"...We all thought thanksgiving was last thursday" but..."I've lost 20 lbs" (November 25, 2013)

Nope I didn´t get transferred. I´m staying here which I´m excited about. No I´m still solid on the stickers. I want music. some good Christmas music preferably. and also if you have any good church movies we can watch we´re always looking. i´ve fallen in love with vocal point so if i can get some of them that’d be great.

Calvin demoing the Sling to nail Goliath (S/O to Abbey Read for the sling)

We brought some recently returned missionaries with us to lessons this week and it helped a lot. We had the member explain authority to our investigator because we really couldn´t explain it clearly enough. She says she knows what she has to do and wants to know if the Book of Mormon is true.

We had a lesson with our 16 year old investigator and she had a friend over and he´s an atheist. It was really hard to teach because we had a lesson planned, but at the same time we were trying to convince this kid that there is a God. It was a really scattered lesson but it ended pretty well. 

Wednesday we had interviews with President Deere who came down to see us. It was really short and we didn´t talk about much but it was still good to see him.

We thought this last Thursday was thanksgiving but it turns out it wasnt...I woke up pretty sick. It’s like 10 degrees in our piso all the time its terrible. I´m feeling better now though.

We brought a member to a lesson and they became like BFF´s and were gonna go to church together so we were excited about that (but it didnt happen).

It´s really sad we found out like the strongest family in the ward has to move to Germany to look for work. The dad is going to leave for Germany in January, and then everyone else is going to come once school ends in June I think. It´ll be really tough because none of them speak any german. And is like a very accomplished construction manager. There´s just no work here.

The Goliath target

Friday we missionaries were in charge of the youth activity. Elder Buckway and I planned the lesson and we talked about David and Goliath. I brought the sling that Abby Read brought me from Jerusalem and we made a fake Goliath and everyone got a turn trying to hit him with the sling. It was really fun and a good lesson. Then we played broom hockey which was fun but our broom broke :((

After the activity we went to meet Jose Luis, our investigator that has a baptismal date for December 14th, and his girlfriend told us that they arent going to be able to get married for two more months probably. She´s a member but they need to get married before he can get baptized. So that was depressing. 

Saturday we had an Elder´s Quorum activity. We made pancakes and watched Ephraim´s Rescue which is a church movie about the pioneers. It was amazing!!! you should all watch it asap!!! so good!!!

Broom Hockey in the Multi/Chapel after slaying Goliath

Then saturday night we met with Angy, the 16 year old girl who has a baptismal date for December 7th. And she told us that she wasn´t ready for baptism, so we have to drop her fecha. So that was depressing as well. We lost both of our baptismal dates in less than 24 hours!!!! yayy!!!!! o well. we´ll keep working. We have investigator that we just need to meet with more and she´ll be baptsized

no more time love you love you!!!

[to Dad] Well we all thought thanksgiving was last thursday, but we still didn´t do anything for it. We´re going to eat at a members house Thursday afternoon so I guess that´s the celebration. And no we can´t go play any football. Nope I´m not getting transferred. I should be here until the first week of January.

Sister Richardson sent me a letter saying that you went over there telling her family they had to invite over another family to teach them about the Church. 

Guess what? I´ve lost 20 pounds...I weigh like 155. I can´t believe it. It´s pretty much all in my waist I think. I don´t feel any smaller. And it´s only since I´ve been in Chiclana. It´s weird. I don´t understand. I´m trying to eat a lot. But it´s hard...

"We spent the next three hours just running..." (November 11, 2013)

Yeah we get money at the end of every month so everyone always runs out by the end. Yeah the cookies were mostly fine. A little crummy, but still worked. For Christmas I want a copy of Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith in English. They only have spanish copies here...

I also really need a warm sweatshirt to wear in the mornings. It doesn´t matter what it looks like or if its an old one of mine. It just gets really cold in our apartment when we wake up so I want something I can just throw on before I get showered and dressed and stuff. Also I need a jacket to wear out. I only have the long rain jacket which is weird to wear out if it´s just cold outside...I was thinking Domineau could somehow take it with her and then send them from France to here. I dunno.

This week was really good. We found 7 new investigators that we´re really excited about. Our old investigators were terrible so now we can get rid of them.

Two of them we found monday. We went to go teach this teenage kid english, but he wasn´t there, but his parents let us in and we talked with them for like an hour. They kept telling us how irresponsible their kid was and stuff. We shared a message with them and they are really interested in us as missionaries and what we´re sharing. 

