This week was very interesting to say the least. Thursday we had an emergency with on of our companionships in the zone that kind of affected both Elder Hall and me in a weird way. The best solution seems to always be the same, go out and worka nd have some experiences that will bring the Spirit.

Monday night we had a lesson with someone that Elder Hall found on exchanges last week. The funny thing was that when he opened the door and let us in at the scheduled time, we were both a bit surprised but excited. We have been working on teaching the first lesson to all our new investigators in about 10 minutes. We had a member convince us to do it that way. It has worked miracles. I think for me I had got caught up in asking 'inspired questions' too much to people who really aren't used to the spirit and they take everything to a different dimension, so it seems. The goal with the short lessons is to teach true doctrine to bring the spirit it in for the objective of a reading and praying about the Book of Mormon. I am starting to notice how effective this is. I believe we as missionaries get caught in 'logical ruts' with the Texans. We use a few biblical scriptures or prove through analogies the truthfulness of the message rather than just taking it to an extremely basic level and allow more reliance on the spirit to carry the message. The member said something interesting "I bet there are converted Jehovah's Witness' that have been strong members for 10 years that just barely have figured out that Christ was the Jehovah of the old testament and that's ok!" When he said that a very interesting 'case in point' came to mind, the brother of Jared! No doubt a great prophet and the strongest Faith of all, yet after all tha,t he knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood like man until he was shown.

Tuesday we buzzed up to Greenville which is about 45 minutes from here. We haven't been to any of the district meetings up there so we made a full day exchange out of it. I went to Bonham after the trainings and spent the day with them. We had a couple cool experiences. I had prayed that we would "get into the 3rd door" to teach but it was answered differently than we thought. We got into about the 6th door we knocked on and about halfway through the lesson it had dawned on me that it was the 3rd door that I had knocked on. We shared the restoration and he agreed to baptism. We met with a woman named Regina in the evening. She has a granddaughter who was born a few weeks early and is barely hanging on in the NICU. Regina had called many churches to put her granddaughter's name on their prayer rolls. A thought came to mind to explain what the temple rolls are and she agreed to have her name put on them. Surprisingly I made the phone call right there at the beginning of the lesson. Once the Baby's name was on the roll, Regina paused and with tears in her eyes said, "Now I know she'll be OK. I didn't feel this way with any of the others." Another experience was when we simply went to go get pizza and there just happened to be a former investigator who wanted the discussions again. The interesting thing was that the Elders had been prayerfully seeking former investigators to follow up with and he was one of them.

We had a sleep over then woke up Wednesday and headed home. We had an exchange with the assistants that night and it was a lot of fun. We tracted a lot and had many jokes. I think the worst part about it was that I was the youngest in mission age so all of our jokes were related to younger missionary questions. We went to a house that we randomly knocked on, gave service to and I asked if that counted as an LTMP because there were 3 missionaries. He responded, I think it's 2 LTMP's because we talked to her, gave service, then talked to her again. If you don't know what that means, then you know what I mean.

Thursday was the crazy day you'll have hear about some other time but when we finally got home from, we had dinner. We ate with the Lafyettes who are the investigator couple that should be getting baptized in March. It was super awesome. She cooked us some super good food because she wanted to really help us out. Just kind of cool. Today we went over to where she boards her horse and hung around them for a bit. It got me kind of excited although I cant ride a horse and I am in Texas. Hopefully dad hasn't sold them all because of the financial burdens of his 2nd born son. We were a bit despondent from the day so we contacted at wal-mart, ended up buying ice cream, and going home at 8:45. Thankfully president called explaining that everything was OK.

Friday we finished Thursday's planning session, had lunch with the Fox's 15 year old son to build more of a relationship with him, and ate my favorite dinner ever (chicken roll ups- mom send the recipe please!). Everything cancelled the rest of the day so we did some contacting and less active drop bys. At that point we accepted that our lessons this week were going to be super low but we could always desperately find new people to teach!

Saturday we helped some elders out in their area. I went with one of them and Elder Hall went with the other. We were tracting this street where the houses were an acre apart. Not a single person answered their door (besides a 10 year old) for an hour...until...(don't you just love missionary stories? I do!) we met Kelly. She has already been through all the discussions in New Hampshire. All of her friends including her godmother are Mormons. She said she would have already joined the church if she didn't go to church because of a bad experience in her former state. The cool thing is that she was already committed to attend church with one of her Mormon friends in Plano before we showed up. Odd coincidence eh?

Sunday was a heartbreaker. No investigators showed up to church and by the end of sacrament I was trying to convince Elder Hall to skip out and go contacting. An interesting chain of thoughts have crossed my mind as I have considered looking over a congregation of 250 active people and not a single non-member in sight. My initial thought was "why aren't these people bringing others to church on their own!" Then the following thought was something along the lines of don't talk the talk until you can walk the walk. The following thought was a commitment to put in a lot of effort after the mission to be that member that the missionaries would love to see by bringing others to church on my own.

It is odd what missions do to you. I remember being scared to serve one because of how much it would change me. I thought "man, I'll just get sucked into it all and not want to do anything fun like snowboarding again and just want to read scriptures and go to church." The funny thing is...I was right.

Love y'all

Elder Metcalf!!!!