Traning a New Companion -- Elder Sturgell

Hello                                                                                                                                                    

So it's back to the car for my companion and I. I'm driving again (scary) but overall everything is going real good!  We truly do have a winner in Elder Sturgell. He is great! Very hard working, focused on our purpose, obedient, always positive, teaches with the spirit, humble-takes advice very well, he wants to improve etc.. In a lot of ways he is a great example to me. We are very fortunate to have him. Also, his Cambodian is pretty darn good too. He worked hard in the MTC and it shows. He knows lots of vocabulary and can listen pretty well already. We've been fortunate to have a lot of Cambodian people to teach.  I was a little worried about that because we are in the car area again, away from Cambodia town and everything. But we're getting lots of opportunities, which is really good!  It will help develop his language skills even more quickly, and it's helping me too!

So before his mission, Elder Sturgell was attending school at West Point. He is majoring in engineering and did something called "sprint football" while he was there. For anyone who watches Psych, Jules' army brother guy is kinda of what Elder Sturgell reminds me of, as far as looks. He's a big guy but super nice!  He's going to be a great missionary.

And so we went hard this week. We picked up 3 new investigators- 2 of which are parents of this Cambodian family we started teaching this week. Everyone in the family is baptismal age but only the parents speak Cambodian. So since we started teaching the parents first, we were just going to work with them in Cambodian and then hopefully the kids will follow suit.  We're really excited about them! Ron, one of our all-star members, who willingly comes out with us all the time said he thinks they will get baptized. I sure hope so!

We've been very blessed with lots of people to teach. I think we're up to eight investigators total. And we still have some really good potentials in part member families too.  We're hoping they will become investigators soon. They're just busy right now, but maybe they’ll have time for us soon! This week has just been wonderfully busy!

Okay so for anyone wondering about what we did on Halloween, we actually just stayed inside and cleaned our apartment. I felt kinda bad because it was only Elder Sturgell's second day, but he had a great attitude about it- like he does with everything.  The whole experience of being a trainer has really been very fun so far. Just answering his questions and showing him how we do things and what not. Plus he's just got so much energy-we've been working real hard. It's a great feeling coming home knowing you gave it everything you had that day.

Transfers are next week. I'm pretty confident I'll be staying where I'm at with Elder Sturgell but it will be interesting to see where the other missionaries go. Elder Skidmore seriously thinks he may be getting transferred out...

We are being blessed! Thank you for your prayers and support!

Elder Hicken

P.S. Sorry to hear about grandpa Gunn passing away. I'm so glad I got to see him before I left.
P.P. S.  Yaay! more cousins coming!