Klagenfurt: March 31, 2014

Dearest Fam-bam!

This week was pretty interesting, but altogether I definitely enjoyed it.  Our week was filled with a lot of good things, that weren't your traditional type of missionary work. We did service again last week, and we should be doing it this week probably about four times, which has eaten up our week a lot. Today we won't be having much of a Pday, because we already spent four hours this morning helping a member, and then in about an hour or so we will be going to another member to help them as well. I may make this short so that I can try to take a nap before we go, because I also lost an hour of sleep yesterday because of the time change, and got up at 5 this morning for seminary, so I'm pretty tired...

In regards to the missionary work, I wasn't very pleased with it this week. There has been a lot of stuff going on with Radu recently, and I don't really want to go into details, because I'm not sure myself what's going on exactly, all I know for sure is that he didn't come to Church yesterday or answer our texts, which is something really weird for him. So I'm kind of worried about that whole situation. We're going to try to get in touch with him soon, and see how we can help him.

Elizabeth is doing well. She planned a little party thing for my birthday, and so we should be doing something with her and with the other Elders then. I'm looking forward to it. She had me order her a Spanish Preach My Gospel, although I think she was unsure what it actually was, but it will be great for her to be able to read through the lessons and that kind of stuff by herself.

We found a new investigator yesterday! His name is Jakob and he is 18 years old. His interest in looking into the Church seems to be more of a objective interest, but we gave him a Book of Mormon and invited him to read about it, and hopefully we will be meeting again in between a couple sessions of General Conference next week.

We had a Fireside this week, and it was great because our investigator, Gin, came to it. I don't know if I have already talked about him at all, but he was a self-referral through the internet, and we have been teaching him for about two and a half weeks or so. He is really funny, and speaks super great English. He is Muslim, and always asks some provacative questions when we meet. Up to this point he has been a little hit and miss with his reading, and he went to the Jehovah's Witness Church last week, so hopefully he'll be able to come next week. We'll see.

Yeah, so we have had ups and downs this last week, but I am really looking forward to next week, because of General Conference. I love General Conference, and it will be a great chance to strengthen my testimony about modern day prophets. I still need to make sure that I write down a couple questions and a few things that I want to learn while I am watching, because that is always how I get the most out of it.

Other than that a lot of my stress has been taken away about school, so thank you for that! I'm glad that I can finally know where I am living, know that I am at least signed up for classes (I may have added a Bowling Class... I just saw one opening and struck, deciding that I can always drop it later if I don't want it. Sometimes I'm an impulse shopper).

I did get a few cards in the last week or so, I definitely got one from Grand and Grandma Grace, from various people in the ward (sorry, I didn't write it down!), and definitely one from the Holmes, which was really nice.

Sorry this email is pretty lame, but on a scale of 1-tired I'm at an 8. Running on fumes right now, and I have a few more hours of yard work in front of me today. Love you all! I pray for you every night!

Love,
Elder Merkley