Letter from Zack

This week seems to be doing better. For one thing, I thought hard about what I had been feeling the previous weeks, and I've decided to stop caring about how not-normal the other ASL missionaries is. This is the Lord's work, and it's not about me anymore. There are people here in Los Angeles who are candidates for eternal life but has yet to know truth. This week, a cool thing happened.

A few weeks ago, We had the privilege of practicin our teaching skills with President Sutton, and that day, He helped me realize how I can do a LOT better as a teacher. I realized that a lot of deaf people are not really excited about church because they don't understand what is being taught. All along, we've been trying to stick to Preach my Gospel, but what we should be doing is teaching the simple doctrines of the church in terms they CAN understand. For example, deaf people migh not understand about the terms: prophets, relvation, repentance, baptism, sacrament, even God himself so what we should do is break it down to one principle at a time and cover a lot of room for clarification and such. since that day, we've been redefining our traching skills. well, this week produced surprising results. Two of our investigators we taught this week, both youth named Pedro Perez and Richard Pena seened to pay more attention. Pedro even said that he understood us very clearly and enjoyed it and asked when we can come back (Before, he was struggling to decide whether to join the LDS church or the (violin screeching) Jehovah Witnesses'). I'm excited to apply our new teaching skills to use with all the other youth (we have quite a few, since there's a deaf school (called Marlton school) in our area), and I hope soon, we'll finally have a nucleus of youth coming to church, and eventually Deacons and Teachers and Priests, and Young Women, which will totally help the deaf branch into becoming a Ward. After the youth program is taken care of, I guess the only thing needed left is a quorum of High Priests, and since we only have two of them, we obviously need more. The Branch President's two counselors seems to be coming back on the right track so I guess the boat is floating for now.

Other than that, this week went ok. I can't believe August is half over already. It felt like only two or three days whizzed right on by. Guess you'd batter start looking for a stuffed camel soon because Hump Day is in 2 1/2 months. It seems to be a little chillier now, especially during our 6:00 AM Ultimate Frisbee exercises.

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-E.T. {0 ^ 0} __o
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