Tuesday morning we got a call from a member asking us if we wanted to go eat at her house that afternoon. We said sure and went over to eat. She fed us tortilla de potata which is like an egg potato dish. It was pretty good. Then we left and walked over to the other Elder´s piso because we were going to do exchanges. As we were walking I felt like I was going to puke. We got to their piso and I ran to the bathroom and just puked up everything. As soon as I came out of the bathroom, Elder Buckway ran into the other bathroom and started puking up everything. We spent the next three hours just running to and from the bathroom puking and ...so we decided not to do exchanges. We made it home without [messing] ourselves somehow. I drank a bunch of water but it just literally went right through my body ...We just stayed in the piso that night and puked a little more. The next morning the mission doctor lady told us not to go out and we shouldn't eat too much. We felt a little better but were still puking a bit. The other Elder´s went and taught two of the lessons we had planned, and even put a baptismal date on one of our investigators for us. So that was nice of them. That day was pretty boring mostly. We watched church movies and read church books. That was about it. 

Saturday we went to knock doors in a building and the first door we knocked was a brazilian woman and she let us in and we talked a bit about the Book of Mormon. She had family that were members. We have another lesson with her at 6:30 tonight, so I´ll let you know how it goes next week. 

That was really it. For P-day the whole zone went to this space observatory which was literally the dumbest thing in the world. An investigator of the Elders in San Fernando set up the tour and said it was awesome, but it was just three hours of the most boring thing in the world. All of us in the zone were just laughing at how uninteresting it was. But its ok, we had fun because we were all together.

That´s all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love ya

"One of our investigators popped her head..." (November 18, 2013)

Yeah it´s gone by really fast. And I guess it only gets faster. The week was pretty good. We improved on our weekly lessons again. And we got to double digit investigator lessons. We should be up to like 15 but some of our investigators can be really flojo (wishy-washy/flaky) and will fail us when we set lessons. But last transfer we only had 4-5 investigator lessons a week so we´re getting a lot better. We set two baptismal dates. One is a 16 year old girl who I think is just kind of in love with me. When we met her and her friend she couldnt stop laughing and i asked her what was wrong and she said ¨you´re just too cute´. but she´s reading and praying, and is going to quit smoking. We still have a lot to teach her but she has potential. We gave her mom a date too but she isnt really interested. We´re gonna bring a member to the lessons though to help us out. 

Not much else exciting happened this week. We really focused on trying to get investigators to church, and the night before we thought we were going to have like 6 or 7, but no one showed up! it was really depressing. But then right after sacrament meeting one of our investigators popped her head into the chapel and we went out and talked to her. she showed up late and didnt want to interrupt so she was just listening in the hallway. shes really friendly and has a few members as friends so i think if she gets a little more serious we can baptize her and her son really easily. She can just be really floja though.

o yeah saturday night we went to visit j… l…. who has a baptismal date that we had to move to december 14th, because HE HAD THE SAME CYST THAT I HAD!!! and he has to recover from that before he can get baptized. but we got in their apartment and it jut reeked of pot. and it was obvious that veronica, who´s a member, and his wife, had smoked. i was super enojado and so we had a very clear discussion about the word of wisdom and how marijuana is against the word of wisdom. we didn’t call her out on it but i pretty harshly told them that when you break the word of wisdom you need to repent. she was pretty quiet the rest of the lesson so i think she got the point.

im gonna go by the coat right after i email. i just want a sporty sweatshirt thats really warm and i can wear in the mornings when i wake up. with a hood please. 

we find out transfers on friday but i think im staying. i´ll be really sad if i leave.

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaa

love ya

"We had a lesson with [a] 101 year old." (November 4, 2013)

Wow Gretchen is pregnant already? Wow. Yeah I got the package Wednesday. Thanks! I gave out the spider rings to the beehive and valiant girls… Halloween I guess has only been a holiday for like 10 years here, so not everyone celebrates it. BUT THEY TOOK OFF THURSDAY AND FRIDAY FROM SCHOOL TO CELEBRATE IT!!! AND ITS NOT EVEN THERE HOLIDAY!!!! AND THEY WONDER WHY THEY ARE IN A CRISIS...!!! THEY TAKE OFF TWO DAYS FOR AN AMERICAN HOLIDAY THAT WE DON´T EVEN GET A DAY OFF FROM!!! There was a party for the primary at the capilla Friday. We stopped by for a second. Holy cow though trying to proselyte Thursday and Friday night was so hard. No one wanted anything. 

I just called the Elder´s in Crevillente to try and get the address of a member, and it just filled me up with so much joy. It sounds like everyone´s doing really well there, and a couple that we taught the whole time I was there are getting baptized in a few weeks for sure now. O how I miss that place. They put two more Elders in Crevillente so there are 4 now...crazy.

This week was pretty depressing although our numbers were pretty good. We just aren´t happy that we haven´t been able to find anyone new to teach. For P-day none of us had any money so we just emailed and then played Settler´s of Catan all day. Elder Buckway has two extensions so the game was pretty crazy. I didn´t understand the rules at all and to be honest I was writing letters so I wasn´t paying too much attention. 

