April 25th, 2016

Dear Family and Friends,

I really enjoyed the service project at OSU planting trees. As half
the mission, we planted over 400 trees on campus. It was a great
learning experience and even helped me learn some skills that helped a
few days later. Elder Low and I had the opportunity to plant some more
trees while we worked alongside a part member family. We were able to
help the Goodson's plant another 25 trees.

In District Meeting I enjoyed learning about how to better face
rejection. Elder Gardner, our district leader, said to be diligent,
remember covenants (including the one to come on a mission), and
things will work out. Part of continuing to find when we could get
discouraged is that we need to do the will of the Lord when the Lord
wills it. The Lord is seeing if we will be like Alma and go back to
Ammonihah even when we know we will likely face rejection. It is
interesting that we had this training when we did, because the night
before we had about an hour of tracting where every person we talked
to would barely give us the time of day and would slam the door in our
faces.

We met one of the potentials, Chad, that we found in the Area Book. He
had some stones out on his driveway and we offered to come back and
teach him while we helped him build his patio. He is a really nice
individual that left his previous church recently and is really
excited to learn everything about our church. We were able to have a
great conversation with him about how the gospel blesses families and
the message really connected with him. He wants us to teach his family
too, so I am really looking forward to that.

In ward council this week, our ward mission leader was able to get
some input for the Focus 15 family list. He has been trying to get the
quorums and auxiliaries invested in thinking of individuals and
families that need some support and fellowship. This week we were
finally able to see some progress and I was really impressed with how
well the council was working together to find ways to engage the
people we were discussing. Everyone was participating a lot more once
we moved from calendar items and we're taking about actual people. I
hope to see this list fill out more and I am excited to see what comes
from all the action items that were made.

--
Elder Aaron King
Ohio Columbus Mission