Elder Justin Michael Goodale: A Bit of a Rough Week

Below is the e-mail we received from Elder Goodale on Monday (April 5, 2010) of this week. Today we also received a package from him which included some of his winter clothes, stacks of his letters, and a couple of picture cards. I have posted a few pictures below his e-mail here, and posted all 50 from one card here on Facebook and here on Flickr (though I have added pic descriptions only to the Facebook library). Sorry I don't have descriptions below each of the pictures, below; I'm having trouble editing this HTML.
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Dear Family,

Hey! How does it feel to have Christopher back at home? How was everybody's Easter? Ours was awesome here. Conference was so amazing! I love General Conference! All 5 sessions were so incredible, I learned so much in each and every one. The Spirit was so strong, too. It's so amazing getting to sit and listen to the prophet and the apostles, there's so much power with that. It sounds corny but at the end of every session I just felt so wrapped up in Heavenly Father's love, like nothing could touch me. The Spirit at each session was such a powerful testimony to me that those men are called of God. I received a special witness from the Holy Ghost of the divine calling of each and every member of the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 Apostles over the last two days, each of them truly is a prophet, seer, and revelator and a special witness of Jesus Christ. The church is true! There's no doubt about that. It was really good timing too, because it's exactly what we needed at the end of a really tough week. Danielle ended up calling off her baptism because of a whole bunch of little concerns, and a bunch of other stuff fell through as well. We're having to drop alot of our investigators because they just aren't willing to keep commitments. It's tough because this area was so on fire, Elder Hirshfeld and I had 9 baptisms our first 2 transfers together (which is a TON for this mission) and now all of a sudden everything's kind of dead. We're going to have to do alot of finding this coming week and hopefully we can get everything going again. The one bright spot is Gloria's baptism on Saturday! Gloria is so awesome, she came to the afternoon sessions of conference on both Saturday and Sunday, and loved it. She's finished the Book of Mormon and has ordered herself a triple so she can start on the D&C and Pearl of Great Price. She's also been working on Jesus the Christ. :) She's pretty solidly converted. It's so amazing, she's a totally different person than she was when we initially knocked on her door 2 months ago. When we knocked on her door then she said that she wasn't being fulfilled in any other churches, and that she wanted to have that light that she saw in our eyes, in her own life. Well, now she's got it. She's really a neat lady. Other than that we've got to get things going again around here, which they will. Things will pick up again soon. It's just been stressful because so much of our time is spent trying to help the other missionaries in our zone too. We've got some really great missionaries that are doing alot of good work, but we also have several that just don't seem to have any desire to work, and it's been frustrating as we've tried to help them and nothing seems to be working. Why go on a mission if you're not going to work? Why waste the Lord's time? If you aren't going to be working, you can do that just as easily at home. Elder Hirshfeld and I have basically become babysitters, which is NOT what I came on my mission to do! Any suggestions for how we can get them to work?

Other than that things are going very well. We couldn't ask for better weather here, and we've gotten a couple of really great referrals lately that look really promising. Things are going great! I love you all!

Love,
Elder Goodale