Tuesday we had a specialized training in Cadiz. We had to bet there at 9:30 so we had to wake up at like 6:30 to get ready and take the bus there. It was a pretty normal meeting...

The middle of the week was pretty boring. Everything is moving so slow. We find people but they can only meet one day a week so it´s hard to make real progress. Saturday night we found ourselves on a street that we knew some inactive members lived, but we didn´t have any information about them, only their names and address. We knock the door and a woman answers and lets us in. I realized I had met her before at the house of a member, and I remembered that she was a Jehovah´s Witness. It turns out that her parents are members, but her dad is 101 YEARS OLD, and her mom is 81. Neither of them can really talk or do anything. They just sit in a bed all day every day and their kids just wait for them to die. But its crazy the 81 year old seems way worse than her 101 year old husband. We had a lesson with the 101 year old. He could understand well enough, and even bore a little testimony. Something about Jesus Christ …. And he said he wanted us to come by more. I think we´ll prob stop by every week or two.

Hey there is a inactive couple that wants to get in touch with the missionary who baptized them, but they have no way of doing that. Can you try looking up the missionary on facebook? His name is Frank Preston Royer (not sure how exactly to spell Royer). He´d be about 50-55, and lived in Arizona at one point. 

That´s it. Sorry, like I said this week sucked.

Love ya love ya!!!!!!!!!!

"24th was one year since I opened my mission call" (October 28, 2013)

Nothing too exciting this week to be honest. We set really high goals, but we had to deal with so much crap this week that we barely had any time to actually work. One night we were stuck out in the campo and it was raining really hard, but we were still knocking all the doors we passed. We knocked on one guys house, and he said he wasn´t interested in our message. We talked a bit longer about his beliefs and if he prays. Then he just started crying. He said his grand-daughter died a few weeks ago and she was only three, so he´s not sure about his faith. We talked a bit more and he said we can come by another day if he was available. So it was pretty cool to see him change like that. Also, we have a less active member that we visit, and she has a daughter that is a member too, but she is really inactive and wants nothing to do with the church. Somehow we got her to tell us the address of her daughter and we went to visit her. A member told us that this girl and her husband were drug addicts so we should be careful. We knocked her door pretending like we didn´t know who she was, and she was pretty rude and abrasive at first. She said her mother was a member but she didn´t want to hear anything. We talked a bit more about her mom and she opened up a ton. She got a lot nicer and we asked her if she needed any help from us. She said no, but she gave us a bunch of cake, and jus totally changed her demeanor with us in about 2 minutes. It was pretty cool. We´ll stop by to say hello to her every once in a while I think.

We had a lesson with an investigator and his less active girlfriend. The girlfriend is coming back to church, and has a really strong testimony, but is just really lazy. Her boyfriend is trying to quit smoking, and they want to get married and get sealed in the temple. Jose Luis is the guy and he´s awesome. He definitely had a rough time growing up, but he´s a recovering alcoholic and is really trying to change his life. He´s so nice and wants to be a good example for his son who´s 7. It was so funny, he prayed after the lesson, and he kept saying, ¨O Lord, please bless the kids. They need so much help. There are so many kids that are so hungry. And they need to be blessed¨ and he just kept saying stuff like that for like 3 minutes straight. Only about the kids. And then after he said, sorry, it´s just that the children are really important and need help. It was funny.

The 24th was one year since I opened my mission call.

We had the youth activity Friday night and it was a big success. The leaders want us to organize one every week but we told them we dont have time to do that. But we´re gonna try and go to all the activities if were not too busy. We were going to play volleyball on the court outside, but it started raining so we played a game where you tie a balloon to your foot and then try and pop everyone else’s balloon. it was fun and everyone enjoyed it. A lot of youth came. I guess no one ever comes to youth acitvities. And we had 5 non-member youth there. One was one of our investigators who´s 16. We´re teaching him and his mom. And a member kid brought two friends to the activity. One of the friends came to church with the kid yesterday, and then last night the mom called us and said that she invited the family of the kid over to their house this Thursday and we´re gonna go too and have a lesson. I guess the kid was saying he wanted to get baptized, and the family had mentioned stuff about how the world is so confusing with so many religions, so we´re gonna help them out with that.

