January 27, 2013 (sorry for the delay)

Dear family:)

sounds like it is cold back there. bundle up:)

it is extremely comforting to know that when God promises us something, he will follow through. thank you for sharing that experience, dad.

what a small world, you meeting a guy who has worked with kosrae he is right, the people want to give you stuff all the time, and yet you know how expensive things are and see how little they have. they really are an incredible people with a lot of respect for God. Actually, they always insist that they put on a shirt of some sort before we start teaching. They are usually willing to pray, and understand a lot of good things. you know how monks were respected back in the day? yeah, that's kind of how most people treat us.

i got a little glimpse of what the 2nd coming is going to be like. when pres. mecham came, i will be completely honest and say that i was decently nervous. i wasn't doing anything wrong, but for some reason, i was apprehensive. and then the entire interview was along the lines of, "Oh you're doing great. Keep going. Be patient with yourself. There are big things happening in Kosrae this year." he is a wonderful human being.

there have been a lot of little miracles that probably only seem miraculous to me. we have been trying so hard to get people to come to church to help them progress, but for the longest time, nobody came. we fasted and prayed and worked as hard as we could, and we finally got a couple of investigators at church yesterday. also, we are trying really hard to teach only member-present lessons, especially to families and part-member families. we have seen miracles as members show up right before a lesson begins and joins us.

transfers are this week and im getting a little curious about whats gonna happen. we will all find out later:)

so in our mission we have language mastery packets that we are supposed to pass off. the recommended time is 4 transfers. however, due to the need to accelerate the pace of the work here on Kosrae, Heavenly Father has blessed me to get it passed off in two. actually, i pretty much had it passed off by the first transfer, i just needed local signatures; we were too busy to stop and ask, "hey, can you pass off my 'common phrases?'" so it has taken me a little longer than i think God wanted, but hopefully He will forgive me.

it is getting harder and harder to write to you guys, because my sentence structure is getting really confused and i have to go back and fix my grammatical errors. i keep writing things as yoda would. that it probably the hardest part of learning kosraean (and probably any other language): re-learning grammar.

we are teaching some really good investigators and have been able to be really bold with them. it is a really incredible experience to testify of something that, in any another context would probably sound crazy, and see the Holy Ghost touch the people's hearts. working with the Holy Ghost isn't really work. it is The Work. i dont know if the english language has the word that im looking for.

i love you all very much.

love,
elder gerber

ps, if you could send me one of the mem. cards back with the classical music on it, that would be great. through technical glitches, i accidentally erased it (except for the 4 seasons).