A Great Little City

I am now here is Selma, a great little city. Yet again, I have no car, but that is the way I like it, so that is all good.

It is so cool. This area just found a solid investigator, well, actually the investigator found them. He is going to be baptized this weekend. The missionaries only met him a week before I got here, so I get to see almost his whole conversion. So that is great. His name is Mark. He has the biggest hands I have ever seen. I can barely shake his hands because they are so big.

I am having a great time here in Selma, and I am having a great time speaking Spanish again.

You Just Have to Have Faith

Well I am now going to my 6th area, Selma! Ha-ha. I will have been in more areas than a lot of missionaries are during their whole mission. I am excited though.

This week in Atwater has been a good week. We have been able to get some of our investigators that were not so committed to make commitments to things. If they do them, it might be a different story (that I will never know the answer to). It is the weird thing about a mission; it is like starting your life over every time you move. And I have a lot of restarts. I don’t know if that is all good? Ha-ha. No, it is just what the Lord wants me to do; so I am doing it.

This week’s story is of this man named Israel. He moved to LA, then San Jose, then back here. We got to teach him again. He has been super interested in what we teach because he wants to better his life. He has some drug problems, and also some other problems, but it is cool to see his demeanor change when we talk to him about the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is awesome to witness the change that goes into people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I hope he gets baptized in the next couple of months.

One more story: There is one story that is super cool. So, this lady pulled us over and asked what we were doing, if we were salesmen or church people or what? We explained to her, and at the same time in our district we were carrying a Book of Mormon with us everywhere we went, so we explained the Book of Mormon and what it is and gave her a copy. A couple days earlier we had talked to this guy watering his yard. We talked to him about the Book of Mormon as well. We went over to go see how they were doing. We found out that these two people, who we had met separately, were in fact husband and wife. Way funny. They put the pieces together when the wife walked in the house with a Book of Mormon, the same book we had given the man. They want us to come over this Friday. You are right. There are people who have been prepared. You just have to have faith to find them and they will find you.

Everyone have a great week.

To Be a Part of This Work

This week is a real good week. We have found another great family. They are from Hawaii, so that is cool. Polynesians are the best.

It was really cool how we found them. We got a referral from the zone leaders. Who knows where they got it, but it was to go visit. The family lives about 20 minutes away from our main area, so we got a team up and drove out there. We went by their house once and nobody was there. We went to go visit some more people, and then, came back to see if the family was there. They were. We ended up talking with them and teaching a short lesson. It was great to see how the Lord works.

We have also got the whole support of the ward in finding all these families who are interested in the church. It is so cool to see and even better to be a part of this work. 

One of the interesting things about being with a Mexican companion during Cinco de Mayo is to understand the holiday better. It is funny that all of us Americans think the holiday is so big and the Mexicans don’t even remember it. They don’t even have that holiday in Mexico. It is like Memorial Day or President’s Day, not really big at all. So that is kinda funny.

I Want to Know More

This week we have been carrying around a Book of Mormon everywhere we go. It has been great to see the miracles coming from that. One really cool experience, well they were all cool, but this one was really cool. There was this high school kid walking down the street. It was just him. He was a big football player type kid. We stopped and talked to him. He was super nice and on his way to mow his grandmother’s lawn. We talked to him a little about our message, then, my companion for the day (we were on exchanges) gave him a Book of Mormon. My companion for the day had just been out for 3 weeks, so he was pretty fired up. We all set an appointment for the next day, Sunday. Of course, this boy being so ready for the gospel, Satan would try to stop us from getting there, and he did. My companion (Elder Rodriguez, my real companion) got two flat tires right after church, when our appointment was supposed to be. We called in the reinforcements, the members. We got two members. My companion went to go fix his bike with one member and I went to the appointment with the other. It was a really good lesson. The member who was with me is very missionary minded. David, the investigator, had already read 5+ pages and it had not even been 24 hours since we met him last. So that was crazy and really cool. At the end, we asked him how he felt. He just said, “I want to know more.” We testified of the Holy Ghost and ended the lesson. It was super good, and he is a super cool kid.

