North Mesa

Hello Everyone! I hope everything is going well for you, because it is going great for me out here in North Mesa! I am loving this area more and more every day!

We have some new investigators that are looking very solid and I hope that they will be baptized within the next two months or so! Pray for the work to increase and for us to continue to work hard here in the heat! I am surviving and I am pretty sure that the worst of the weather is over. It is still over 100 degrees everyday, but not as hot as it was before. I heard that it wont cool down until about Halloween time. That is a long ways away, but I will deal with it. The air conditioning in the car helps a lot, but it stinks when we go into a house and the a/c is broken or something! Anyway! We are teaching some really neat people! Dusting Trott, who has a step brother on a mission and wants to be baptized by him when he gets home next month! He is super shy, but we are going to be going to a Arizona Diamondbacks game with him and his dad (season ticket holders) on September 6th! (my brother Clark's 23rd birthday). We are also teaching a wonderful African lady! She moved here from Zambia last year and her name is Zamiwe! She is so humble and she is interested in coming closer to God. She will be baptized soon for sure!

Elder Bickmore and I are doing great! we are very similar in the way that we act, teach and we both work really hard to bring the people that are prepared to Christ! He and I eat very well here and it makes it nice because now I will have more money to spend in my budget on food. In my last area I was stretched thin for money at the end of each month because we were not fed as much as we are here. The members are so nice and they are willing to help in any way that they can! We are still working out every other day at brother Freeman's home and he is showing us some good stuff! The only thing that is going wrong is my sleeping pattern, and if you knew me at BYU-I you knew that I woke up a lot during the night and rarely got a good nights sleep. Here it is the same way, almost worse, but I am dealing with it and will push through the pain. If anyone has suggestions please let me know.

I would like to spend a little time to address the youth of the church, so if you are a parent you are going to want to read this to your kids.

I have seriously wasted a ton of time in my life previous to my mission. I am not saying this because someone told me to, I am saying it because I have realized how important the church is and how serious it is that we need to be involved! One of the biggest things that I regret was not inviting my highschool friends to activities, you dont have to invite them to church for them to feel the spirit! You have to get them exposed to the great feelings that exist in the church and around the members! I want to challenge everyone, young and old, to reach out to some of your friends and to invite them to something church related. As a missionary I rely heavily on the members to find people that they know for us to teach! This is the MOST effective way for missionaries to find people to teach, please do this! Also I want to let you know that going out with the missionaries for a lesson or a visit means everything to their efforts and even more to the people that they are teaching. So again I will extend a challenge, this time to my family, to go out with the missionaries at least once this next week and help them in any way that you can. Just bearing your testimony will help. that is all you need. Please let me know how this goes.

A mission should be in everyones future plans. No matter how old you are you can still serve a mission in your future! I know that this will not be my last mission, but that I will be severing the church and the missionaries for the rest of my life. I hope that you will see the importance of missionary work and pray for the missionaries in your local area BY NAME.

Thats all I have to say

Elder Thomas