Brian Email 8-4-05

Hi family,

I have some great stories this week. They're not really hugely
important, but they made my week a lot better. First of all, on Sunday
we were driving around trying to find people (investigators, members,
less active members, strangers...) and NOBODY was home, or else they
were busy. We ended up driving 80 miles that day, and couldn't find a
single person to talk to... it was pretty rough, but then my companion
spotted a "deep burgundy Brunswick bowling ball bag" on the side of the
road. We stopped, he ran out in the rain and brought it back to the
car. It smelled terrible! It smelled like some animal crawled in it
and died, and then some dog claimed it for his own. But we took it and
it was pretty heavy, so we assumed there was a bowling ball inside.
There was. We cleaned it a lot, and it smells all right now, and we
have a bowling ball, and some shoes and a polishing rag now. Que
suerte!

Then, yesterday we were tracting and stumbled across an apartment that
had been abandoned for years, and in the grass there by the door, we
found an old record album. It was totally The Beatles' "Love Songs" on
vinyl, with John Lennon's "Imagine" soundtrack to the movie. Incredible
find. Elder Mitchell is sending "Love Songs" to his mom, "Imagine" is
mine, who has a record player that would enjoy it? Do Julie and Scott
have one?

Also tracting yesterday, we found a cool investigator. We taught him
the restoration lesson, and he gobbled it up. He had lots of questions,
but my favorite one was this one, "So you say that this Joseph Smith
wanted to find the true church, and when he asked God, that God and
Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him there wasn't a true church but
then he restored His church through another living prophet?" He totally
understood everything, enough to repeat it back, (with more details than
this, I just didn't want to type them all). Usually when we tell that
story, we ask about an obvious part, and they just stare back at us and
say something like "anything to do with God is good..." Not this guy.
He asked when we would get another prophet, he seemed a little bummed
that this happened 200 years ago, so we explained that there is a
prophet today, and his eyes just lit up, it was amazing. He said he had
always beleived that God would call another prophet, but the Bible never
said where or when or who. He loved it, and he said how natural it all
seemed that God would reveal another book of scripture to clarify the
lost truths that have been taken out of the bible. He promised us he
would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it before we even tried to
commit him to do it. It was a really great lesson. Elder Mitchell even
did most of the talking, he's getting so much better with his Spanish,
he's making a lot of progress, fast. Then this guy's 6 year old kid
went tracting with us until we finished the rest of the building. He
told us where all the Spanish people lived, and he told us about all of
the people. It was funny, we gave him a couple of pass-along cards and
he was happy. He called them his "Diositos" or I guess it could be
translated God-lets or something like that.

As for our other potential baptisms, they haven't been back to church
yet, they're pretty embarrassed that they didn't go that day, and they
don't want everyone to judge them. I would love to tell them that no
one would do that, but the branch has pretty much no faith in them
anymore. The Relief Society President told us we were dumb for not
dropping them. Hmmm... We'll have to see. Edwin won't talk to us
still, he hides in his room when we go over, so that's kind of hard.
We'll just have to wait for him to cool down.

Overall, everything is going well here. I'm having a blast and having a
lot of fun here. Winston-Salem is a really odd little town, it always
keeps me on my toes. I'm starting to love the South, it's really really
different from back home, but it's got a lot of character.

I hope the bike trip goes okay for Dad and Andy. What did Michael and
the Scouts do this year? Maybe you already told me, but I forgot... I'm
not sure. Tell Bro. McDaniel good luck for me, I still think about the
scouts a lot, and I have some good stories to tell people here from last
summer. Well, that's about it for this week, I'll talk to y'all later.

Love, Brian Harris