Email: October 24, 2011

Hello family,

Well I am back in Oregon. Sounds like you have already heard but I am serving in Prineville. It is almost the dead center of Oregon. There is a town not too far from here that is called Post that really is the official center of the state. We are almost the farthest out but there are missionaries in Burns that is about another three hours from here. It is a pretty small city, not quite as small as Coquille was but there are two sets of missionaries here, so our area is almost as small. It is crazy how many people are related here. It has been a long and short week at the same time. There hasn't been a huge amount of success here in the recent past and I hope that we can change that pretty quick. My new companions name is Elder Snyder. He is from Provo. He has been out only 4 and a half months. He is a little different of a guy but he loves the gospel and that's all that matters. Right now we only have two investigators, Bernice Powell who has a baptism date for this weekend and Aaron Mapes. They taught Aaron a while back and then had a hard time getting in contact with him for about three months but we got in contact with him and went over and talked to him on Thursday. He is a religious guy he goes the calvary church here in town and loves the bible. He had a problem with having to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands when we talked with him. He thinks that anyone can have him with you all the time once you have decided to believe. We have a few good scriptures that we are going to talk with him about next time. We assigned him to read Acts 8:14-17 and Moroni chapter 3. They really haven't had a real lesson with him yet. He loves to talk so they just ended up talking about gospel topics with him. This next time I am hoping to go over that concern and then have a real lesson. We did find a good few investigators this past week that I feel good about. We are meeting with one on Wednesday that I feel very strongly about. My goal is to have her baptized by the end of November. She knows a lot of the members around and teaches music to a few of the youth. Her father passed away about a year ago and she is now taking care of her mother full time. She seemed very interested and we gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon and gave her a section to read and pray about and we are going to discuss that with her Wednesday. But other than that its been pretty slow. They didn't really do any tracting here before, I don't know why but I have made it so we do that at least two hours a day. We are heading out to a corn maze today and might play some basketball. Oh something funny happened I wanted to tell you about. So you remember Justin from last season of biggest loser? He was Rulon's partner. Anyway he is our bishop's brother and he came to visit this week and so I got to meet him. Pretty random but I thought you guys would like that. Well got to go. Love you all and look forward to hearing from ANYONE.

Love,

Elder Erickson