Hey

I finally made it to the middle of nowhere. Lots to write about.
Before we hit all the Lewistown hab jab Let us finish off with Helena. The Stones, as you can probably recall, set a baptismal date for the 1st of May. Both Elder Lewis and I spaced their Word of Wisdom issues but still were confident that they would be able to pull through. I mean, cmon, Its the Gospel of Jesus Christ, with the help of the Gospel you can do anything. Especially, quiting smoking, etc, peace pipes, sage brush and other misc burnt offerings that are inhaled or not. Going to back to the Word of Wisdom deal, we both agreed that we needed to teach it ASAP so that they could get started on quitting smoking. So we did...... and it didnt go too well. They knew that smoking was bad and they wanted to quit but they just did not understand why they had to be living the word of wisdom before they were baptized. They have an uncle who lives in Townsend and he is a member so before we met with him again the Stones wanted to talk with him about the smoking thing. They did and the uncle said he didnt know so He had to talk with someone else. Hopefully things will get worked out.

Now for Lewistown:
Lewistown is only about 6,000 people and is very country. Its about 120 miles away from any other city, but surrounded by small towns and nuclear missile silos. I heard yesterday that Montana, even more specifically, The area of Lewistown, holds over 1/3 of the nations nukes. So, do’tt worry about me. I am safe.

We live in a tri-plex house type deal. There are two apts on the bottom and we have the whole top to ourselves. Its not the nicest but it works. Our bathroom looks like a bathroom in a third world country but hey, I guess I couldnt have luxury my whole mission. One fact about our mission is that every companionship has access to a car. The answer to, "Do you have a car?" is YES. We are in the middle of nowhere. As for the people they seem to be pretty nice. I only know about 5 families because we didn’t have church on Sunday so I will have to wait another week for that. Elder Rice is quiet but you wouldn’t know he had only been out for 6 weeks if no one told you. He knows all the lessons so we dont have to worry about that. We stayed the night in Kalispell where I got the chance to meet the infamous Elder McClaws, relative of the Smiths.

So for the work in Lewistown, there are lots of Eternigators, not investigators. There are lots of people that the missionaries in the past have just visited and not really taught. I told Elder Rice that we need to make some changes and he agrees. I will give you an example. K: If he knew the Bible any better than he does I would think he would be angel Moroni, except for the fact that he is about 400lbs and talks with a southern accent. He has been many places in the world and in all those places he has taught many a sermon. He said that he was also on TV for about 4 years. He knows the Bible but that’s all he knows. So me, being the new missionary, not knowing K. personally, decided to poke around a little bit and ask him about the Book of Mormon. He transformed from this nice big southern man, to..... THE DEVIL HIMSELF!!!! AHHHH. Honestly, scared the poop out of me. It was the most intense conversations I’ve ever had on my mission. He started testing me and asking me questions to things that I honestly did not know the answer to. He told me that I should keep my mouth shut and not talk about things that I didnt know about. Then he went off on this whole sermon on how he didnt read anything besides what the word of God was and that was it. I came to conclusion that he had no idea what the BOf Mormon even was. So, we took the chance to explain it a little and he said, "oh, I didnt know that." In the end we invited him to read a few chapters.

Thats pretty much the week story with missionary work in Lewistown. We have been executing "Operation Hitler" Weeding out the weak and keeping the strong. Or, the non progressing and progressing. I will keep you informed on our Operation.

One more quick: We visited this less active family that gave us their pre-bapitzed lives of being wicken witches. To be continued.....

We are shearing sheep today so I will let you know how that goes next week.

ElParHey