"Conference was totally awesome"

Well hello there! It’s been a little longer since I've emailed last, so there is a lot of stuff to talk about.

First and most exciting is Jonathan! I really am bad at remembering what I've mentioned in past emails, but Jonathan has been on date for baptism on the 8th. This last Monday, Elder Kropushek and Elder Curtis came up to interview him and he's ready to go! This Saturday, 7:30, he'll be baptized by his older brother! That's probably the coolest part, so we are really excited.

We met with Cathy twice this last week and she's doing well. We've reviewed a lot of the bigger commandments with her and she's slowly doing better with remembering them specifically. We are hoping she’ll be baptized at the end on October. It would be sooner but one of the weeks the church building will be shut down for cleaning (mold prevention) and then we have Stake Conference. She was also able to watch conference at the church on Sunday, so that was great!

Thomas is doing well. He is doing the Book of Mormon reading challenge with Elder Baggett and I. It’s something we are doing as a mission, we are reading 8.5 pages of the Book of Mormon each day from October 1^st through December 3rd. So that's going well. He also came to 3/4 of the conference sessions. He said it was a little long to sit through, but he did feel good about it.

So I mentioned last time how we found Sean and April by a pretty crazy GPS situation. Well they were going to come to church, but that fell through sadly. We visited with them last night though. We were a little afraid when we called on Friday and Sean said he had "done some research". That often is a good and a bad thing. But all he had questions about was polygamy at the beginning of the church’s history, so it was a good lesson. They both had questions about different prophets in our church and how they come to be and such, so to end the lesson, we pulled up President Monson’s talk from Sunday Morning. It was such a calming spiritual experience and they felt the Spirit for sure. They committed to coming to both the Jonathan’s baptism and church on Sunday. We are really excited for them and April actually knows some of the members of the ward, so it's a good situation.

We were able to meet a lot of awesome new people this last week as well. Some we are particularly excited about, we met walking past a funeral home often when we got to visit some of the less active members. We are pretty good homies with some of the older guys that basically just chill in front of the funeral home (not sure why?) and so last Thursday we felt like we should talk to them a little more in depth. There were 4 guys there, Onda, Dwayne, Sam and Greg. We talked to the 4 of them and offered copies of the Book of Mormon to all of them afterwards. Greg was the only one who took one and he was actually quite interested in it. In fact, he gave us his phone number and wanted to meet with us! So just yesterday we were in Allen, and who do we run into, but Dwayne! Yes, I know Greg and Dwayne aren't the same person, but Greg and Dwayne are good friends. We actually got to talk to Dwayne about his family that has recently passed away and teach about the Spirit World, so now he is much more interested and wants to meet! Then he told us right where Greg lived in Dwale and told us to try and catch him home that night. So after some other appointments in Dwale, we headed up their hollow ("holler" in Kentuckian) and found out that basically, like every other hallow, there are about 10 families all related to each other. Greg wasn't home, but we met some other family members of his and told them what we previously told him and they are really open and excited to meet with us! Just awesome!!!! Martin is sweet, so much good stuff going on here!

Conference was totally awesome. I can't choose a favorite talk at the moment, but these are some of the highlights I had:

-The difference between "believing IN Christ" and "believing Him" - Elder Bednar, Sunday evening

- Focusing on Joy - President Nelson, Sunday Afternoon

- Without the Savior, all hope would be lost - President Monson, Sunday Afternoon

- Make the Book of Mormon the keystone of your testimony - Elder Stevenson, Saturday

- Repentance is a gift and a joy - Elder Renlund, Sunday Evening

It was really good overall and I am excited to study all the talks more. We watched it at the church on Saturday, but Sunday we watched it with Tina (a long time investigator) and her brother in the morning and then with Austin at Job Corps in the afternoon. We were supposed to have more people watching with us at Job Corp, but they apparently decided to make people work on Sunday, so most of the people were busy sadly. Oh, and Austin is doing really well. He has been reading a lot of the Book of Mormon and believes it is true!!! He wants to get baptized but his father doesn't want him to leave yet, so he can’t come to church or do any of that fun stuff outside of lessons, so we'll keep working with him!

Fun Story: We do service at Elk Horn Park, they are on the justserve.org and we go and just do a bunch of grounds keeping for them.  It’s a huge community park that has receptions, XC meets (it would be a sweet course), hiking, walking, dances and much more.  We saw a lot of fun animals there last week. We saw 2 snakes, one big, one small, and then an epic spider that I almost grabbed on accident. I'll send a picture of the spider :)

Hope y'all have a great upcoming week, love ya!!!

Take Luck

Elder Goold :)