California One

Happy Halloween! Today is the first day since the 4th of July where we have to stay inside all day unless we have a set appointment. We're going to go to the ward party for about an hour and other than that we basically get a day off.

This week we mostly spent tracting. We don't have a whole lot of investigators at the moment, and we've been working hard to find more. I'm pretty excited for one guy we've ran into a couple of times now. His name's Gaspar. He's in his twenties and used to be a gangster (aka cholo in Spanish). Lots of tatoos. His wife is a member and he used to be taught by the missionaries in our area before we got here. We've kept running into him and we have an appointment for Tuesday. He's cool. He calls me Chucky. I hope it's because of the Rugrats character and not the creepy doll. He said it's because of my glasses so I'm going with Rugrats.

Also the husband of our recent convert from August has been gaining more interest. Last week they gave him a Gospel Principles book and he's been reading it and underlining parts he likes. It's pretty cool because a few weeks ago he totally didn't want to stay for all three hours of Church and now he's reading ahead for the next classes. We just need to help him stop smoking. Last time we talked with him about it he seemed to lack the faith that he could stop. So we're going to read with him in Alma 32 and try it again sometime soon.

In all of our tracting we've also been running into a fair amount of anti- people. I never feel like they're very Christlike when I talk with them. They're also trying to tear you down and destroy your faith. They always deny revelation. Always. It's funny how people can be so afraid of asking God. It was interesting because the morning when we ran across the first anti- guy I felt like I should read about Alma and Korihor in the Book of Mormon. Satan's tactics are always the same. His servants always try to tear you down and destroy your faith. I've never met someone yet who offered me more faith in exchange for destroying mine. True Christlike teaching never works on the principle of instilling doubt. Christlike teaching replaces incorrect notions with greater faith, instead of destroying through doubt in order to replace them.

Love,

Elder Grasley