Week 1

17 January 2015

Hello family and friends,

                                                                                     

We hope everyone is doing well back at home.

Tuesday night we arrived in Lamar about 6:30 and unpacked the car. The car was so full that Dad said he couldn’t take off his hat until we arrived because there was nowhere to put it! After we put a few things away we headed to the local Walmart for a few groceries. It is a small Supercenter, and they don’t have as much selection as we are used to, but it is new and nice and we are very grateful to have it.

This town is very old. There has not been any new home construction at all in many years because the population has been shrinking rather than growing. It is unusual that every part of town only has very old homes. It reminds Mom of Atlanta, TX where Grandma and Granddaddy Jackson lived.  We hear a train go by several times a day. There is an old steam train engine at the Lamar visitors center. The kids would enjoy seeing it. Dad is disappointed that it is rusting badly, though. 

We live in a 4-plex apartment. We live upstairs, but the downstairs is more than halfway underground so we aren’t really on the second floor. It is at least 50 years old, but it has tons of storage areas. Mom  told Rifka she would have a ball playing hide-n-seek with the kids in here. Downstairs is a young couple that got married in December and they are members of the ward. We meet them at the church Wednesday night. They meet at “Especially For Youth” when they were about 15 years old. It was fun to hear their story. We haven’t met the other neighbors yet.

We had our first dinner appointment last night at the Young Mens President’s home. He has been married about three years and is from Lamar. His wife is a ward missionary. They are both really sweet and dinner was delicious. They also had the sister missionaries and the young missionary elders over. It was a fun dinner appointment. 

We meet the bishop Wednesday evening. He invited us to ward council meeting Sunday morning, then we will meet with him after church to go over the ward roster to become familiar with those that need contacting. I think we have our work cut out for us. We have discovered there are 165 households and 105 are not active! Our ward boundaries are larger than our stake boundaries at home - before we split the stake! We identified that 89 families live in Lamar and 76 families live in other areas. Many members live at least 50 miles from Lamar, and some people are as far as 80 miles from here. How is that for an obstacle to being active? 

Wednesday we drove the young missionary elders to Holly, Colorado and Syracuse, Kansas to visit some families. We also traveled out of town a ways today and talked to an inactive lady and tried to locate some others on the rolls. We made an appointment to go back Monday afternoon to teach her about the Plan of Salvation. Hopefully she will remember why she was baptized so many years ago, and she will want to come back. We shall see...

This Thursday is the Zone Conference in Garden City. It is about two hours away (100 miles). Maybe we can finally meet and talk to out Mission President. We haven’t heard anything from him so far.

We don’t have any internet here at the house yet. Dad has been working on that problem all week seems like. This place is so old I don’t know what we’ll be able to get here. But we are doing okay, and we are adjusting to a new town, new people and new schedule. This is a very friendly town. We talk to people and make friends everywhere we go - so that is good. 

We want to hear from you all. We can do face time with any of you. The best times for that will be Mondays and after church on Sundays. Take care, we miss you and love you all!

Elder and Sister Gorden