Happy Father's Day!

(For some reason my last email got deleted, so I'll start over)

Family,

First, I'll do some shout outs to the fam. This one is for all the June birthdays, so Kristen, Clark, and Matt, happy birthday.

Moving on.

So this last week was Zone Conference. Being the companion of a Zone Leader is pretty weird. I still have to run all the errands for other missionaries and mission business, and I still have to help prepare for Zone Conference, but I don't get to do the fun stuff, like go to Guam every transfer for Zone Leader Council. Oh well, I'll get used to it.

There has been a pretty depressed feeling here in Palau for the last little while, since we haven't been having much success. At least it didn't feel like it. It was pretty apparent I guess, President Dowdle must have noticed the tone of our letters to him. Anyway, he addressed it both in his training and in each of our personal interviews. He said that we cannot base our happiness and feeling of success on how many lessons we teach or who we baptize. Rather, those things should come from whether or not we know that the work we are doing is acceptable to the Lord. It reminded me of the way that I felt for the first few months of my mission. I left each morning and came home each night knowing that God was happy with me. That's something I haven't noticed that I've been missing until President mentioned it. It's not because we're disobedient or lazy or anything, we (at least I) just haven't had the same attitude. After doing what I can to change it, things have just been so much better. I've been a lot happier, I'll tell you that much.

To top it off, we got fed fruit bat again. Gross. Elder Lyman (my companion) will never admit it, but he feels the same way. This stuff is not good. I won't say that actually - it's just not my favorite. Usually I would just eat the meat, and maybe some wing, but we have to follow the example of the host. This guy loves fruit bat. So he cut it open, tore off the wings,.and first thing, he popped a piece of fur (fur+skin) into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Then he scraped the insides out with his fingers, and those went in right after. So then we went to work. We ate the meat, the wings, the insides, the fur - everything. All that we left was the bones, a little fur (we can only swallow so much hair), and the brain (we just couldn't figure out how to get to it). I even scraped the meat off the skull with my teeth. Once I popped that first piece of fur in my mouth, I gagged and almost threw up. We soon learned that if you followed it quickly with rice, then you can swallow it. Sick. Once all was said and done, we were pretty proud of ourselves. The only reason we were so determined was because the guy that made it for us isn't a member. He is Evangeline's (I think I mentioned her before) husband. He usually ignores us and acts like we aren't even there. I think we actually impressed him, which was our goal. We helped them move some tables a few days ago and he actually came out and offered his help and said thank you to us afterward. We're making progress! It was still gross.

We still have someone on the road to be baptized July 3rd, so we're pretty excited about that. All she needs to do is get her marriage recognized by the court, and then we're good to go. She was married to her husband via a cultural marriage, but without the papers from the court, the church doesn't recognize it as a legal marriage. Luckily, all she needs is a witness from each side of the family who was present at the marriage, and the cultural marriage is valid in court. At least I hope that's fortunate, I don't know how hard that will be to get.

We started another one of our investigators on the Book of Mormon challenge. We gave 2 months to read the entire book and mark references to Christ. He wants to be baptized, he's just not sure when. We're hoping this will kind of speed up the process, and that it won't actually take the whole 2 months for him to decide. He's having a lot of pressure from his family (mostly his mother) to not get baptized, so I think that's the only thing holding him back. However, he's pretty independent, and like 30 something years old, so I doubt it will stop him in the end. He's a really nice guy.

This week was pretty slow since we had Zone Conference, then Branch Conference (like stake conference, but we only have one branch - it just means a member of the mission presidency comes and trains the branch leaders, and then there's a 2-hour Sunday meeting, and a Youth fireside). I think that's all I have to report. I'm still getting accustomed to my new area - trying not to get lost.

I hope all is well.

Love,

Elder Barlow