What a Week!

Dear family and friends!

This week was the best week I've had in a loooooooong time. Like, since I was in Apache Junction with Elder Sweeten well over a year ago. This was an amazing week! So, it all started on Tuesday when we were invited over to the Buchanan's to teach them. The dad is a member, but the mom and three boys aren't. We're primarily focused in their son Zach right now, but I'm sure with time the younger two boys and mom will be baptized. Zach is 13 and told our stake president and young men's president that he wanted to be baptized. We talked to his parents about it and they said they would be willing to support him in that. It was pretty awesome! This upcoming week we will put him on date to be baptized. So, basically in a single lesson we picked up four new investigators! The rest of the week was good. We taught a few lessons here and there and had a few angry people told us not to come by anymore, but that's fine.

On Thursday we went and taught this really old guy named Ike. I mean, really old. He's got to be in his late 80's or early 90's. His youngest son retired about five years ago.  Ike really likes working on cars. Whenever we go over there he shows us the progress he's making. I feel bad for him because his wife passed away a few years back and so now he's super lonely. He loves that we come by and visit with him. He talked our ears off for an hour, we told him we had to go, and about 45 minutes later we got out of there. Haha!  Hopefully we can get him to progress in the gospel and start attending church.

Sunday was what really made the week amazing. Since it was fast Sunday I fasted for a couple of purposes. The first was for Connor, our neighbor who left on his mission only to return home three days later because a biopsy came back with a positive result for cancer. The second one was that the work in our area would pick up and we would have people to teach for my last three weeks as a missionary. Well, guess what happened? We contacted a lady named Adriana. We were told she was a potential investigator, but it turns out she was an inactive member. However, she has a daughter who is of baptismal age and a fiancé that is a non-member as well! We haven't met the fiancé yet, so we don't know if he's really interested or not, but the daughter totally is! She goes to church with her aunt and uncle from time to time and absolutely loves it. We talked about the importance of the Sabbath day observance and Adriana told us she really wanted to go to church and meet some people so she could have more friends. We invited her to come and we set a return appointment for Wednesday!

Boom! Another new investigator!

Later Sunday night we got a text from our Ward Mission Leader telling us he had a referral for us to go by. Her name was Nakea. She's a mother of three and super nice. We went by and found out that she has been reading from the Book of Mormon and been talking to one of her coworkers about the church. She's been to church a few times with her and said that in a couple of weeks she'll be coming to our ward. She's going to Maine for a while, so that's too bad, but when she gets back we can teach her! We got a return appointment set for my last full day of proselyting. August 28th! She seems very promising.

This week we got 6 new investigators. Our previous record for investigators in an entire month was 2. We tripled that in a week! The Lord is blessing us. We've been working so hard to find people and it seems that finally, at long last, the flood gates are beginning to open. The drought is ending. Hopefully this next week goes just as well as this one did. Six new investigators in a week is fairly impressive for any area, but for this area it's almost unheard of. To make this miracle even more miraculous, five of those six were found in the Red Mountain Ward. That ward has almost nothing going on in it. It's seems as though it's nearly impossible to find in that ward. I know that the Lord blesses those who are obedient to His commandments. There's no way this could have happened if we weren't being obedient. Have a wonderful week everyone! I'm excited to see you all, but I'm still loving life as a missionary. I have very mixed emotions for sure.

Love,

Elder Mullins