Leamington is Great!

Elder Houghton  with  the Coverntry Zone of  hard-working missionaries!
Mom's note:  He looks happy, doesn't he?

Dear Everyone,

     This week has been wonderful! The work is moving forward in our area and we're having great success! We have some investigators who are really prepared to receive the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and it's amazing to be a part of their experience. I just hope and pray that I'm up to play the very important but actually quite limited role of teacher.

     Two of our investigators made it to Sacrament Meeting on Sunday. It was awesome but also really stressful. You want everything to be perfect so that they can feel the spirit and want to learn more but this is still a church of imperfect members. It's great though when the members of the church really pull through and make great things happen (especially when we're almost late because we had some difficulty with the rendezvous with one investigator so we're worried that the other investigator is sitting all on her own at the chapel wondering what in the heck she's gotten herself into for the next three hours)--(a  member was really nice and talked to and sat next to her without even being introduced).

     Today, we had Zone Preparation day in Coventry. The Coventry Stake (which is also the Coventry Zone for missionaries) is one of the smaller ones within the mission. It's funny because there are not really many wards or branches and two of the wards are smaller than our branch in Warwick. So, our zone is one of the smaller ones as well. It's great though. We had a bunch of instant barbecues and everyone brought their own meat and then we played football (English) at a park. It was quite epic. History of Coventry: basically Coventry was leveled during the Blitz because it was an industrial centre and the place where the British made many of their tanks. It's crazy that the whole city is there now. You can tell that it lacks a lot of the historical character of other surrounding towns though.

     Some other cool and/or weird things: 1. An American family moved into the Branch in Warwick about a month ago from Oklahoma. They knew the Hobbs a little bit. Now, the husband is a professor at the University of Warwick (which is actually in Coventry) and he's taken on a fellow-shipping challenge with one of our investigators. 2. My Math(s) professor for Calculus 113 at BYU was English and was named Steve Humphries. There are some Humphries in the branch who live in Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace). Brother Humphries in the Branch is Professor Humphries' brother! It's a small world. 3. On Saturday, we were walking to city centre to do some street contacting. When we got there, we saw a gay pride type festival. We didn't know it was on that day, though we'd seen advertisements for the event before, and it was a bit awkward that we were there. Needless to say, we ended up knocking some doors a bit outside of town centre. It was pretty funny.

     Things are great. I'm totally out of time. I love to hear from you!

I love and miss you lots!
Elder Houghton

A British bus!