Key Quest (Week 10)

It's been a pretty decent week here in Shawnee. We have a lot of investigators that are struggling with the Word of Wisdom right now. We have taught them everything, it's just a matter of them quitting smoking so they can be baptised. I've quickly learned that the only way someone can give up an addiction is if they have the desire to do it for their self. It all starts with a desire to quit, and if there isn't any desire there's nothing we missionaries can do. One of our investigators who is married to a member has been taking the missionary lessons for over a year, and the only thing holding him back from being baptised and being sealed to his wife is smoking. Faith, love, and persistence is the best thing we can do at this point.

It has gotten really cold here in Oklahoma this past week. We had a small ice storm on Thursday while we were at Mission Conference in the city our cars iced over, which took about 30 minutes to scrape off. Church was even cancelled on Sunday and our cars were grounded. At the mission conference we were privileged to hear from Elder Cardon from the Quorum of the Seventy. He gave an awesome talk on the dispensations of time, and how this is the last dispensation of time. Now is the time to bring forth the work of salvation to the children of men. We are all eligible to receive the restored gospel. We are the messengers not the converters, conversion doesn't take place until someone begins to commune with God daily. 

We lost the mail keys... Again. We lost them once about two weeks ago and had to go to the office to get a copy of the key, but the one we lost was the last one, so the next day the apartment maintenance replaced our lock and gave us a whole new key. Well it didn't take too long for my companion to lose that key as well. We searched high and low and completely cleaned our apartment looking for it. We went without getting the mail for a week praying daily that we would find them. Finally I told Elder Bushman he needed to confront the office, it was his turn to tell them we lost them. We went in on Saturday and spoke to a very nice lady who was "brand new" and "only works on the weekends". She let us take the duplicate key to get our mail but we had to give it back to her. Hopefully we will get the 3rd mail key today, and from now on I'll hold on to it.

This next week will be good, we are going to be setting some pretty solid baptism dates for December. It's a mission goal for the month of December to get 50 baptisms. We are shooting for one if not two.

Sincerely, Elder Watkins