Sunday, March 16, 2014

Puddles and Lessons...


March 10th, 2014

Hey hey! Another week gone by, crazy crazy.  I hope everyone's week was as good as mines was! 

So lets see, what happened this week. Well, we started off the week real strong, we taught the restoration to S & J last Monday, and man did it go well. We're super excited to be teaching them, and we're tentatively planning their baptism for the 22nd of  March, which we're super excited about!  But it was also a lot of fun; we taught the restoration using a jenga set.  I'm sure you could all figure out how it worked; we likened the standing Jenga tower to the church that Christ established, and over time when the apostles and prophets were killed and the priesthood was taken from the earth, the church crumbled. When it crumbled, everyone took all the parts of the church (the blocks) and built their own towers. Technically, the church was still there; it was just divided among many different churches. All the doctrine was still there, but it was scattered. Then we likened the restoration to building the tower again. It was fun. I got to play jenga with some kids, and in the mean time I taught the gospel.  It doesn't get much better than that! haha. 

Wednesday, we taught the their family again, actually. We taught them about the plan of salvation. Although “S” received it very well, and so did his mom and brothers, we didn't feel we did as good as we could have in teaching the lesson. There were distraction, which to us felt like it was inhibiting the spirit. We weren't very happy with how it went. However, we met “S” (he's 15) at mutual to introduce him to the young men, and he was SUPER stoked about the lesson. He loved it! It just strengthened my testimony that the spirit can speak to you no matter the circumstances. The spirit has no language barrier and can touch people, even among many distractions. It was very cool.

Then, we went to mutual with “S” to get him some good fellowship there, and it was great.  We played jeopardy with the young men, then afterwards we played some basketball with them. it was me and elder wride versus 3 YM. We stomped em. Well, not really.  We beat them by one point. I was sweating so bad, and my shirt got untucked, and my feet were just about to blister, which is embarrassing because they're all like 14 and 15, and i'm 19, but no matter!  I still won. That's all that matters. hahaha.  It was a ton of fun though. “S” loved it.  He can't wait to go next week, we're super stoked!

Other than those two lessons, we had very little success (that I can see at this moment) the rest of the week. We're working really hard to find new investigators, so we knocked a lot of doors, tried to meet with a lot of potentials, and tried to meet a lot of less actives. We may have gotten in two doors from thursday-sunday, other than dinners.  And, those were our bike days, and it was raining a LOT this weekend haha.

it was fun though. It got to the point where we were so stoked that we were just trying to ride through the biggest puddles we could and splash each other.  The way I see it is we could be bummed about not getting in many doors and not teaching much, but it's kind of like life...things aren't always going to be prime and perfect, and we're all going to have challenges (side note, i almost typed desafios, that means challenge in spanish ahha). But you have two choices when you have those challenges, you can either get all upset and depressed, or you can make the best of it. Hence, the puddle water splashing.  You gotta have fun on a mission.  If you aren't having fun, you aren't doing it right. That's the way I see it. I’m probably wrong, as I don't know much about being a missionary yet haha.  It's good to be humbled at times though. It's good to realize I'm not this super missionary that can talk my way into any door I want. When you're humbled, you then become teachable and moldable so you can become better. So, all in all, those days were way good. We learned a lot, and we learned that we need to find a new way to find investigators. So, although we didn't see the immediate success from those days, we may have planted some seeds, and we definitely learned, which is going to lead to more success down the road!

Last little note. We knocked on a door of a less active member.  She let us right in, and we soon found out she spoke ONLY SPANISH.  You have to understand, this was my first time ever being in a house or trying to teach a lesson that was solomente en espanol.  It was super frustrating haha. Elder Wride killed it, and I understood about 90 percent of the vocabulary she was throwing out there.  I was getting main ideas, but i'm still just not used to how natives speak. I can understand when white people speak Spanish fluently, but when natives speak, it’s tough. They talk faster and slur and use slang, and although I can understand most of the words by themselves, when they put them all together it's hard for me to understand. But it's okay, I still talked to her a bit and it was a nice visit. Very short, but that's okay. It was another learning moment – I learned I need to study Spanish harder! haha. it was fun though. Definitely interesting!

Well I think that's all for me this week. I hope you all are doing well! Love you all like crazy, have a great week!

Love,
Elder Snow

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