Garden of Kadesh

June 14, 2010

Hey family

Well this week was the last week of this transfer. It was rather fun. On monday after I e-mailed y'all we did the GALLON CHALLENGE. In which you have to drink a gallon of milk under 1 hour and then hold it another hour. It was pretty fun we did with some members. Well, nobody got the whole gallon down in one hour, and only Carlos, the big guy on the left in the picture of all of us got the whole gallon down and kept it down. The rest of us couldn't keep it down. I got like 2/3rds of the gallon down. The pictures of everyone vomiting are hilarious but I don't think mom would want to see them so I think I'll send them to Austin.

Other than that we've just been working hard, it was my companion's last week in the mission so he's been working with this 'chicken with it's head cut off' mentality it was crazy but whatever we worked hard. I'm trying to think of some amusing story.... umm... Okay, so Carlos was finally baptized, I don't know if I mentioned this last week but I guess he thought that if he got baptized he would have to go back to Mexico and get re-married to his ex-wife. That's why he didn't get baptized three weeks back. Anyway we told him that was not the case so he was good to go. So he was baptized and that was all fun and good. The other picture shows the Perez family, the family who works with Carlos and are his fellowshippers.

I forgot what other pictures I attached but I know one is of some food I made one day. It was really good, I wondering what to eat so I poked around and found some things and made that master piece. I cut up some onion, fried it with some black beans and an egg, added some brown rice, cooked it all together, threw it on a plate and added lettuce, avocado, cojita cheese, crema mexicana, and some Tajin, which is this chile/lime seasoning that I had gotten last P-day and some limes. It looked so good that I decided to take a picture of it.

What else happened? Oh on saturday we had this epic bash with this guy. On friday we had tracted into this family from Guatemala, who had been taught by missionaries before, we talked to the wife and some of her teenage sons. We came back the next day for our return appointment and this time the dad was there. He invited us in and asked us to sit down and once everyone had gathered together he told us straight up that the Bible is the only word of God and there can't be any other scripture. I admit that I got a little mad, got my blood running, I call it my beserkergang, which was what the Vikings called a sort of mad frenzied blood-wrath. Anyway I opened my bible and we spent the next hour utterly destroying him. Thinking about it afterward I realized that this guy believed pretty much every false doctrine there is that crept in in the early Christian era. Nobody has ever seen God, Jesus doesn't have a body, God no longer speaks to man, the Bible is the only word of Got, etc, etc, etc. Well we utterly destroyed him on every single one of his false beliefs using his own Bible. He was pretty dumb, when we'd refute him on something with a scripture he'd find himself cornered and would then spew out something completely random about having faith or Abraham. He would try to show off how much (if anything) he knew about religion and likely hoped that something he said would somehow prove us wrong. It utterly failed, by the end of it his head was bowed and he wouldn't look us in the face. And his family was looking at him like "Dad, you're an idiot, stop making a fool of yourself". They looked pretty embarrassed. We felt kind of bad for him, we had just humiliated him in front of his family and made him look like an fool, so we asked him if we could read something about Jesus, he agreed in a barely audible voice and we opened the Book of Mormon and had him read parts of 3 Nephi 11 when Christ introduces himself to the Nephites. The tension seemed to leave the room and the spirit seemed to stick it's head in just a tad. We probably should have done that in very first place and avoided the whole bash, but perhaps it was necessary to pierce the guy's hard heart and after we had utterly crushed him, strike while the iron was hot and bring the spirit in. We then left him with the challenge to read the rest of the chapter, he accepted, we bore our testimonies and got out of there. On the way out we talked to one of his sons and the mom and they told us they didn't believe any of that stuff that they're dad said and they really wanted to know if our church was true or not. So it went well.

Well that's all I got for today. Tomorrow I'm geting my new companion, Elder Manship, he was in the MTC with me and we are good friends so this next transfer should be a blast. Okay, I love you all, bye.

-- Elder Rice