New Life

Dear Friends and Family,

My new companion has been out for 5 transfers, working on his 6th. His name is Elder Leftwich. He is from Colorado and went to BYU for two semesters. We were there for the same fall semester but he lived off campus so I never met him there. He is my district leader as well as my companion. The other two in my apartment are on transfer 16 and transfer 8. They are great guys. 

So I got transferred to a new area and I have a completely different apartment and everything. On the day of transfers I got on a train, rode one stop, and dragged my bags up a massive hill to the new apartment. I walked into the apartment and was greeted by stuff everywhere and just all around messy. It was pretty bad. I didn't even unpack, I just started cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. Luckily my new companion helped me clean the apartment. That was good!  So that is how my first transfer went. Now the apartment is beautiful, but I don't want to see anything like that ever again. 

So Elder Leftwich and I have been sent to an area that has actually been struggling a lot. Up until last transfer it was in the same district as the other Machida district. But they were split from us last transfer when they got another Elders companion set. So Machida had two districts of six last transfer and now there are two districts of 8 missionaries. Their key indicators are crazy low last transfer and nobody really knows why. A couple of the people from the district were transferred away and four new missionaries were brought in, creating another companionship. We are going to try and breathe some new life into the district and the ward and see if we can't help the Lord in his work in Machida! 

So far we have certainly been blessed with success out here. We already have a new investigator who we found yesterday and are meeting him again today. Yesterday we gave out two Book of Mormons! It was awesome! The funny thing is, we spent four hours dendoing hard core to try and find some people interested with not much luck. Then a little later we had some extra time between finishing district leader duties and a zone conference call, so we went out and found four incredibly prepared people! It was interesting. We had to put in time to show the Lord that He could bless us with some success. He had to see our desire to bring people to Him before putting them in our path. It was really great--great lesson. Anyways, I need to go! Love you all!

Siebach 長老