Sic semper homines exquirendo *

Dear all,

Pretty downer stuff going on in the area this week in terms of investigators. We tried to pass by our golden Haitian friend Élie the other day and succeeded only in making his wife angry at us. He still hasn't answered any of our calls and hasn't come back to church. 

Lydia and Flora, the "Golden" people I taught with Elder Surette last transfer, also officially dropped us this week. From the text they sent, it sounded like they had dropped us about a month ago, but I guess they just didn't communicate it too well, or we didn't understand it too well, or both. Either way, that's another two fewer people to worry about.

As far as I've seen on my mission, that's pretty much the life span of a "golden investigator." You find them and they're super hyped to come to church and get baptized, you teach them a few times and maybe give them a baptismal date, and then they just stop talking to you for no reason that you can see. You can't even schedule an appointment with them to figure it out or help them overcome their concerns. They're just gone. 

There's always a very interesting battle with hope. Most of the time, I feel like I'm doing the Lord's work, and I generally enjoy what I'm doing, but my struggle is to have hope that the work I do will pay off. I know that even if I don't see any results in terms of baptisms or high numbers that I'm still making a difference doing what I'm doing (perhaps sometimes a difference only in myself), but it can get very discouraging. I feel like I very frequently go through a cycle of being filled with hope as we find someone new and then having that hope slowly leak out as they gradually start to ignore us. 

However, I have learned that hope should be much more in ultimate results or events than proximate ones. Even if I don't have much hope that we will baptize someone or that a specific person we're teaching will progress, I do have hope that my service and efforts are recognized by God and that one day everything will be made right. 

In other news, member work has been great. We met with quite a few less active and active members this week and had great visits with all of them. One of them is a chess teacher named Robert who agreed to let us come back so he could teach us some chess. Another is a sister named Rosie who hadn't been to church in more than a year but came this Sunday after we invited her. We also met with Sister Baker again (we've been meeting with her for a while, but we lost touch with her about a month ago) and had a very enjoyable visit with her. Even if non-members are depressing to work with sometimes, members are always great. 

We've also been doing a good amount of successful finding trying to rebuild our teaching pool. The other day we found a less active member from Peru who hasn't been to church in years and only moved to Canada a few months ago. She has a couple kids who havent been baptized and she said she wanted to come back to church and meet with the missionaries regularly. We passed her off to the sisters since they're the Spanish team, and last we heard they had a very, very spiritual lesson with her. 

So there we go. The moral of this week is: missionary work is sometimes pretty depressing, but hey, at least we've got members. 

Love you all, 

Elder Hadden

I'm out of pictures today, but we're having our first ever non-apostate district activity P-Day today. Pictures next week. 

* Sic semper homines exquirendo:  Thus always to investigators.