Big News

Hey Family! Big News this week!

For Starters, I don't know if you've been reading your church news, (I know I haven't) They just announced the new missions and mission presidents for this July. They announced 58 new missions! How nuts is that? Bringing the number of missions worldwide from 340 something to 400 something. Among those is our very own Vancouver Washington Mission! The changes will be made in July, along with new mission presidents, for Kennewick and Vancouver.

Also, I'm being transferred! I'm opening a new area...... The Yakima South Spanish area! Ok, so actually the area is being divided. I will be in the south part.... TRAINING A NEW MISSIONARY, and The Zoneleader 4-ship, Elders Calder, Swenson, Diaz, and his trainee will be covering North Yakima. Two Spanish sister missionaries will be covering Terrace Heights Moxee, and Union Gap, making 8 missionaries in our branch!

This is where were finally starting to really see the effects of President Monson's announcement. We're getting 13 spanish missionaries and only 1 is going home, so... 6 new areas, (one of those for sisters) and it looks like we're beefing up the big branches first. They got another companionship in vancouver, and one in kennewick also among others.

I'm excited to be with an 8 man spanish district. Also, just this week, several golden investigators, in the soon to be yakima south area have come out of the wood work and shown up at church. Its going to be sweet! ME and my soon to be hijo are gonna have a super good transfer, this is also going to be a huge strength to the branch. Its going to be awesome! I don't want to keep Brian Waiting so I'll send this out right now!

-Elder Derek Partridge

Work Smart

its been a good week! I think the challenge we've had isn't finding investigators, but finding ones that will progress and keep commitments. It made me think of an mtc devotional a long time ago, from Elder D. Todd Christofferson. He told us something to the effect of, "on your mission never hesitate to stop and evaluate the effectiveness of what you're doing."

It made me think, because it seems though as we have put in a lot of effort, we haven't seen it be as effective as we would like, and so this week we're going to talk about Finding, and finding effectively; working smart, not just hard. I think that’s going to be good advice for the rest of my life.

We did have a great lesson with the Pimentel family, which consists of Manuel, a 28 year old, convert of 3 years, got back from a mission 2 months ago, solid. His 2 nonmember brothers and there wives and kids. We had a very spiritual lesson, and basically established that we're here to help them enjoy the blessings of the gospel, so we made some headway there. Manuel has been fun to go on exchanges with. It makes him miss his mission, I feel bad for him. He is a star, though. Playing primary in piano has been good. I've been enjoying and slowly improving. I've pretty much mastered mi padre celestial me ama, with the right hand even though it has 3 flats. so I'm doing good!

I'm going to have to start up piano lessons with Sister Paul after the mission...

Well that’s all I have for you, have a great week

-Elder Partridge

Doctrine of Christ

It has been an awesome week in Yakima. We had zone conference on Tuesday. It was awesome to be able to see President and Sister Greer. They talked about the doctrine of Christ. It was good to get fired up to go do more work. On Wednesday we went to Selah to learn more about family history from a lady in one of the wards there. They want us to teach the high priests in the branch. That would be really good, but also a daunting task. I guess its kind of hard to get correct information from Mexico. I got some more time to clean some stuff up on our line. A couple duplicates here and there. I've actually kind of enjoyed figuring that stuff out. Elizabeth Buxton had the wrong father on there a couple times. The one that was on there was about 80 when she was born, so I knew that couldn't be right. She had a lot of different parents listed, I went ahead and cleaned them all out..

In other news we've been doing a lot of work and going out with people from Elders Quorum this week. We've found a couple new families in Moxee and here in Yakima. So we're excited! Well everyone, Have a great week!

-Elder D. Partridge

Miracles

Dear Family,

Glad to hear Ma and Pa are back safe.

The miracles haven't ceased in Yakima. We've seen an awesome week. Concha continues to progress and we've found a ton of new people. I've also been working into my new call as district leader. District meeting went pretty well, I also had the opportunity to go on an exchange with Elder Skeen, have a District Comp Study on member missionary work, and I interviewed Angela Coombs for Baptism on Friday night. I pretty much got to experience everything in week 1.

The exchange went well, It helped me to get a feel for the 2nd ward area a little more. I feel like they putting a huge emphasis on working with members would be good for our whole district. I thought about it and we went over for comp study to study sections from Chapter 9. I've kind of thought about showing or telling members about mormon.org for spiritual thoughts after dinner, so that they can use it as a resource to do missionary work. I might be mistaken but it seems like a lot of members don't really have a full knowledge of what Mormon.org is and what it has to offer. I think this would be really good. You should all check out mormon.org. It is good!

As far as work in our own area goes, we've been teaching a lot and finding alot, and trying to sift them to find the elect. We've found a lot of very good people, that are very accepting and so I think we'll put a big focus on those ones. We continue to be blessed and see miracles!

Elder Partridge