Hey everyone!
How are you all doing?! I loved hearing from you all and am so thankful for the support that I receive from you all. I can't believe that Friday will be my year mark. It is really blowing my mind how fast that came. This first year of my mission has been the best experience of my life and I am so thankful for the opportunity that I have to serve. I know that this next year is going to be just as great!
Everything is going well here in Armenia. The work is going great and I'm loving it! I'll go ahead and fill you all in a little bit. So, Aram is doing really good. He is such a good guy haha. It is really weird teaching him in English cause I've gotten so used to teaching everything in Armenian. It is nice in some ways and in some ways I don't like it as much. But he is doing really well. He is still moving towards baptism, but we had to push his date back to the first week of April. We want him to be more consistent and steady with church attendance. Here is some good news. He actually won a weight lifting competition this last week! haha. He was calling us during the whole competition and letting us know how he was doing. There were only 5 people in the competition, but hey, a win is a win. He was really excited about it all. Today, we are actually going to go play basketball with him again, which I'm really excited about. Elder Seegmiller and his companion and Elder Steglich and his companion are
coming too so it should be a good time! We also picked up two new investigators this last week. There is actually a really cool story that goes along with it. So, about two or three months ago, we met
this lady on the street and she seemed really great. We were really excited to meet with her but we fell out of contact with her and weren't ever able to meet. Well, this last week for some reason her
name came back into my mind, so I gave her a call and she was so happy that we called. She told us that she had been wanting to meet with us but she had lost our phone number and didn't know how to get in contact with us. We ended up going over there this last week and picked her and her grand daughter as investigators. They seem like really great people and are searching for truth. I'm really excited to start working with them! Other than that, we have a few potential investigators that we met on the street this last week whom we are hoping to meet with this next week. I'll let you know how that all goes! Things with Elder Rackham are going really well. I really love training. Really I love teaching. It is so interesting seeing him go through a lot of the same frustrations with the language that I did and being able to pull from my experiences and help him out with it. This last week as I talked to him about some of these things I realized what a blessing it has been for me to be able to learn another language. Even though it has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, I realized the great blessings that it has brought me. It has also brought me so much closer to God and helped me to understand the doctrines of this gospel better. It has taught me how we always need to rely on the Lord, and how much of a blessing the Holy Ghost is. That we can receive that help and guidance when we are doing our part. Elder Rackham is doing so great though. I found that he does what I did/do a lot and looks ahead. He just wants to speak and understand perfectly right now, something I still want haha. One thing we both have been focusing on is just controlling the things we can control and never forgetting how far we have come. Just a year ago, I didn't know any Armenian and for Elder Rackham, just four months ago he didn't know any Armenian. Yet, The Lord still trusts both of us enough to do His work and serve His children. What a blessing! Yesterday Elder Rackham and I gave talks in Sacrament Meeting. Elder Rackham spoke about The Holy Ghost and did an amazing job. I had the
opportunity to speak about tithing. I took a few days to study tithing and I learned a lot of really amazing things. So many people look at commandments as restricting and something that holds us back. But commandments are really such a blessing. Especially the law of tithing. As I studied it, I realized that the law of tithing really gives us two great blessings. It gives us a way to thank our Heavenly Father for all of our blessings. I will pay tithing until the day that I die because I have so much to be thankful for haha. But it also gives Heavenly Father a chance to bless us. It is impossible to pay tithing and not receive blessings, whether temporal or spiritual. Obviously, that is not the reason we should pay tithing, but it certainly is something that we need to put our faith and trust in. I'm so thankful for the great blessing that this gospel is in my life. I can't imagine what my life would be without having this gospel in my life. Neither do I want to imagine that. I read a really great quote this last week that I'll finish this letter off with. It is from Elder Oaks. "Testimonies are better gained on the feet bearing them, than on the knees praying for them." (Alma 4:19) What a true principle. I'm so thankful for the strength that my testimony has received as I've been out here bearing it. There is nothing I would rather be doing with my life and there is nothing that I could be doing that could even
compare. A testimony means nothing unless it is being acted upon, and I hope you all have a great week of acting this next week! I love you all and am so grateful for your support!
Love,
Elder Fairclough
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