Friday after the activity we had to go to San Fernando because the sister missionaries there had an investigator who had a baptismal date for the next day, so he needed a baptismal interview. He´s the husband of a member, and has been investigating the church for a while, but he doesnt have a testimony of Joseph Smith. They asked me to come over and do the interview anyways and try and convince him. I was nervous but excited. We went and the two of us talked a bit. I asked him the baptismal question if he believed Joseph Smith restored the Church and he said I don´t know. So we chatted a bit more and then we prayed about it. But he said he still hadn´t received an answer. We talked a bit more, and then I asked him the question again and asked him to really listen to the spirit, but still, he said he didn´t feel like he had received his answer. I told him I thought he had already received it. He believes in all the commandments and everything about the Church. And I said that God had already given him the answer through all of that. But he expects some glorious revelation. So we couldn’t pass him in the interview. O well, I think he´ll get baptized soon. And the Hermana´s weren´t expecting him to pass, they just wanted to try and see what would happen.

That´s really it....yeah there has been some halloween decorations in some stores, but i dont really know what to expect for when the day comes. there’s a party in Cadiz for the youth, but we can’t go. :(

love ya adios

"I thought I was going to explode" (October 21, 2013)

Ok so Tuesday we had 5 lessons which we were going to eat at, because Elder N was leaving the next morning. They were all right after the other. I thought I was going to explode. But it ended ok.

Wednesday Elder Buckway came and the other new Elder in Chiclana, Elder Reynolds too. We had a meeting with our new Ward Mission Leader. His name is I…. he´s 22 and served his mission in Salt Lake Central. He´s a good guy and seems like he´s gonna help us a lot. 

We had a reference that we hadn´t been able to go by, but finally on Thursday we did. Her name is M, and she´s a bit older. Her son just recently killed himself and so a friend of her´s who´s a member told us to go by. Her son was 28 I think and was a police officer. I guess his wife had left him and taken their two young kids, so he just shot himself one day at work. She hadn´t spoken to anyone about it, and refused to let anyone come and talk with her about it. But she opened the door for us and let us in. We had no clue what to talk with her about. But we just talked about how we can find peace in Christ and that now is the time for her to strengthen her faith. She knows a bit about the Church. Her son had read the Book of Mormon several times she said. Right now we´re just trying to help her regroup.

Our convert S went to another Church this week. So I´m not sure if we can count her inactive or not yet...

We were at the house of one of our investigators, and her mom was there. We talked briefly and I realized that she was a member. She told us she wasn´t anymore. She told us she was active many years ago and had had a rough life and had been excommunicated. I asked her if she still believed the Church was true. I expected her to say no way and blow me off, but she paused for a second and said yes, and then started crying a bit. I invited her to come to Church Sunday. She said she was in AA and wants to come back to Church, but wants to wait until she´s fully recovered. We tried to tell her she could start her return now, but she said in a month we can talk with her again. It was a cool experience.

There´s an inactive family that some members told us we should go visit. They lived like 5 miles away in the middle of nowhere but we walked there one night when everything else failed us. We got there and they were just shocked that we had shown up. They said in 10 years living there missionaries had never been to there house. They let us in and we talked for a while. The husband served a mission in Denver, so he was excited to talk with us. They´ve been inactive for at least 3 years, but he prayed at the end of the lesson and then gave us a ride home. Hopefully we can get them to come back to Church.

We had the primary program at Church which was really fun. A ton of people were there for it. Including two of our investigators. We weren´t expecting them, but they came and had a good time. One of them was a kid and he sang in the program too. The husband was crying during sacrament meeting. He´s a nice guy, but he smokes, and he´s not married to the woman he lives with, who is a less active member. So he´s got a ways to go.

Then last night we went by the inactive older couple that we go buy every week. they´re really nice, but have been inactive for about 15 years They were really strong members at one point. I knew that P…., the husband, hadn´t prayed in years and years because he thought God was mad at him and didn´t want to listen. But he didn´t know I knew, so I just casually asked if he would pray at the end of the lesson. He got really flustered and said no. So i poked at his pride a bit and asked if he knew how to pray, and pulled out a little bookmark thing that has the 4 steps to prayer. He said I KNOW HOW TO PRAY!! And then offered the prayer. I could hear in his voice he was nervous, but it was a great prayer. After he asked if I believed God would listen to a guy like him. I said of course! He listens to everyone. He acted really goofy afterwards. He obviously felt very awkward about it. But I feel like he´s felt the love that God has for him. I really think now is the time for them to return. I had thought the members had been visiting them still, but they told us last night that no one had gone by in years. And they seemed pretty annoyed by it.

the areas alright. we have the high goals to find people this week. im excited. buckways good. im excited to work with him. district leader doesnt mean much. sunday nights i have to call the two other companionships and get there numbers for the week, and then give them all to the zone leaders. and lead a meeting once a week. it sucks.

why do you always want to know who is in my zone? there are like a million people. hermana blake is a new hermana in my district. elder berrett too.

yes that pic was in cadiz. and its a destination for cruise ships i think. i dunno.

spanish is good. understanding can still be a little difficult sometimes, but its not too much of an issue anymore.

yeah everythings good!

love ya