4TH OF JULY

What's good!!!

I hope that y'all had a fantastic week! This week was all over the place, like most weeks are it seems like.. As of last Friday we officially lost the Annapolis zone to the DC North Mission and picked up 2 zones from the Pittsburgh Mission so that was super weird. I lost 2 former companions to DC North:'( #RIP Also my trainer Keatin (Elder) White is getting engaged!!! Super weird!!!!

The 4th of July was super fun!! There is a guy in the stake presidency here in Frederick who has a big farm and every year he puts on a community breakfast potluck and after there is a program for veterans and all those who serve in the military and every year hundreds of people come to it! It is an amazing missionary opportunity because there are a ton of non-members there and all the missionaries in the stake help set up for it and attend so we got to talk to a ton of people about the church there, it was sweet! This year around 400 people attended and the mayor of Frederick and even high ups from the state government were there to speak and stuff so that was a lot of fun! As soon as we took everything down from that it started pouring rain so that was good timing!

Our investigators are doing really well, we put our investigator Brian on date for July 20th which was sick! His wife is a member and through us teaching him she has been coming to church a lot more which is good! Carlos is still doing pretty good, he invited us over to his family's house for dinner on Sunday which was super interesting but fun haha! The whole time everyone was speaking Spanish and we had no idea what was going on but it was still a good time! The food was super bien!! Also Carlos followed me on Instagram and he saw the picture of me and my friend Mitch holding hands at homecoming acting like idiots and he said that we looked "super gay" hahahaha. Our gay investigator called me gay, dang!! Howard is doing good still, he has been reading the Book of Mormon and we're super pumped about that. Lastly, after a long frustrating week of having a ton of appointments fall through and just plain not having really any success, on Sunday evening we finally were able to pick up an investigator. I thought for sure that last week we were gonna pick up like 5 investigators but nothing was working out. We were frantically out working trying to pick up at least 1 investigator and finally we ran into Pedro. We had talked to Pedro earlier on and when we walked up to his apartment he was in the window of the second floor and yelled out "Hey elders!!!" after which he came down and we taught him the Restoration. At first the lesson was mediocre and he wasn't really having it and he "wasn't solid" but I felt really inspired to no matter what get to the First Vision. As soon as we taught him about Joseph Smith and the First Vision everything changed! He went from "I'm Catholic and I'm not gonna change" to "Dang...." and at the end of the lesson he was asking us when we can come back to teach him more about this message. Super sick!!!

Have a good week!!!

-Elder Larson

Ben Franklin!!

'MERICA

Rain