Transferred

This week is AWESOME! I love p-day! I'm getting transferred, my family is doing great, and I'm a missionary!!! I'm also going to be a district leader again, and I'm once again going to another dangerous area... I'm just convinced that this entire city is dangerous. It'll all be fine. I still haven't been robbed yet, so the Lord is on my side!

December 8, 2014

         One of our investigators  bought us a 1 kg. bar of delicious chocolate so I decided to make chocolate chips our of it and then I made chocolate chip pancakes!  Talk about divine!

         This afternoon we taught a huge group of evangelicals and it turned out pretty well.

December 9, 2014

         Today we did something highly unusual when we did a service project for one of our investigators.  We painted two grates in front of their home.  Since there were two of them we decided to each take one.  I finished mine and then I turned my attention to the other one……face palm, Elder Y  did a lot of painting but in a very random pattern.  He tried to explain to me the details of his intricate method, but I couldn’t follow his logic. 

         Our cool miracle of the day (as Levi would say), happened when we were walking past this house and I just had to stop suddenly and go back to talk to the people there. It was a family of 3 and they let us in to teach them.  The mother of the family told us that it was her dream to get married and have her child baptized.  It was a pretty cool experience and they accepted our help in getting married.  I love it when I get to be a part of things like this.

December 10, 2014

         Our zone is doing a musical presentation for the Christmas Mission Conference and one of the kids in the zone leader’s ward is SUPER musical.  He wrote an arrangement of the First Noel, Silent Night, Hallelujah, and Mary did you know.  It is going to be totally awesome!  We have a lot of great singers in our zone and there are some sweet solos.  Needless to say, I will be on the piano. Thankfully I have been able to practice on the member’s keyboard in my spare time.

         We had 2 really good lessons with members today.  In one of the lessons, the member sang “Away in the Manger” and that left a really nice spirit with our investigator.   In the other lesson, we took our investigator to a members house for a lesson and the member was able to help a lot with encouraging  our investigator to live the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity. 

December 11, 2014

         Everything fell through today but we did some pretty cool contacting, and I made some more chocolate chip pancakes which saved the day!

December 12, 2014

         Elder Percival and I went on splits today.  We ended up teaching only new investigators and they could all be really good or not. In between teaching assignments, we saw this old man who was just sitting on the side of a road in a rocking chair.  He looked exactly like half naked Santa.  Seriously, he had a huge perfectly white beard, and shoulder length snowy white hair.  It could have been Santa resting up for his busy season.  I asked Elder Percival to take a picture of his sometime for me.  It made my night!

December 13, 2014

         Today we taught a 17 year old girl and it was really difficult because she lives with and extremely drunk and mentally ill aunt.  The aunt will not leave her alone and will also not keep quiet.  Let’s just say that she was very irreverent, loud, and funny.  In the end of the lesson, Elder Y. moved to sit next to the aunt to distract her so that I could finish teaching our investigator.  It was next to impossible, so we wrapped things up quickly and our investigator promised to come to church on Sunday so that we could teach her another lesson after church.

          We confirmed with 13 people that they would come to church tomorrow.  I hope that everything works out, but I am not holding my breath. 

December 14, 2014

         The only investigator to follow through in coming to church was our 17 year old girl.  We were able to teach her a good lesson after church and she has already accepted to be baptized, but first we need to teach her all of the commandments.

After the lesson, some other elders taught us how to roast cashews. The nuts literally burst into flames!  It was pretty sweet. 

Later on I had a discussion with my zone leader about one of our investigators who has set multiple baptismal dates, but never comes to church so I keep postponing the date.  My zone leader thinks that we should still baptize her even though she never keeps this commitment.  I told him that I didn’t think it was a good idea to baptize her before she was really ready.  He responded with, “Elder, are you scared to baptize?”  Oh boy, if he would have said this to me a couple of months ago, I would have flipped. But instead, I calmly explained to him what it teaches in Preach my Gospel about baptism.(which we were told had been declared by the First Presidency to be scripture.) He didn’t like that, but he stopped arguing with me.  Later on in the day I felt that I should call him to clear the air so that there were no hard feelings.  As it turned out, he called me first and apologized to me and told me that he was wrong.  That has never happened to me before.  In the end everything got resolved except for the fact that our investigator is still not progressing.  I am definitely ready for p-day.