Another Family Home Evening...

In May, Elder Booth had the opportunity to visti with a less active family in his area. Unfortunately, he didn't leave a name for them. It looks like the family definitely knows how to take care of the missionaries, though!

Here are some pictures of Elder Booth and his companion, Elder Martanito, with the family:

This is a picture of just Elder Martanito with the family:

It looks like the missionaries are well taken care

of as far as having lots of good food around!

Here they are getting the food ready to eat:

This last shot is one of Elder Martanito, Elder Booth's companion,
with one of the kids from the family. What a cute kid!

Here is another email update from Elder Booth:


Subject: Happy Mothers Day
Date: May 10, 2009 8:39:18 PM PDT

Hey how is everybody? I'll start off by saying sorry for not calling today. It's Mother's Day and it probably would have been best to call on the exact day, but yea, it just did not happen. You would think the mission would make me better at planning things out. It's alright. I will just call next week instead. I am already excited to talk to you all.

Things here are still going pretty well. They are just moving on like they usually do. Me and my new companion are getting along great and he is catching up to me fast when it comes to the area, which is really nice. The investigators and members seem to like him just fine so there aren't any problems there. I have been pretty lucky when it comes to companions. The apartment is still a little different, but I am getting used to it. I guess life is all about change, though. The other two elders turned out to be pretty nice. Even if they weren't, dad told me to stop crabbing and gossiping. Sorry. I will try not to do that again. You can't be to hard on me though. When you grow up in Moapa Valley, gossiping is in your blood. I guess it is a hard habit to break.

The area right now is actually doing really well. We have seven investigators right now with baptismal dates and right now they all look like they will go through as long as we do our part and keep going by the spirit. Two are actually the cousins of the two girls that I baptized a while ago. They are always there for the lessons and are great fellow shippers. They bring them to church every week and are helping with the small shy problem each one has. The other is a girl who is really good friends with the daughter of the ward mission leader. She actually lives there right now, which makes the fellowship thing pretty easy for us. Sorry if I said all of this last week, but I really can't remember that far back. I think I did tell you about our fun adventure last week trying to pick all the kids up for church. I am very very happy to say that we did not have to this week because they all came on their own. It was really funny too because I sat by them in church and kept having to tell them to be quiet because they kept wanting to talk about their baptism on the 30th. To be honest, it was kind of hard to tell them to be quiet when that was what they were talking about.

I did have a scary moment though with them. One of the kids that comes with them is only six. After sacrament he decided that he was a little too tired to go to church anymore so he started to leave. Since the others wanted to stay, nobody was going to go with him so he just started to go on his own. I ended up chasing him down the street and then about had a heart attack when he ran out in the road. Luckily there were no cars right then. I really don't know what I would have done if there would have been a car there. After that I just let him go. I figured that would be safer than me chasing him into the street. He actually ended up coming back and just sitting in the front waiting for the rest to finish. That's about all when it comes to the investigators right now.

I don't know if i told you this yet. When Elder Erickson was here he really worked and got an inactive RM to return to church. The bad thing is she has not been back ever since he left. I just heard that she has been baptized into the catholic church. That was a little shocking. To make it even more shocking, she just said that she wants her son that just turned eight to be baptized as a Latter Day Saint. I don't know what is going on, but I do love the kids so I hope that the one will be able to be baptized.

Let's see. I have three kind of funny stories. The first one actually happened last Monday at the mall. I was buying something at the book store when this older guy started talking to me. He was asking all kinds of questions about where I was going to find a wife at here it the Philippines. At the end of that fun conversation I tried to share a little bit about the church with him since he seemed pretty curious. He actually turned out to be a priest that shared more with me. He first asked me where I was going after I died, so I told him. Then all he did was ask over and over again if I was sure or not. He ended up giving me a little book about it called this could be your last five minutes. I told him that I would read it as long as he read the one that I gave him about the true plan of salvation. Who knows, maybe he will read it and we will have a very strong bishop in the church.

The next one is when we saw that one guy again that yelled at me about Jesus. This time was a little awkward since he decided that we needed to close our eyes and bow our heads so he could say a prayer for us all. I didn't know whether I should do that or just watch him. Either way, I could not help laughing this time. It was alright though, because he had his eyes closed so he did not see me.

The third one was the most embarrassing for me. We were teaching this really old lady about repentance, and I was the one teaching. I tried to tell her that in order to repent, we first need to actually stop doing the sin. Instead, I told her that in order to repent we all need to first fart. I guess the words for those are pretty close to each other. The people with me really could not help but all laugh out loud. I was confused, to say the least. At least now I have the word for stop and fart down. I think this one was worse than the time I told the lady she was really good at having kids instead of raising kids. That one was also a little awkward. Just another of the unforgettable moments.

Well I love you all. Again, I am excited to call. Since nobody has told me anything since I talked to mom yesterday, I will be calling here on Monday morning. So it should be around 2 to 3 pm there on Sunday. If you want to make sure, you can look it up. It will be around six am here Monday morning. Again, I love you all. Keep up the work in the church and remember to pray and study the scriptures each day. It's hard for me sometimes to tell the investigators to do that when I remember all the times that I didn't do it. Thanks for the support and the church is true.

Elder Booth