From Chelan, Washington

Dear Familia,

Alright, so there is a lot that has happened here in this past week. I am glad to say that I am not quite as savage as Amanda, as far as finding and cutting a chicken’s head off. Funny! That is so crazy to think she has been through half of her mission already. As for me, this past week has been awesome. My companion, Elder Acosta, although a native is from Provo and speaks perfect English so it is not like a native companion with Amanda. He is way awesome and this area here is so beautiful. The only somewhat of a letdown is that it is both English and Spanish here, so I might not pick up Spanish as much as I hoped. The Spanish congregation here is a lot smaller than the one in East Wenatchee, with only a couple of families that are members. However, the new Stake Pres., Pres. Huntsaker, told us that he had a vision or a goal that in 18 months that this area would actually be an individual branch. This Sunday we had 1 Spanish family come and 3 other people. So overall I think there were 6 or 7 people that showed up. Yea, that is pretty sad, but I know that with our faith that in 18 months that this area can truly have a branch with all the priesthood authority needed to run it. So I guess this is something y’all can pray for is just the overall growth of the Spanish work here in Chelan. We did have a baptism here this week of a boy named Reuben. He is 9 yrs. Old and is part of a part member family. Hopefully with this baptism we can get his whole family fired up and get the members in his family active again. So I am praying for some miracles this week. We have already seen some, too. We found 6 new investigators this week., 2 of which come from an area where past missionaries have declared as dead. It was way sweet. In this same area I also had a big testimony builder. We found a guy named Jim Johnson. This older man was not born Christian but was converted in his 20’s and for the past 40 years has been studying the Bible. He told us how he had received inspiration from the Holy Ghost about certain things. These things which he told us about were what we believed. He quoted scriptures left and right and summarized chapters and was just a historian of the Bible. I then felt prompted to ask him a simple question, “Well then to you, sir, what is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He then replied that this was a hard question, and that he didn’t know. Throughout our discussion he had mentioned faith, repentance, baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end, but his 40 years of searching the Bible and his 40 years of knowledge could not put these principles together to form what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is. With a 5 minute read in 2 Nephi 31 or 3 Nephi 11 or 27 we read exactly what His Gospel is. Although at this time he did not accept the Book of Mormon, he said that he would like us to come back. It was really awesome and a testimony to me of the divinity and the importance of the Book of Mormon. We also taught some really crazy Anti’s. Man the Anti’s drive me insane. It is a good thing that my testimony is based on Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, cause they sure come up with a bunch of crazy stuff. Here is the last story for today. We had 2 mice come into our house, and my companion was all scared…haha. I acted like I was scared for his benefit. But anyways we tried to kinda catch it, but man that little mouse outsmarted us so bad. We caught him on camera and the video is pretty funny. If you ever see Anna Nygaard tell her thanks for the letter.

Elder Nelson