9-July-2012

Dear Family,

Happy late 4th of July! I hope all of you had a great experiance this year. 4th of July as a missionary is just a diffrent experiance.

It really made me more appriciative of the religous freedoms that we have here! Truely, this nation was the only one that was

truely prepared for the restoration and for that I am thankful for! I loved celebrating the 4th here in Oregon! We were invited to

go to a small town of Vernonia, Oregon with a family I hadn't really known previously. They were so excited to have us with,

it was such an adventure! Verniona is a little town of about 2,000 people; maybe even less than that give or take. Their family

reminded me so much of ours. We barbaqued, watched a parade, played games,sang songs, jumped on their trampoline and lit of fireworks.

 They showed us a swimming pool that the town makes in to a swimming hole in the middle of the river. Swimming never looked so

inviting,but we decided to be obediant missionaries and not to hop in. We were allowed to stay out till 10:30 for fireworks this year

(the missionaries last year were allowed to stay out until midnight, and i'm really glad we weren't this year! The next day we

were just so tired just from staying out until 10:30!)

 We had enough time to see some other investigators and families before we

left for vernionia. One of them was an older lady named Gwen. I just love her and her family. She is going to be getting baptised

August 18th, the same day we have a mission tour. She's come such a long way! We're going to go to the Visitor's Center sometime

with her this week. Last lesson, she was telling us about how her family would go and do temple work in Seattle, and they would come

back so tired from all of their sealing work. She was so confused as to why, and thought that they had been working on the "ceilings" in the temple.

Her reaction to that is that the temple must have alot of ceilings!

This week we've been doing alot of tracting and finding and it's been in the 90's. No humidity though, and certainly not as hot as Virginia. They

keep letting us know about the heat waves everyone else is getting. Oregon certainly has intresting weather- one week it's super hot and the

next it's so nice. But back to the work, this last week, we were able to make succesfull contact with someone that the previous missionaries

had tracted into but had never gotten a return appointment with. He's an older african american gentlemen who grew up in the south and

loves to study with diffrent religons. This lesson really strengthened my testimony of tracting! He was impressed that we had just showed up

on his door step, testifying to him and his family of what he keeps calling "the word". He was intrigued and wanted to know more. We taught

him Saturday night and said that he would read. The apostasy made so much sense to him and he accepted the message that we had.

 I love experiances like this as a missionary. So often we just get turned away from going door to door. I hope that him and his family will keep learning.

Sister Peart and I have just had the funniest experiances while tracting this week.A lady turned us down but offered us cookies if we would leave.

We opened one double door to knock on the real door and ended up opening the door to the house. We both started laughing hard and walked as

quietly as we could away. We had a very anti less active man yell at us for coming to his door, asking us why in the world the mormons keep

coming to his door step. Tracting is great fun at times. You never know what kind of reaction you're going to get.

I hope all of you had a fantastic 4th! I love you, Sister Embley