Week 41

Hey! Who's that lovely family right there? Oh wait, that's YOU!! 

Happy Late Thanksgiving!

We have to bring an investigator to see the devotional and the transfers will probably not be messed up, just cause it's always 6 weeks.

I didn't get sick!!! I made it past the Thanksgiving hump!

Monday was a pretty fun day. We played this new soccer game with the other Elders and it was super fun. The game goes like this: everybody has their own chair and you have to protect it from getting hit by the soccer ball. It's every man for themselves. You try to peg someone's chair with the ball and they try to block you. Everyone is up and trying to kick the ball at this point. When your chair gets hit, you now have to always be touching your chair. You can now grab the ball with your hands though. If you peg someone else's chair, you can stand up and they have to now touch their chair. The last person "standing" is the winner. It gets really intense when you play with Latinos and gringos who played soccer in high school, I never won, but I still had a lot of fun. We ate with the bishop and his wife, they are super nice people. They have a son who is on a mission right now in Colorado, he just left in September. We stopped by a part member family later on and, wow, do they have problems up the wazzu! I feel like I'm in the middle of a freaking novela right now. They have a lot of marital problems and the wife (a non-member) asked us why bad things happen to good people (that type of question). We told her why, and she told us that she prayed just before we came. She is not very religious and hates talking about God, so this was a big change for her. She told us that in her prayer she told God that she was mad at him. We compared that to a child giving their parent a hug and saying 'I'm mad at you'. She laughed at that and we told her that we will always be in the area if she wants to keep talking. 

Tuesday we had a special Zone Conference because Elder Clark from the Seventy came. We had to wake up at like 4 in the morning to get ready and bike over to another Elders apartment. Our zone is full of companionships on bike. We had to mix and separate companionships just so that all of us could get into a car and arrive on time. One companionship even had to take the bus even earlier just to arrive on time. The conference was super good. I took a bunch of notes. There was a lot of cool things said, even funny quotes here and there. We were talking about 1 Nephi chapter 1 and words that people might not understand, cause of the word language the scriptures have. The phrase 'pillar of fire' was one and Elder Clark explained it his way, which was good, but then after he had already moved on from the topic, a random older lady raised her hand and said 'the pillar of fire is like a light saber!!'.... Oh my. It was funny and everyone chuckled to themselves because of how random and awkward the comment was. All of the appointments canceled that day too. We had dinner with the E family and they had their whole family over! The daughter, who served her mission in Utah gave us early Christmas gifts! I got a BB-8 cup from Disneyland plus cookies and Elder G got a light saber, I think I got the better end of the deal. It was really cool cause not all their family members are LDS so we showed them last years Christmas Mormon Message (FYI new one just came out on the 29th!!) and we asked everyone why they like Christmas, or what they think Christmas should be like. It was a really good lesson and everyone was smiling at the end. 

Wednesday I went on exchanges/ splits with Elder J. This day was probably one of the most eventful days of my mission. So many crazy stories, ready?? Ok. First off, it's the Zone Leaders area, so I was in car!!! It was cool. Crazy side note to all of this. Elder J was Elder W's MTC companion, and Elder J is from Herriman/ South Jordan area. He went to Itineris at SLCC and so we have a lot of people that we both know and talked about. We talked to a lot of people on the streets. While we were walking down one street, this drunk lady asked us (while walking towards us) "are you Mormons??" We said yes and then she asked us for money, and that's when it got weird. I started to walk away, but she cut off Elder J and tried to reach into his pockets. Elder J started dancing away from her, but she kept being persistent and trying to go for his pockets. He scurried away and then she started to walk towards me. She didn't even get close and Elder J caught up to me as we walked away. One of the funny things this lady said was "I'm not the devil" as we walked away. Man did that make for a good laugh later on. All of the appointments that he had scheduled, fell through, or they rescheduled for Friday. As we were walking, Elder J saw some black guys ballin it up and asked me jokingly, "want to go play with those guys?" I turned to him and said "ya, let's go!" He looked at me and said with a huge smile "you serious?" So we decided to challenge the guys to a basketball game, cause hey, Elder J is 6"3' and he plays super good. So we asked the guys if we could play. Our whole intention was that we would make a bet with the guys that if we beat them, they would listen to our message. Because there were 4 guys there, they split us up, so it was 3 on 3. Elder Js' team won because it was him and two 17 year olds vs. me, and pretty big black guy and a 11 year old. We played for like 20 minutes and at the end talked to them a little bit about the Book of Mormon, it was sooo cool. We ate dinner with the S family and it was super good. They gave us tamales the Guatemalan way along with rice and black beans. To drink they gave us hot chocolate and it was funny cause everything was hot, so you couldn't cool your mouth off with the drink you had cause, well, it was hot! At the very end of the night we went to go get Cream, which is an ice cream place (see pic) and it's super good. I got cookies and cream ice cream with a peanut butter cookie on one end and a red velvet cookie on the other, sooo good, and messy. We joked a lot and that was just a super fun exchange. 

