Hello Family,

 I just read melissa's letter that she sent a couple minutes ago. She's engaged? Whaat? Thats exciting! congratulations. I will be waiting for the date. I hear from dad that Jerr and I are getting ties for the occasion? That would be awesome.

Alabama is such an interesting place.  My first area is Tuscaloosa, AL.  My companion, Elder Lacour, told me "I hope you like football."  At first I didn't know what he meant until our ride down there I saw all over the place "A" flags, representing the Alabama Crimson Tide.  It's a college neighborhood.  There is red everywhere.  Football is so big over here its pretty much part of their godhead:  Jesus Christ, Paul Bryant (first coach), and Saban (Current coach).  Its crazy here.  It's kind of funny though because we as missionaries would be praying that Alabama would win a home game, otherwise the people here would be in a really bad mood.  There would be no body to contact or tract.

  This week was kind of interesting, we got a referral about somebody who wanted to learn more.  We went to his apartment and he wasn't there.  So we start to tract the apartment.  We knocked on this door where this guy answered.  He is going to school for law, and we found he was a very liberal thinker, like my companion.  As we talked with him, he always had a smile on him and very receptive to what we said.  We told him we may drop by again to talk to him more.

  We came back like 2 days later to see this referral we had.  He answered the door and taught him a little bit.  We found out that he was just interested in the facts of our scripture, so we gave him a book of mormon and introduced it to him.  He said he feels very prepared to read it now haha.  We gave him our number if he had any questions.  I don't think he is really going to be investigating the church.  I guess we'll see.  We dropped by the law student's room again.  We became really good friends with him.  He was comfortable to share his questions, and we answered them.  He is presbytarian and was interested in how the leadership in the church was organized.  He was able to really understand what we say.  We taught him the first lesson, the restoration.  We asked if he had questions, and he said, no that makes sense.  This guy is what we missionaries call, golden.  We gave him a book of mormon, he said he'll read it.  We talked about baptism, he said once he learns more he'll get baptized.  So we set an appointment with him to teach him more.

  People here are really nice, even when they are part of another religion.  There was only one person I saw that didn't have a background in a belief in God or Jesus Christ, he's chinese.  We actually taught him a lesson and the spirit was so strong there that I actually had to take a break after to recap what just happened.

Dang it I got to go.

Well I'm doing great everybody.

Take care.

Jacob Miklich