Dear family,

So the most exciting thing this week was when we were street contacting and I stopped this Muslim guy.  After hearing me out, he explained how the Bible, Koran, and some other book were kind of like 3 glasses of water and we had to try them all to find out which one was the best.  He had a lot of similar views of how we can find the truth, but he ended up leaving and we never saw him again... or so we thought.  We continued street contacting, and a second guy came along, obviously muslim from his huge beard, and he started talking to us about Islam and gave me a DVD explaining the importance of forgiveness in Islam.  They have some different word for the forgiveness they get, but I can't remember it.  Right after he left, the first muslim guy came with a friend, and they said they wanted to talk with us.  So we sat down and started talking.  They talked a ton about how we should read the Koran so we can see that it is true, and they had even printed off a piece of the Koran to have us read.  They used analogies, and all in all they seemed to be pretty good teachers... except they interrupted a lot and didn't ask any questions at all.  That's probably how some of us missionaries look.  So we basically threw a couple cool analogies back and forth, and I shared some scripture from the Book of Mormon.  They ended up leaving because they had to get to the Mosque for the prayer call, which kind of relieved me and my companion, because we started talking about the time lunch was supposed to start, and finished talking the time it was supposed to end.  So we had lunch a bit later that day.

So that's the story of how 2 Muslims tried converting me to Islam.  Meanwhile, we recently received 2 referrals from members, and have a couple returns for tracting that will hopefully bring some more results, so that's exciting.  This week we also were able to catch up on all the bills that were unpaid due to the negligence of previous missionaries.  But now it's all set in order.  I know at least older members know about holidays like Thanksgiving from talking to missionaries, but I'm not sure how widely known it is here.  I just know that on Thanksgiving we have a special zone conference thing where we are all going to get together (as 2 zone conferences happening in the same place at the same time) and we'll do zone conference followed by watching a movie.  From what I hear, there's a good chance of us watching Toy Story 3, but we'll see.

Anyways, I'm almost done reading Jesus the Christ, and I just finished the portion that talked about Christ going to the Spirit world.  It was crazy to read about all the trials and stuff that Christ had to go through.  The book pointed out every single thing that was illegal about what they had done to convict him to death, and in the end, they couldn't convict him guilty of anything legally.  One of my favorite responses from Jesus was when somebody hit him, and he said something like: If I have spoken evil, why am I not convicted?  If I have spoken good, why do you hit me?  Something like that.  Just every time he spoke, nobody had any clue what to say.  That's a pretty good book.

The weather is starting to get colder, but it's still not too bad. I'll keep you updated in a week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine