Letter from Mark 23 Jan 2006

dear family,
things are starting to pick up here. it is still slow, but we have had a decent week. we were able to teach a few people that we have had a hard time getting in contact with recently, we have gotten a few refferalls recently, and we hve been able to teach off of tracting. the most promising that we met off of tracting is a lady named stephanie that we met earlier this week. she was very excited to talk with us. she is a baptist, but does not like the religion, so she iss looking for a new religion. she weas very receptive and told us a few times how glad she was that we stopped by. she works every other sunday, so she wasn't able to come to church yesterday, but said she would come next week. she has a 19 year old daughter that is a senior in high school and she said that her daughter would come, she also has an 11 year old daughter that said might want to come if the 19 year old comes. she said that her husband is realy shy, and might come, but he might take a whild to get more comfortable with the religion. it was great. we met her tracting a street that had been tracted not too long ago.

saturday we have a family with a 19 month old and a 6 month old moving in.then the 1st of march a husband of a family of 6(one is on a mission) will be here, and his family will come shorly after. I haven't heard anything from the family that came last week. we are hoping that they come as well. in that past few months 3 families have moved in and 3 or 4 more could move in in the next 3 or 4 months. this branch is really starting to grow.

while we have had a better week, this area is starting to get frustrating. before this week we had several weeks where we did not teach off of tracting at all, and we don't have a large teaching pool so we were tracting a lot. there isn't a whole lot of people out here either, so i have already almost tracted everything nearby. it makes it hard, but going back to the streets that were tracted a few months ago(some by my comanion) we have had some success. the assitants to the presidant and the presidant were woried about this area, because we we not getting any lessons for a few weeks except for the part member family that we are working with(they are not married, but they are now engaged for march 18th, that made us happy) and judy and laura, who are progressing, but slowly. this branch nees the support of the missionaries, but they expressed concirn that they didn't know if they could keep missionaries busy in this area. it just recenly opened after being closed for about a year, and it has taken a hard hit from being closed, so they didn't want to do it again. hopefully we will continue to have the sucess that we have been getting this week.

I got the camera, i haven't had too much time to fiddle with it but it looks cool.

Thank you for your prayers and support. I pray for you, and i have been trying to work hard, dispite the difficult circumstances. I love you.Elder Lundberg