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
