Jesus Christ and Carly is like a born again christian. So last night, we decided to invite a return missionary to go teach with us at Carly’s house. We get there and our return missionary that we brought knew Carly from before his mission when she was being taught. He remembered her missionaries and everything. So we come to find out that the missionaries that taught her two years ago were the biggest bucket missionaries ever. They went go carting with Carly, out to eat dinner, and just hung out with her instead of actually teaching her. After we heard all that we had an awesome lesson and she has huge potential. She began to understand everything. After the lesson we went to our apartment and as I was filling out the area book I found Carly’s old teaching record. haha so this whole time we didn’t know she was seriously taught until last night. So now we are teaching her and she is looking like a good prospect to accepting the Gospel. She does her reading assignments and everything.

Lamarr: He is still doing good. He has been very busy this past week so we didn’y get to teach him too much. He is still really solild. He is still deciding on what he is going to do. We love teaching him. We have been meeting with him for the last two months now. So, we have a lesson with him tonight so we will see how that goes.

So that is our teaching pool. These people are awesome. I love them and I love teaching them. Hopefully we will have more next week.

So guess what? We found out that the Grim Sleeper lived in our area and most of his crimes happened in our area. You should look him up. He was a murderer that was caught like last May. There is a part of our area where you find a ton of prostitutes and supposively this man killed prostitutes. Look him up it is crazy. They have billboards in our area that say LAPD needs your help figuring out the unidentified women found on the computer of the Grim Sleeper. haha. So that is the new news of the week. Things here are crazy.

So this week was awesome. We are teaching amazing people and I feel that I am growing every day. I love you mom and family and hope that you have a great week!
Love,
Elder Kevin Jones