Cody

Happy Fathers day! Glad to hear from everybody. Sounds like its been a good week. Things are going great in Boardman. Inez Romero is back working day shift, so we're meeting with them regularly again. On Tuesday, our zone leaders and District leaders and trainers all went to Kennewick for leadership training. So that left me working in Hermiston working with 2 other elders that day. Things are going good with Carolyn, our 80 year old investigator. Yesterday was her 2nd time coming to church, and she has the Gospel Principles manual and Relief Society manual to study from. She's a real nice lady, and she has lived in Boardman since 1947. We had the Young men do some service in the yard of one of our new investigators, Melissa. And we started teaching another new investigator through youth friendship in the ward. We've also set up an appointment to teach a friend of Bishop Rogers and he'll be joining us, so things are going great. On Saturday night we met with our Ward Missionary A-team and Sunday morning we started teaching our Preach my Gospel class to the Ward missionaries and prospective elders. So lots of exciting things are happening.
One cool experience in particular, is we were tracting through some apartments a week and a half ago and bumped into a guy named Cody. He said he goes to a christian Church in tricities. We talked to him a bit longer and he said we could come by that saturday afternoon. We went by then, but he wasn't home. We tried the next week and he answered and said he had to go somewhere that saturday but if we'd come the next one he'd be home all day and he even gave us his phone number to check back with him.  On Saturday we decided to leave the car home and get by with walking and getting rides, so we got a ride with Tory, one of the ward missionaries, over to our appointment with Cody, and found a note on the door that said "Mormons: I'm not interested, Thank you" So a bit disheartened, we left a note on the door that said "Thanks for the note, let us know if you ever need anything" with our phone number. That evening, we were walking, and we had 2 appointments cancel on us so we didn't know what to do. Elder Evans got the thought that we should go to Cody's, (He lived pretty close, and get some water) I wanted to just head back to the church and get ready for correlation. We decided to stop and pray about it, and we both felt like we should go to Cody's house. So we did and he let us in! We talked for a bit, had some water and, we'll probably end up being able to go back and teach him! I'm grateful the spirit directed us back there, and I know that something good we'll come out of it!
Well I'll close with a cool scripture I ran into the other day.
 1 Peter 3:15 But ^asanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give ^ban answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the ^chope that is in you with ^dmeekness and ^efear:

Have a great week everyone!
Elder Derek S. Partridge
8202 W. Quinault Ave. # D
Kennewick, WA 99336