A week of service

 Literally. We probably did some sort of service at least 4 hours of every day this past week. Needless to say, we're going the Ammon Approach. If you don't know who Ammon is, then you should read about him! Alma 17-18 baby! But yea, we've come to realize that since the work here is really slowing down as far as personal proselyting goes, we need to really work on building trust with the members. It's really working I think! It's great! We're really starting to help members to share the gospel and invite their friends to learn from us. It's definitely different, and slower compared to personal contacting, but that's alright. We're both convinced that neither of us will likely see a baptism for the rest of our mission, and so we're just trying to build the area for missionaries in the future. That's our motivation right now.

I finished my picture for President and Sister Pitt! It's based on O' Jerusalem by Greg Olsen. I called it O' Charleston. Some members in the ward were kind enough to build a custom frame for it as well. I'll send a picture of it. It was started when I was in Charleston, back in March. I didn't get a chance to work on it in Clarksburg, and since I've been here, I've been working on it every day during lunch or after planning at night. Needless to say, it rocks. I feel like there's parts that I could've done better, like the lower right hand section looks really flat compared to the rest of the picture, but that's alright. It was good enough to catch the eyes of people at SVU and get me an offer to do schooling there. We'll see. I don't know quite yet.

We're teaching this one guy names Sammy Moore. He's the county commissioner or something like that. He knows a lot of people, and a lot of people know him. We talked about our first lesson with him in Ward council, and said his name and we got some weird looks from people. A lot of people said "good luck, Elders." Well, we taught him for a second time yesterday, and have a third appointment with him on sunday. He said that he initially wanted to meet for educational purposes for his job since the mormon church is so dominant in the area, but I personally think that might be changing. In a week, he read a huge list of answers to questions of the soul in the Book of Mormon, started reading from the Book of Mormon, watched the Restoration DVD and read the Restoration pamphlet. We only told him about the pamphlet and the DVD, and only showed him the Book of Mormon. He has some awesome questions. He even told his friends at work about us, and when they dumped Anti on him, he withstood! Oh yea! There could possibly be a miracle brewing. We'll see!

So we have a wrench thrown in our plans for next transfer. We have to move out of our apartment tomorrow for students to move in on Wednesday. The Zone Leaders(who are in our ward as well) are being kicked out of their apartment for a new set of missionaries being put in for the YSA stake. So neither of us have an apartment as of the end of August. We're trying hard to find a place in Lexington, but students are moving in quick. And to make things worse, it appears that there's a law in Lexington that says that no more than 3 unrelated people can live in a single home or apartment. Soooo yea. We're working on it. We're trying to figure out if it's really a law or not. There's some lawyers in the ward we're talking to. Haha. We might be living in a member's basement for my last transfer! It's a good thing that we've been building trust! Nothing to worry about though. Who needs purse or script, right? The Lord will provide, and none of us are really panicking. But, as a result, please send all mail to the Charleston address.

Love yall!

Elder Shain C Wiederholt
888 Oakwood Rd Ste 310
Charleston, WV 25314