Monday, July 18, 2016

Week 78



  Hey! So this week has been really great! Elder Puga was transferred, and my new companion is Elder Stewart. I'm not sure if I wrote about him earlier, but we served together in Weslaco, we lived in the same apartment and served in the same branch. He's awesome! He's on his 6th transfer now, and I'm on my 13th!!! 13/16... That's scary. We get along really well and he's even an inch taller than me, so we are two tall white skinny kids.. It's pretty fun. It's nice because now we don't have to go through the first awkward week or so of getting comfortable around each other. 
   Elder Messinger, the elder in my district who has stayed for 6 months, is staying again! Haha super funny! But we have an elder in the mission that is on his 7th transfer in the same area. And the area is very small in the middle of nowhere, so Messinger isn't that upset. 7 transfers.. that's almost half of his whole mission! Anyways, Elder Messinger has a new companion. So Elder Messinger is tall, good looking, really athletic, sociable and has a hard time being 100% missionary mode, like most of us. And his new companion is Elder Horne, about 5'5', glasses, emotional, loves working really hard. And another cool thing, he LOVES cleanliness. He was excited to find out that we don't have huge activities here on P-days so now he can spend about 6 hours cleaning their apartment. Haha so there is lots of learning to do on both sides.
   This week has been really great, although I miss Elder Puga and the funny stuff he used to do, I love elder Stewart too. The other day we had a funny experience. We went to visit a less active, and she came out and met with us for about 5 mins and so we walked out of her gated yard and this little old guy smoking a cigarette waved us into his house. So we went in and his father in law walked in. An even older, smaller hispanic man with "hearing problems" he got mad at his son in law for letting us in because he is strictly catholic. I don't know if he thought we couldn't speak spanish because he kept asking the other guy why he let us in in  spanish. So that was interesting.. he just turned on the tv and paid us no mind. So we talked with the other guy that let us in, it didn't really go very far but we invited him to church and gave him the address and our number. Then we walked around and talked to another less active in the area and contacted some referrals. Then we walked back by that house and the really old dude that didn't like us was trying to park his car. He was just trying to parallel park by the curb, and his vision wasn't too good so he would pull forward a few feet, then back up a few feet, and continued to do that for about 7mins. Literally 7 mins, we waited and watched the whole time. It was so funny, there would be long pauses inbetween so we thought he'd just parked but then his reverse lights would come on and we'd be like "aww so close!". He finally gave up, turned off the car, went inside, then came back out and did it again for another 5 mins, but actually parked it this time. It was pretty strange.
    We had a cool lesson. We taught a recent investigator we found named David. He's from a neighboring town and actually is moving back in a few days. But we went over to teach his brother and his family, David was staying with them for a few weeks. The first contact we had with him we handed him a restoration pamphlet and then some weird pastor dude came out of his house and starting talking to everyone, just trying to distract them from our message I guess. It was really weird. Then he went around to all the neighbors and talked with them, just incase we had "corrupted" them I guess. But David didn't pay any attention to him, he read the whole pamphlet while the other dude was talking. And after the pastor left he told us he wants to learn more about this Joseph Smith guy and if we really do have 12 apostles he would like to know who they are too. So we looked at eachother and nodded our heads like, "Yeah we can do that!" We talked about joseph smith and a little about the BOM. Then we went over yesterday and taught him about the BOM and about how Christ came to the Americas. He found that hard to believe and said he thought that history doesnt really match up with that. It was pretty interesting, I had never really talked with anyone about it, so I explained the little that I know about the historical evidence supporting that claim. He also thought the BOM was redundant and pointless and so we read with him a few verses from 2 Nephi 29. He kind of shut up and said yeah okay that makes sense, and we talked about how you cannot understand the mysteries of God through logic, only through the spirit. Which is something I recently learned from Elder Bruce R McConkie, I have some of his talks. He agreed a lot with it and we invited him to pray and search the scriptures for his answers instead of just drawing conclusions. The spirit was really strong, and we gave him his own copy of the BOM and left. We might not see him again because he is going back to Corpus Christi and then moving up towards Houston. But we told him missionaries would help him move and he said that'd be cool. I feel pretty good about the seed we planted. I feel that sometime in the future he will be prompted to read the BOM and when he does will be baptized. Lots of times we teach lessons like these and I have this similar feeling, although it's not as great as teaching the lessons and seeing them progress, I still feel like that experience will be one they can draw back on, and it's cool. 
    Also there are cotton fields next to a church in our zone, super weird.

         Thanks for writing me, glad to hear that you guys are all doing well,  I love you! Have a great week!



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