Happy 4th of July!

Hello Everyone!                                                           3 July 2012

Thanks for the emails Mom and Dad!

So this last week has been full of excitement! We started the procedures for Emergency Preparedness. Everything worked out fine - although 2 of 7 of our zones lost power. We were ok. We had our power flicker on and off a bit but nothing serious. We took some great shots of lightning and the sky since we had to stay in....a lot! Because of stormy weather, we've also had to stay inside during heat advisories, so things were getting really boring for a while.

Lots of Lightning strikes!

On P-day (yesterday) we went fishing up in North Norfolk at the longest pier in North America. It was great! We caught 10 or 11 fish; mostly Spot and Croakers and also crab....those are fun catching! Haha! We had fun chasing them on the pier after pulling them out of the water!

The Gangs all here!

What an amazing 'Fisher' of 'Men'!

Virginia Crab

As far as our missionary work goes - we made GIGANTIC progress with our ward and the blessings are coming in. Our Bishop is the Man! We asked him what his vision was for the ward and for how he sees us working with the ward. We spent about an hour and a half talking about how we could effectively work with the ward members through the home teachers; and through that to find more people to teach. It's a great thing to be doing one plan that accomplishes many things all at once....so things have been great!

Lately I've been studying in Alma 10 and have had some great experiences learning from that and applying these teachings in my missionary work. I've also been looking at all the 'teaching moments between two or more people' in the scriptures and highlighting those examples. I've also been studying how they communicated and progressed in their lessons and highlighting a lot of these things. I'm sure that makes me weird but I've tried some of those ideas and other modern communication ideas and I've noticed that with the people we're teaching our lessons are going better and we're progressing farther. It's great to see the blessings that come from what we learn in our studies.

I hope everyone is doing great and is enjoying the week and hopefully the great weather.

Love y'all!

Elder Richards

Virginia Richmond Mission

The Church of Jesus Christ 

of Latter Day Saints

P.S. More Pics!

Lots of bikes! His is the ORANGE one in front!

Crazy riding this bike!!

As is very normal, there are more bike repairs in my future!! Can't believe how hard us missionaries are on our bikes!


ENJOY the pictures!