This week was great and not so great!

Hi!

Hope everyone had a great time on their trips! 

Dad and Colby - 

Man, sounds like you had a good time. I am jealous of Colby - trying
to get around by himself in two big cities. I would love to do that.
It's fun using public transportation even as a missionary. A few times
in Trenton we took the bus to get to church in Princeton. Making the
transfers between bus zones was difficult there, but in Newark, public
transportation runs smoothly everywhere. Newark is probably like a
small version of SF with much fewer tourist attractions. And it's more
dangerous, I would imagine. I'll show you around one day :)

This week was great and not so great! On our part, we had a lot of
success in finding and teaching. We fell short of our goal of 20
lessons, however we had five of our investigators at sacrament meeting
and had a lot of member present lessons. We have more people on
baptismal date too. One of the highlights from this week is a lesson
we had on Friday with a new investigator named Igor. He is Ukrainian
and his family members are Jewish. He speaks something like five
languages fluently (Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, and two others besides
English) and he is only 20 years old. He is a Christian. He is
planning to go to BYU so he showed up to church during our zone
meeting and asked us about getting an ecclesiastical endorsement. He
also said that he was interested in joining the Church. So, we sat
down with him and talked about his religious background and it turns
out he knows way too much about the scriptures so we had a hard time
teaching the Restoration simply. It wasn't a mess, partly because we
were in a trio with one of the assistants, but I wish that I had been
more prepared for that. It worked out alright. He came to church on
Sunday and he said he would "absolutely" be baptized. I look forward
to going to school with him! I think right now he has a desire to be
baptized in order to join the crowd when he goes to BYU. But I am
certain that desire will change with time, especially while he's at
school. He's awesome. We had good lessons with Jackee and Jose this
week, and they also came to church, but left after sacrament meeting.
More on that later. Natalie came to church and enjoyed it as usual.
All three of them have a baptismal date of June 22nd. We're praying
for them! Igor should be on date soon, too. One of the recent converts
in the ward, Denise, brought her son who we just started teaching. He
is 10 years old. He will be baptized and join the church very soon as
well. The only reason he hasn't already is because of a custody battle
that Denise is still going through. She recently married a member in
Texas and will be moving there in August assuming she wins her case.
She is one of "the elect" if I have ever met one. So Ryan will either
be baptized here and move quickly thereafter or join the church in
Texas.

We've been contacting a lot and teaching new people, but it is
difficult for us to see them more than once or twice. I'm not sure
why. That is kinda how New Jersey rolls from what I've seen. But just
making 10 contacts a day helps us feel accomplished and it helps us
reach our goals. We see blessings in other areas of the work as a
result. Our teaching pool recycles a lot quicker through people who
are or aren't interested. Finding motivation to get our there and talk
to people is hard for me on some days. Other days I am all for it. It
helps to have a companion who can pick up the slack on the days that
I'm not feeling it. I try to do the same for him. We work well
together.

Thanks for all the snacks! We enjoyed them, especially mint oreos haha.

Love you too! Hope you all enjoyed your trips. :)

Love, Tab!