Aloha Guys!

I wanted to try a letter this week so here it goes.
This week has been a blessing, our mission president has started a new initiative to reactivate less active members and find with part member families. This week we learned a lot of information about our branch, last night especially. We learned from president Campbell the long history Honomu has had and some of the conflicts they have had. Now it all makes a lot more sense. We met several key less active families. One auntie bore her testimony this Sunday. I talked with her after church and she bluntly told me she was questioning her faith. Her life story is really sad. She lost everything in the recession, got divorced, and is working long hours to stay afloat. She told us with tears in her eyes that she has questions she wants to ask us. I think it was meant to be that we talked with her when we did. Several other members are in a similar boat. The Van Ness family owns the largest security company in Hawaii, and they have a compound of houses they live in. They came to church after we invited them. They are good people and we hope with the help of our branch mission leader (their son in-law) we can activate the entire compound about 20 people including kids. The family has come before and when they do our chapel is filled. Our branch president is convinced that if we activate the Van Ness clan our chapel will be filled. There are a few other updates with various less actives but this is the most interesting developments. Our goal is to have 10 people less actives coming before the end of this transfer. If we are able to reactivate some key members we will potentially have 4 new people we can teach in part member families. But the sheer amount of information we learned yesterday has left my head spinning, there are a lot of people who know the gospel is true but stopped coming. We have a long list prepared for this week so hopefully the new names we have will work out.

Besides all these new members we have found things have been going like usual. The work is moving forward in Honomu. The fight between the first counselor and the Elder quorum president has been fixed fortunately. (It was cool they both were at the temple when they made up with each other.) We are meeting with the first counselor tonight to check up on them.

I hope things are going good at home. I will probably call later today if things go smoothly. This is going to be a busy p-day.

Love you guys!
-Elder Esplin