Week 15 (WITH PICTURES)

Another week come and gone. I'm really enjoying my time up here with Elder Wilson. Every 6 weeks I've been given a new companion, so I'm interested in what's going to happen 5 weeks from now. Elder Kirsi and my new companion, Elder Wilson switched places, so he's in Cottonwood Heights. When Elder Wilson came up, he showed me pictures of how EVERY SINGLE HOUSE in their area was labeled Member, Non-member, or Less Active. I'm so happy I'm up here in Wyoming *shudder*

A new apartment thing is not only a ping-pong trophy, but a ping-pong 'ladder' as well. You challenge the person above you to take their place. Not only this, everything has been moved around, so the ping-pong table is up against the wall. Hitting the ball off the wall is part of the game now, which makes everything more crazy. It all sounds kinda ridiculous, but it doesn't really matter to me, cause I'm sitting on top. Heh.

For Halloween we had a ward trunk-or-treat, but we couldn't go out past 6. This is because people will dress up as missionaries for Halloween, and do some stupid things, and the church will get blamed for it. So if no 'real' missionaries are out, there wouldn't be a problem. So we basically hung out at the Institute for like 3 hours.

On Saturday we helped set up for a HUGE event called Cowboys against Cancer. There was a ton of important people there, and when they recognized the LDS missionaries as volunteers, we got a standing ovation, which was pretty cool. Later that day we helped a suicidal man who saw how his life was better and wanted to come back to church. It was probably the most fulfilling thing I've done as a missionary so far.

Sunday was incredible. We had 4 investigators, and many, many less-actives come to church. Since it was fast and testimony meeting, Elder Wilson and I got up to bear our testimonies. After mine, I challenged the ward to come up and talk about a missionary experience they've had in the past little bit. The whole fast and testimony meeting was all about missionary work, and one of our investigators got up and bore an incredible testimony about how she feels God has been leading her to this church, and that she knew this was where she needed to be. (This was the first time she had even come to this ward) We expect to have even more people there next week!

I'm loving this experience, and I'd like to thank everybody again for all of your support. I finally got around to sending out some letters today, and hope to hear from you all over the next transfer!

Love,

Elder Martineau

P.S. (From Tami) One of the kids asked him "What do you do on Halloween? Do you pass out Book of Mormon's instead of candy?" He said that for Hallween he and Elder Wilson switched name tags. I thought that was funny.