8-3-10

Hello Family,

Sounds like things are going well back home. It is interesting that things have been cooler because it has been pretty hot up here. We seem to get a thunderstorm that rolls in mid afternoon almost everyday which actually feels nice when you are on a bike. This past week has been about the same. The good thing about the week is that we were able to meet with a lot of our investigators and other members of our ward. We haven't been able to set anyone for baptism yet (it’s going to happen) and none of our investigators came to church this past Sunday so that was kind of a bummer. A lot of them had random things going on I guess.

This past week we had Zone Conference again for the transfer and I had to give a ten minute training in front of 40 missionaries. Every transfer we focus on 4 topics and review them in the next zone conference so we gave one of those. I was kind of nervous and I was also nervous for my companion Elder Porter but we went over them before the conference and we did all right. There are going to be more changes in the mission now. For example, we will have zone conference quarterly instead of every 6 weeks and that goes for interviews with Pres. Ely too. That’s kind of a bummer, but it will be good. There are a lot more changes but I don't remember a lot of them.

So, we do a lot of tracting in Berthoud and this other day I learned something about having a good attitude and to not get offended. So, we ran into this lady who told us that when she was prego with her 4th child her husband ran off with some Mormon girl and for awhile she hated Mormons because of it. Since then she has had a change of heart as she has met others of our faith to the point where she is no longer bitter about it. A little bit further down the street we ran into this really ticked old man who said that a missionary (not even sure if it was a Mormon missionary) said to him that he was going to hell once and has been holding a grudge ever since and probably won't change. After leaving it just showed me that here is a lady whose husband left her but was still eventually able to forgive and yet here is a man where someone said one stupid thing once that he can't let go. It just made me realize that people are not perfect and make some pretty big mistakes sometimes, but we have to learn to forgive and move forward rather than dwell on the past.

Elder Cooper