A letter from Elder Gates

Hello Home!



Ok, so I apologize for this being so late in coming but the server or computer or something there is messed up. So, here is my email...kinda.



Things ae going well here. I really frankly don't have much to update on this week, no huge breaking news or anthing, just some good stories. First, I realized what company that is that you have their binder from. I'll try to get a picture by it. Stewart is a busy road so it could be slightly awkward. But it's cool, MUSCO is a pretty big company. There's a strange amount of big companies in this town that I'm sure, is smaller than Auburn. You have MUSCO, HON (not centered here but lot's of factories), Kent Feeds (that GPC lant I mentioned), a company called Stanley or something, its got stuff in the Middle East, so it must be big. We even have Iowa's richest woman, and the best sunsets according to Mark Twain. Just a little Muscatine pride.



We visited on of our investigators who is getting baptized this week. He's an amazing guy. He knows and understands so much and knows it to be true! It was the first time I'd ever met with him and it was great to see that in an investigator. I may have never taught him, but it really showed me that this work really can pay off evenually.



We also stopped by a couple towns, Columbus Junction and Columbus City, on the way back from district meeting this week to do some Spanish work. While there we had our first dog attack! It's surprising to me this was the first one in my time here, since it seems like nearly every home has at least one dog. It might have been that way back at home, too, but I never noticed it. Anyway, there was a football-sized dog on one doorstep that was yapping around like crazy. When Senor Nelson went up to know on the door, the dog pulled the metal chair it was chained to across the porch and bit into his pant leg. Senor Nelson, scared by the growling football attached to his pants, used the dog's size, and his other foot to his advantage and sent the dog back half-a-foot or so. The dog seemed fine, as it kept barking, but we left quickly.



We also went to an appointment that Senor Nelson had set up earlier in the day when we were on splits with the Elders in Washington. But she wasn't there. So we were about to leave the Columbus Area but decided to go ahead and tract the street she (the person the appointment had been with) lived on, since there had to be some reason why we had gone to that street. That was fruitless and fairly uneventlful, owing in part, to the fact the street was long with few houses; that is until we came back to the house of the lady we had had the meeting with. She was home this time so we came in and Senor Nelson taught her the first lesson. I can usually follow along fairly well if I focus really hard, but apparently I wasn't focusing hard enough (imagine that), for when we went out to the truck to grab her a Book of Mormon, Senor Nelson let me know she had accepted a soft baptismal commitment (when you come to know this to be true, will you....) which is HUGE for a first lesson that almost didn't happen. I can't believe I didn't hear it; "baptismo" is fairly distrinctive. A couple other things went down in the lesson which make her pretty solid.



Also, that couple that I think I updated you on who committed to baptism and marriage set their own dates for these two things, and the date they set for baptism is the same one we had prayed about and had decided to commit them to. Nice little testimony building on prayer.



We also knocked into a modern-day Job of sorts. She had been divorced by the her husband a couple years ago, had had her fiancee call off the wedding that was supposed to happen a couple weeks ago, had surgery and had just barely gotten out of the hospital and her friends had deserted her or something like that. Anyway, all sorts of junk was going wrong for her, and yet here she stood with a smile on her face and faith in God. She rejected our message, but couldn't turn down our offer to mow her lawn for her. She said the Lord would provide and I just pointed out that maybe the Lord was providing through us. She seemed to like that, and referenced the good ol' parable of the guy in the flood who was waiting for God to help him and then turned down people who were trying to help him three different times. So this, but mostly the Elders Nelsons not allowing her to say no, allowed us to go to work. And so us three missionaries in our white shirts, ties, and dress pants and shoes mowed her front lawn for her. We even came back a second time and mowed again so it would look better. By the way, now that I've mowed with both bag and bagless mowers, I now know that bags are MUCH better!



So we went to a place called West Liberty this week, as we usually do at least once a week due to the loads of Spanish work there, and there were car races going on at the track there! I felt home! Sort of. Plus we had amazing El Salvadorian food at a restaurant there. Good stuff, and inexpensive!



The weather is starting to change here. Temperatures definitely feel different here than in Washington or Idaho.



I know this to be Christ's true church restored again through modern-day prophets and am glad to be a part of this great work.



Elder Charlie Gates