Sept. 7, 2010

Dear Family
I hope you had a great week this last week. So far so good for me. We visited an elderly sister and we were able to teach one of her friends, Bill. The non-member has had the lessons before and at one point had a baptism date but somehow stopped progressing. We read the introduction to the Book of Mormon with him and did some ice chipping on his concerns. The hard part is that Bill lives in the Denver Colorado South Mission. When he comes to visit is the only time we can teach him. I think Bill is only interested in appeasing his member friend. He does not really keep commitments.
We had dinner with a less-active family, Cade still does not want to give up chewing. So we are going to try and help his mom quit smoking instead.
We made contact with Sister L. again. She was happy and glad to see us. Her new visiting teachers have been amazing. They sent her nice cards in the mail and even dropped by with a stuffed animal, a plant and another card. I think that was all that Sister L. needed was to feel loved. She was very grateful and even set up an appointment with us later this week. We have invited the visiting teacher to come to that appointment. We are trying to contact the high priests to find out who her Home teachers are so we can help them make contact.
We invited the Home teacher to come with us to an appointment with one of his families. The less-active member told us that he had never had home teachers come visit him before. We called the member before hand and invited him to be ready to share a story on how "studying the scriptures has blessed his family." It was a cool experience. I’m glad it worked out.
We talked with our bishop this last week about what he would like us to do. We came up with an invitation for all the less-actives to invite them to take the lessons. It went something like “Will you take three hours to make an educated decision about the LDS church. If after those three hours you decide that the church is not for you then we will show you how you can remove your records and we won’t come back. But if you decide that you want to learn more we will teach you all we can. If you decide to send us away now without hearing our message you are affect not only your salvation, but you children and your children’s children salvation.” It’s way bold but I am excited to see how it works out. The key is doing this with the spirit, in a loving manner just like the savior would.
That’s all I have time for, family I love you
Elder Durfee

PS it was great to hear about camping!