September Already!

Hello Everyone,

This week was great! Like they all are.

On Monday Elder Sarmiento and I found a less active family just walking down the street.  We ran into an elder that was in our area a year ago and he sent us to this house that had a really awesome family.  We went to the house but no one was there, so we decided to walk down the street to an investigator's house and on the way we saw a 3 people that looked Latino so we decided to talk to them.  As it turned out the mom and daughter had been baptized three years ago.  less active  They had become less active when the mom had gotten in a fight with another lady at mutual, involving lots of bad words and hair pulling.  They live outside of our area so we had to pass the address on to other missionaries but hopefully they can help the family out and remember that they went to church to come closer to Heavenly Father and not for the other people there.

Elder Torres and I went on exchanges the other day and it was an awesome day like it always with him.  Elder Torres is a great missionary and we always get a lot of work done.  We found 3 new investigators that were really nice and really interested.  We also started teaching the niece of a less active lady in our ward that just moved up to Sacramento from Mexico to learn English. We went to a member's house for dinner and had a really good discussion with her.  She is very very active and faithful, although her husband is less active as well as her 17 year old son.  She was telling me how she was really worried about her son and fortunately (but not for my parents) I was in the same situation as her son at one point in time and I was able to give her some advice looking back that will hopefully help them out.  We found lots of people and did lots of teaching.  It was really good day.

Last week we found a person named Gustavo at the 99 cent store and this week we went to go see him.  It turns out he was baptized about 12 years ago but afterwards because of a drinking problem got his license suspended and started going to the church down the street and has been doing that since then.  He is probably one of the coolest guys I have ever met.  He is paralyzed from the waist down but he doesn't let that stop him.  He just competed in the national sit water-skiing competition in Elk Grove last week, he goes all over the country to compete in hand-pedal bike races, he skis, is building a cage to go sky diving, he pretty much does everything.  He has really strong faith and although he's challenged physically he doesn't let that stop him.  He is an awesome example and I love being around him. Hopefully we can get him back to church.

This past week Elder Sarmiento was kind of off and on sick and on Saturday he had to stay in.  Elder Walker, one of the APs was on exchanges with Elder Jensen, one of the zone leaders, and he really wanted to come with us to go back into Spanish work so we switched up so Elder Walker and I could go on exchanges together. I was really stoked because Elder Walker is pretty much my grandpa in the mission and I have heard a lot of great things about him and I finally got to go work with him.  We went to visit a return we had gotten from some other missionaries but unfortunately he wasn't home.  There were a lot of Latinos outside across the street and so we went and talked to them and they were really interested in learning about how they could live together forever as a family, and they're a family of 10 people! We were stoked to find them and I learned a lot from Elder Walker while we were together.

Yesterday wasn't that great because no one came to church that told us they would.  It was really sad but gave me a new determination to refocus and work even harder this next week.  We did have a really good lesson later in the evening with our bishop's neighbor that lives out in the middle of nowhere.  At first we were just talking to the wife and she told us she doesn't know really anything about God or Jesus or the Bible, but she was born Catholic and thinks all religions are the same so she isn't open to learning or the concept that there could be something more out there to bless her life.  Eventually her husband and another guy that lives there came home and we finally got to talk some sense with people.  The other guy that lives there asked us what was different about our church and theirs and we got to explain to them the Restoration.  How the authority and fullness of the gospel was lost with the death of Jesus Christ and His apostles but was restored through the prophet Joseph Smith in its entirety.  It ended well and hopefully they will be open to listening to the spirit in their lives.

Today we went down to Galt and play football against the Lodi zone.  It was a lot of fun to play something besides basketball and I got to see Elder Guzman again so I was excited about that.  It was a lot of fun and we won so it turned out alright.  At the end the zone leaders they told us they could tell that elder Mata and I were soccer players because we were the really quick guys on the field and although we're not very tall we were a big influence on the field.  It was a lot of the fun; I wish we could do it more often.
Well that's all I've got for this week. I hope everyone else is doing well.  I'd love to hear how everyone's doing!

Les Quiero,
Elder Gaskill