Thursday was thanksgiving... If you didn't already know;) we switched back with the ZLs and went out to Jack in the Box, cause we were all hungry. I'm pretty sure that was the first time for me at Jack in the Box, correct me if I'm wrong. That place was super good! Greasy, but good. Talking to people on the streets was super difficult. We would try and stop them but people just kept telling us "happy holidays! Bye!" Ugh it was super frustrating. I saw more white people on thanksgiving in this area than any other day, weird huh. We had thanksgiving dinner with the R family. I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of everything, I forgot to take one at the beginning with all the food, so the picture is of my 2nd plate of food. Other food that they had were some BBQ ribs that were seasoned with pineapple (sooo good) and a fruit cocktail that Latinos like, but I don't. It has plums and papaya in it, so no thank you. Dinner was so good, I was so 'stuffed' hahah, that was bad. I miss having pumpkin pie and stuffing though. There wasn't any sweet potatoes, green bean casserole with bacon, or noodles, but it was a lot better than the thanksgiving in Peru!!

Friday morning we were invited back to the R family for breakfast, round 2 anyone? It was super good. We had mashed potatoes, Mac n cheese (I miss that a lot), rice, and they put their turkey in a soup type things and it was good. Latinos don't like turkey at all, they all think it's the most blandest, driest thing ever. Well hey, I like it. They then gave us flaun. I normally don't like flaun, but I think it's growing on me. We then went back to our apartment afterwards. Because it was Black Friday, nobody was outside. We would try to talk to people, but nope, nobody wanted to talk. We stopped by R's house, and this time we found a relative and a little boy. We started talking to the relative, I think he was an uncle or something, and he started to bash with us. I have recently learned that it is better to just listen and talk about the Book of Mormon, than to argue doctrine. The little boy seemed to be interested in what we said though! I explained the Book of Mormon to him and he read the last 2 paragraphs in the Book of Mormon and he was super into it! Too bad cause I think his family lives outside of our area. We then went and taught this guy named L. L told us to come back on a Thursday or Friday, but when we knocked on his door, he seemed super shocked. We were doing How To Begin Teaching, or getting to know him more, what he believes, all that good stuff. All of a sudden Elder G goes off on the Plan of Salvation, talking crazy, completely random stuff. I looked at him and said "how to begin teaching" we were then on the same page. By the end of the lesson, L understood a little bit of our purpose as missionaries, and we set up a return appointment for next Friday, hopefully that goes good! We then walked around for a long time, and then had dinner with the Fs. We ate tostadas and a salad type thing, it was good. Bishop and his wife visited the Fs as well and we shared a scripture and played a round of spoons, like always. 

Saturday helped me realize that God has a plan for everyone. We had no set appointments and we didn't have a dinner with a family, or anything, so the whole day was spent visiting potentials and trying to talk to as many people as we possibly could. As we were walking along one of the major streets in our area, we were right about to cross an intersection when we saw this older lady waiting for the bus on the other side. We decided that we were going to talk to her, as we approached her, she stood up. I was thinking that she was getting ready for the bus, but my surprise was when she held her arms out to stop us. She basically told us this (in a nut shell): she was a member who has a friend to whom a recent tragedy happened. She has a firm testimony in the power of the priesthood and she wanted us to go and give the friend a blessing. She has been praying to Heavenly Father that she could know the phone number of the missionaries in her ward, she goes to another ward, and then boom, we show up. We walk with her to the house of her friend and the husband of the friend answers the door. The old lady says "is sister Aju here?" The man responded that she was busy and it would be bad if she was disturbed. To my wonder this lady bore the most powerful testimony. She said "these men are Elders. The bible says that these men have the power of God to heal the sick because of their worthiness, if you want your wife to be healed, you let them in!" We walked up the stairs of this humble home and say the sister. She has a muscular problem, I don't know what it is, but she can barely control her muscles, they are very stiff. We explained the blessings of the priesthood and talked briefly about the faith that precedes the miracles. I was blessed with the opportunity to give the blessing and although my Spanish sucked, afterwards the sister with the muscular problem smiled at me. The old lady then bore a stronger testimony of the priesthood and we have a return appointment for Tuesday. We then went back to the apartment for dinner. Our neighbors were very kind one night and brought us over food in tin foil. They wrote a note and the dish is called a 'bastilla'. It's a Moroccan dish with raisins, meat, almonds, egg, bunch of stuff. Here is a picture of it. It tasted really funky. It's not that it was bad or lacked flavor, it's just really weird. It's almost like a shepherds pie with nuts and raisins in it... Different. We had a lesson with a couple named F and G. They have a lot of problems. The first one is that they are not married and F is a member. G doesn't really believe in God, but some relationship issues have come up for them that have recently helped her to start praying. It's really awkward because both G and F want the other to be 'called to repentance' but neither one will do it, or forgive the other about something that they did. The lesson we taught was about the Atonement and it was a pretty good lesson. They both committed to come to church afterwards.

Sunday was pretty good. I am so grateful for church. In sacrament meeting the missionaries were in charge because it was the fifth Sunday of the month. Two other Elders gave talks and the ward mission leader also gave a talk. One of the ZL sang a solo, acapella, and it was pretty good. We had G and F and their kid show up to church. We then went to the F family to see why they didn't show up to church. Their family was in town and convinced them to not go to church (stupid), but hey, at least everything is ok in the family. The Hermana gave us pozole again, this time it was even better. As we were walking around, we are know showing everyone the new Christmas video that the church released which is #ASaviorIsBorn and it's pretty good. We showed it to a couple people and had some good street conversations with people. 

This week was altogether good, just 3 1/2 more till Christmas!! Transfers are next week, any bets? At this point anything can happen. I have never had the same companion for more than 1 transfer (really) and I've never stayed in the same area for more than 2 transfers. Elder G was called English speaking, so he might be switched back, but who knows?? 

Love, 

Elder Roberts