30 Aug 2010

Well it was a good week. This morning was cool we ran down to Coney Island beach! it took us a while but it felt good. We are going to do it every P-Day the rest of the transfer. Diane came to church again yesterday but her daughters did not, we are meeting with them tonight and hopefully we will be able to baptize all of them soon. Diane is doing great! she reads from the book of mormon every day and is really gaining a strong testimony, and the best part is that she is not even focused on baptism. She has her eyes on the temple! that is where she wants to go! So i am stoked, she is a great lady, mom and dad you will definitely meet her when you come here. We had a cool guy named marlen come yesterday too towards the end of church. He is from trinidad and is the fiance of a less active that we have been doing service for every week. Just helping her clean out her garage and stuff like that. Well he came with her for a little bit and this week we are going to start teaching him. I have a good feeling about him for this month. He is Rastafarian, so the beliefs are a little different but he is open to the lessons. We have another lady named ann marie that looks good too, but she is really struggling letting jesus in her life. she has had a really rough childhood with abuse and stuff and doesn't want to let those feelings go. But she is really nice and knows that she needs to change, she is just scared. She has a 18 year old son that is pretty ghetto and a 4 year old daughter named Tori who is really cute. Yesterday she could not come to church because it was Tori's birthday and she had to take her to the prison to visit her father. But she should be coming next week, she has accepted to be baptized but she needs to make a lot of changes. We have 2 months left of this "year of miracles" that we started last november. We set a goal to baptize 800 people about double of what we have averaged the last 5 to 6 years. Well to be completely honest our misssion has not changed that much. and we are basically doing the same thing that we were doing a year ago. We have about 400 baptisms left. Our district set a goal for September to have 8 baptisms. I think that we could really do it, we have 6 people in our district. So pray for our goal! I love you guys and hope you have a great week.
Love Elder Olsen