Week 32 Email

Week 32 email

All,

 

This may be my last week in Murrieta. Transfers are this weekend. Elder Plaster and I have been together for two transfers now, so anything can happen. We've made our predictions on what will happen in the zone. Loser buys a soda. I hope we stay together though.

 

We've gone a long way here, and knocked nearly every door in the area. The Lord has certainly blessed our efforts, mostly in small ways, but in a few big ways as well. Oscar was called as the Young Men's secretary on Sunday. He's looking forward to helping out with the Youth. We're also pretty excited about the baptism this weekend. Hopefully we can get everything put together by then.

 

This week was fairly uneventful. We taught a few lessons, got ahold of some people we've been trying to see for a long time. 

 

Elder Plaster is now the district leader and so we went on exchanges Friday and Saturday. On Friday I got to go out with the Spanish Elder, Elder Graves (He was my roommate in Highland so we're pretty good friends). It was fun. The weather was horrible. It rained hailed and was especially cold. I felt bad riding around in the car while Elder Plaster was on bike when we had no scheduled apointments (aparently no one was home). Elder Graves and I taught 6 lessons that day. That's more than we usually have in a week! Some of them were in English so I could participate but the rest I practiced my vacant smile while they chattered away in Spanish. 

We talked to an old lady in their branch who was from Argentina. She had a really interesting conversion and life story. In the 1950s in Argentina she thought the LDS missionaries were spies. So she followed them around and finally learned who they were and took the lessons. She was the 2nd person baptized in that city. A few years later an American Spanish teacher was staying with them and offered her and her husband a job in the US. They took it and their emigration here was abnormally smooth. She was working at a bank when she was contacted by Catholic nuns who ran a hospital. The nuns offered her a job as a nurse. The sister said "I'm not Catholic..."

The nun said "I don't care"

"I don't know how to be a nurse"

"I'll teach you"

"But I already have a job."

"How much do you make?"

"about $6 per hour"

"We'll pay you $10, you start next week."

And so she became a nurse for 5 years. Stuff like that would just happen to her. It was really cool listening to her.

 

On Saturday I was with one of the zone leaders. Nothing special happened. Not very many people were home.

Yesterday Elder Plaster and I were knocking doors and we met a guy with an enormous saltwater fishtank behind the door. He wasn't interested, but we complimented his fishtank and Elder Plaster said "Make sure you don't get starfish, starfish are just a path of destruction." Later he told me about how a starfish ate all the coral, anemonies and some fish from a fishtank he was around. Who knew how menacing starfish could be?

 

I taught the Sunday school lesson in church yesterday about Agency. It went well. God will not rob us of our freedom to choose. He has given us the tools to choose the right and to follow him. If we don't it is only our fault for we will recieve the wages of the work we do.

 

That's all I've got time for. Hope you all have an amazing week. Please write,

Elder Bryce Johns