Highgate

Mon, Jan 10, 2011
Well, things are going good here. I love Highgate. We've had a good week. On Wednesday we went to Port Antonio for district meeting. the drive there is so pretty. you drive right along the coast with the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. This part of the island is much more jungleish. Wednesday night I spent the night in Ocho Rios and drove to Kingston Thursday morning with the zone leaders for some leadership training with President Hendricks. It was really good. I got to spend the night in the mission home. It was so nice to see carpet and hot water again. The rest of the week went really well. Elder Conder and I have been teaching our behinds off. It paid off when we had one of our investigators came to church with her 3 kids as well as 2 others that came that were invited by a member. Chris Singh unfortunately missed church. we had a good talk with him yesterday about why church is so important. He is still doing ok. he has been reading a lot from the book of mormon. he could use some prayers though.

Elder Conder and I have been working very hard and teaching our behinds off. We are really trying to get the members more involved in our missionary work. Elder Conder and I simply don't have time to do everything that we want to do especially when we have to spend some time dealing with branch buisness. We got the OK from the branch president to start our Member Missionary Preparation Class on Tuesday night. This class is meant to help members understand the doctrine of missionary work, understand and explain our beliefs, give practical ideas for member missionary work, and coordinate our efforts with the members. Since we don't have any structure in the branch to work with, we are trying to work directly with as many members as we can. Hopefully we will have a good turn out and it will be effective. We are hoping to get the members motivated so that by next week we can start another class on Thursday night at the church to which we can invite investigators and encourage members to invite people to. We haven't finalized our plans for this class yet but our thought is that if we can get people to come it will be those who are prepared to hear our message. Those that come will have an immediate support system from the member that invited them, coming to the church for the class will make it easier to come back on Sunday, and those that come will be those who are interested in learning and are willing to act on an invitation. This is all part of our plan to think of different ways of how to find those who are prepared to act on our message. We'll keep working at it and see how it goes.

Thanks for all you do. Love you all, have a great week.
Elder Kartchner