We're the Super Servants!

This week I was able to have a really cool experience talking to everyone on the street. This experience showed me the importance of talking to everyone, as well as how much we need the members to set good examples and open their mouth to share the gospel with people. We were biking to dinner and we were just about there and the across the street neighbor was outside walking with his kids. We stopped and talked to him, and listened to the kid talk about who knows what. The topic kept switching. But we started talking to him about the gospel a little and about Jesus Christ and faith and all. We found out he knew the member family across the street pretty well. So we asked him if we could come by; he said yes. Then we asked him a time that would be good, and he said he was busy all week, then paused, and said except Thursday. I said, name a time and we will be at your house. So he said 6:30. We now have this awesome appointment with a friend of a member. When we told the member family, they were in shock, both that he said yes and that they had not got their before us. It was kinda funny, but they are real glad we are going over.

It has been a good week with everything else, too. It is cool to see how the Lord’s work keeps moving forward in the areas where the Members do their best to help the missionaries. I have learned one thing on my mission. I always have thought, through my whole life, that missionary work is the missionary’s job and that the members need to help when the missionaries need help. But I have learned on my mission, it is supposed to be the opposite. The Members are the missionaries, while the full time missionaries are the teachers and supporters of the members. We are like the super servants that are on call 24/7. Yes, missionaries do find and they do a lot of the dirty work because we have to keep busy.

It is great to be a missionary at this time, with everything that is going on and all the help we have with technology and all.

Helping Out in Little Ways

This week has been a good week. This new area is interesting. I have never seen so many people who are just not all the way put together. I feel bad for them, and we try to help them out in little ways. For one guy, we give him a different pamphlet to read every time we see him; soon we are going to run out of pamphlets to give him. We already gave him the Word of Wisdom one. The best thing about it is he loved it. He said this is how I need to live my life, not smoking or drinking. It was kinda funny.

Another person we help out is quite amazing. He is all the way there in his head, but he just can’t move. We were given the name of this lady to go help by some members. She has a son who is 30 something and he got in a bad car accident when he was 20ish. It clipped his brain stem, so he can still think clearly and understand everything, but he can’t move any part of his body. We help him do some stretches, because his muscles are all tight. We help him move his arms and stand up on a board that holds him up to move his legs and all that stuff. So it is a great help. He can move a bit by himself, but he is still on a hospital bed all day, every day. It is really sad.

We have also found this amazing family. Elder Rodriguez and the other missionary who was here found him first, but never got in to teach him. We finally got in to teach him. His wife was not home, but we just taught him the Plan of Salvation. It was great. He grew up Southern Baptist, but did not like it, because if you did anything bad you went to hell. And he believes in a God of mercy. So we explained the Plan of Salvation he said, "Well, that is what I have believed my whole life." It was great. He also accepted a baptismal date for a month from now. It was super cool!! They are a great family.

A New Experience in the Town of Atwater

I am now in a small town outside of Merced named Atwater. I am still in an English area but with a companion from Acapulco, Mexico. I still get to practice my Spanish a lot with him; so that is good. He is super funny and he got baptized just a few years back. It is cool to see him grow in the gospel.

The work here in Atwater is hard, as well as Madera, but here we have a few lights. We should have a baptism at the end of the month, a niece of a recent convert. So that is cool. Also, we are teaching a lady who has studied with the Jehovah Witnesses for a year and likes us better, but does not know how to tell the Jehovah Witness's how she feels. That is her only hold up for the truth.

Here in Atwater there is a big old air force base, so there are a lot of ex-military people.  It makes the area interesting. One of our recent converts is living at the Wal-Mart parking lot, so that is very interesting. I really don’t have many stories from Atwater yet, but later this week we have a mission conference with Elder Christofferson, of the Quorum of the Twelve, so that should be really cool.