It's 2012!
I can't believe this year is here. We need to get all of our lives in order because apparently this upcoming December 21st the world is going to end. Oh no! Too bad no man knoweth the time of His coming. Thank you for the letter by the way. I love how you can cram so much information into an email. The pictures look fantastic! Everybody is growing up so dang much. Of course Megan Leah is standing on her tip-toes...of course. Thanks for the update on Grandpa also. Though he is struggling immensely I am constantly reassured that "everything is going to be ok." When your letter said that he feels no pain in reminded me of my experience where I couldn't hold back the tears following my surgery and only being able to write, "He took my pain" in my journal. It is such a powerful, hard to comprehend feeling. One must "feel" it and "experience" it for themselves before they can truly know. I know that Grandpa knows. He knows he will see us again. I know I will see him again as well. There's no better feeling than the feeling of not fearing the "(un)-known" mysteries of passing through the veil into the world of spirit.
This week has been one of many mixed feelings and emotions here as well. Christmas was awesome. It's always sad to see it leave. Each of our investigators in the YSA were celebrating the holidays back at home so we didn't have many lessons to teach. We also spent a load of time on our year end report to give to the stake president. Usually we have a member of the mission presidency attend those meetings with us but since we had it at 7:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day they told us to just go at it alone. It was a good meeting. We calculated the "Real Growth" that the stake has seen over the past two years. I don't know if you have heard that term at all but it is being used by the brethren to show the growth of the church by seeing if people who either get baptized, reactivated, etc. continue on to receive the other ordinances of the gospel. They also want to know the percentage of activity of recent converts and all members for that matter. The activity level down here is very low compared to what I was used to up in Utah. There will be upward of around 400-500 people on a ward roster, but only 150-200 come to church on Sundays. I believe that rescuing a "less-active" person is just as good as a baptism on an eternal perspective. Of course our purpose is to invite others to come unto Christ through faith, repentance, and baptism but we are also "Called to Serve" the people we are around in any way that we can. Some missionaries have taken this idea to "rescue the less-active" to their bishops and been taken advantage of. For example, some Bishops have said that they are only allowed to visit prospective elders and less actives before they visit part member families. Those visits were also being counted by the Bishop as home and visiting teaching. That isn't right so we with the missionaries, and the stake president and high councilman over missionary work with the ward leaders, put a stop to it. The "Real Growth" of our stake has been better than we thought. There were 204 total baptisms in the past 2 years. Only 3 or 4 are endowed but many more that were baptized in 2011 are going to make it there. Several have also expressed interest in serving missions. One that you might have heard about was a kid Kennington and I taught one year ago. His name is Will Wight. He's working on his papers right now. Mark Coleman has also expressed interest in serving. Our awesome stake president is trying to get him permission from Salt Lake because he will be 26 one his year is up. Hopefully it happens. Mark bore his testimony again on Sunday. It was hilarious! He got up there and said that he loves "testimony day." He then went on to say that he feels that one day he will get up to bear his testimony and he will find his wife from the pulpit. Either that or she will find him as she gets up to bear her testimony. He said it much better but everybody laughed pretty hard. He is a solid convert. He walks ten miles each week to go do baptisms for the dead in the Mesa temple.
We had a pretty neat experience this week. On Wednesday we were walking through an apartment complex parking lot and a young man who looks exactly like Corbin Bleu walked up to us. The first thing out of his mouth was, "Man, you guys are lookin' fly! What are you up to?" We responded by saying we are missionaries, yada yada yada... He was like, "Ah man I was hopin' you guys were! I'm pretty interested in learning more about your church." Our conversation went on and we talked about his experience in the past with religion, what he believes now, and some other stuff. He made a comment that I thought was interesting that I had never heard before. He said, "So I have heard that some church out there believes that Jesus actually came to the Americas and taught the people here just like he taught the people in Jerusalem. I think that is so cool! I believe that happened..." So, after I picked up jaw up off the ground we went and grabbed him a Book of Mormon from the truck and told him that it gives the account of that experience. He was pretty enthused.
Well sorry my email this week isn't very eventful but we gotta get going because the bowling alley opens up at 2! It's 2 dollar shoes and 1 dollar games today. Last week I broke my record and bowled a 202! It was pretty awesome. I'll send a picture of some other things we do there. President Taylor came with us one time. It's a great P-Day activity.
I love you all. I can't believe I missed Kyler's homecoming, haha actually I can but it's just weird to think that he his home.
I hope your 2012 starts fantastic.
Love,
Your son and brother. Elder Mouritsen
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