Do not send photos with blood and no explanation. Mom

This week was like a hot air balloon takeoff. At the beginning of the week, we had very minimal success. The summer arrived, and I was fighting off some strong attacks of laziness. We were occupied by trying to get everything set up for our ward activity, a "Movie Theater Night," and the schedule we had made for the nightly family home evenings started to cause our time to go to waste when most of the week's assigned families forgot. We had everything ready for liftoff, but we lacked the fire. My companion and I decided to experiment; we would just put our all into the next day, and do everything right, and see how the results changed. We lit the fire, and our hot air balloon took off. The latter half of the week was great, and we saw fruits of our faith and sacrifice.

First, we had the movie night on Thursday. A great group of investigators came out to see "17 Miracles," a film about the pioneer trek to Salt Lake Valley. From there, we started working hard to find new investigators and get everyone from the ward activity to got to church on Sunday as well.

We found some really cool guys. We knocked on José's door, and he let us in before we had even said anything. Different members of his family started filtering through the house during the lesson, and each time he would try to convince them to listen in before we could even invite them. He went to church on Sunday. He actually ditched his only school class of the week to go. We also found a guy named Sergio. He looks like a real thug. However, that preconception seemed a lot different once we were inside and met his one year old daughter and talked about the importance of parenthood. Maybe he is a thug, but he also wants to be a good father. We started teaching, and he started to go off on this rant about the prophet Moses. A bunch of people started coming to his front gate to talk to him, and eventually we were kind of losing control of the lesson, so we invited him to church and gave him a pamphlet. Sunday morning, Elder Smalley saw him on his bike and told him to go to church, and he went too! After running wild Sunday morning, we managed to have ten investigators come, seven for the first time.

I think I've learned a lesson. Without fire - without diligence, and dedication and sacrifice - we're grounded. But faith gets us up in the air. And it's just more efficient to tract from a hot air balloon.