June 13, 2011
Hello fam.
Once again reporting in at the end of yet another slow week. There really just wasn't much that happened, again. Just more of the same, knocking doors, driving around, visiting the same old people with the same old problems. It's getting old.
Actually a couple of interesting things did happened. Firstly we finally are now able to text on our phones. They told us back in September of last year that soon we would be able to text, then they authorized that ability on all of the ZL's phones but not for the rest of us underlings. Well finally this week they announced in Zone Conference that they would finally authorize it on our phones. We think the reason why president waited so long is since he's done in two weeks so he'd authorize and then the new president would have to put up with all of the mischief that will surely follow. We have strict rules on who and when we can text but it is sure that people will start abusing it soon. So far it's actually been going great for us. People Never return our calls, ever, so now that we text people they will actually respond to us. It's pretty amazing. Twas also odd to text for the first time in like almost two years. So yeah, now that we can text I'm sure that baptisms will just start rolling in now haha!
Also we've been sorely afflicted this week. On exchanges I with Elder Armstrong went to do service for Hno. Garza, and old old man who wants to come and do his yard work every now and then. Usually we just mow his lawn and whack the weeds. But this time we were engaged in a desperate battle with the plants all over Garza's fence. There were small trees growing through the middle of it so I don't think it's been touched for several years. Armed with only our wits and two machetes we were locked in a duel to the finish with the many vines, weeds, trees, and shrubbery that held Hno Garza's fence captive. 'Twas a desperate fight in which didst end in a draw. For though many of the enemy combatants were hewn down and cast into the fire after two hours we didst only slay the smallest part of them. Having partially come off as the conquerors we returned and a few days later we found out that a lot of that vegetation was poison ivy. Now it's spread to the whole district and we spend most of our time trying not to scratch ourselves. It didn't get me too bad, only my left arm and ankles were badly effected. Though for Armstrong it's now over his whole body and he definitely got hit the hardest out of all of us. Though it's starting to get bad my companion, Elder Cawley.
Yup, that's pretty much all the interesting stuff that's happened this week. These e-mails just seem to get shorter and shorter. Hmm... Well have a good week.
-- Elder Rice
Showing posts with label 2011. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2011. Show all posts
Dos que Tres
June 6, 2011
Hello family.
Sounds like y'all are having fun in Japan Mom and Dad. Also remember to see if you can get me a Japanese soccer jersey while you're there. And don't get one that's huge! Actually since all the people there are pretty small you might have to get one that's huge for them.
Well down here there's not much going on. It's been brutally hot, everyday we try to think of things to do other than walk around outside tracting or something because of the heat. Actually it's easy because nobody else is outside as well. The lack of rain really worries the locals who say that means that there will be a hurricane this summer. Which would be cool, I would like to see a hurricane before I go home. I don't know how ethical it is to want a destructive hurricane to come to Houston and flatten everything just for my amusement.
Oh kay. I got something to write about. So here's the latest chapter in the Minerva and Dianna drama. And I fear it might be the last chapter as well. So neither of them have come to church for the past two months due to an endless mountain of excuses, but Dianna has gone to mutual almost every week. Well this one week the YW had a "campout" in the YW leader's house, basically a sleepover. Well SOMETHING happened, we're not sure on the details but it had something to do with an investigator of the other elders who is a young woman as well and went along, who needs to wait a couple months before she can be baptized, she had to have an interview with President Cue, President Hansen's spanish-speaking counselor who does interviews for people who have serious issues. Well whatever happened, the YW leader freaked out and called the bishop. And the bishop talked to Dianna and told her that she couldn't come to mutual anymore but she could still come to church on sunday "if she wanted". So Dianna decided she doesn't want to go to church anymore and Minverva, who will only go if Dianna goes because she is her seeing-eye-human, and who always feels sick sunday morning, wouldn't be going either. We talked to them about losing out on our blessings if we don't go to church. And then Minerva says that well if they couldn't make it to the church a friend or someone is offering to take them to their Pentecostal church. Her reasoning was "Well yeah it's bad to not go to church and we lose blessings but I think if we go to another we can get some blessings, better than sitting at home right?" Well we told her NO. And that when Joseph Smith asked Jesus which of all the churches was true Jesus replied that none of them were true, thus meaning that all churches except the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is completely false. Furthermore, In both the Bible and the Book of Mormon it speaks of the last days as only having two churches, the church of the lamb and church of the Devil, and since we've all figured out that our church is the church of the lamb, it means that every other church is in fact founded by the devil, including that stupid pentacostal church. (Which happens to be across the street from our building).
So therefore it would in fact be better if they sat at home rather than go to another church. We talked about their baptisms and how they had made a PROMISE with God and stop going to church would be to break that promise they made with God, which is a big NO-NO. Now I didn't blow up like I've been doing a lot lately because they're not stupid, and I love them very much, they're part of my family away from family and I honestly told them that I didn't want them to suffer the same fate that I've seen countless other recent converts suffer for almost two years now. Well despite all of this we got a 'well we'll think about it' response. So we left them with homework to read at least one chapter out of the BoM everyday and pray together afterwards, and we have called them every night since to remind to do it. They did it for the first couple days then the following ones they slacked off and came up with a bajillion excuses as to why they didn't read their scriptures. Yeah so I was kind of depressed the next couple days. Out of all our recent converts, only half of them still make it to church.
Oh and the cherry on the top of this cake is when we brought it up in ward correlation (the ward mission leader didn't come to church so we had to fill in for him, and I actually wasn't in the meeting either, I was giving a baptismal interview to some other elders' investigator but my companion and one of the other elders in our ward were in there). So they brought up Minerva and Dianna in there and how they don't to come anymore and how they want to go to another church. The bishop said: "Oh that's natural, of course they feel like that." And then he dropped the subject and moved on. Now normally I would be really upset with this stupid ward again but I'm so used to it by now that I don't feel that upset at all, sure it's sad that the bishop and the other ward leaders don't care about people but this is so normal now that it was no surprise.
Yup, so... Nothing much going down on here. Actually one more amusing anecdote. So we were having a lesson with Tomas, Rubiel, and Hno. Galeano. All of them are recent converts, and the first two are our recent converts. We were doing the fun activity where you read selected verses in 1 Nefi 8 and have everyone draw out the whole Lehi's Dream with the tree and everything. But you don't explain what it is. Then after everyone is finished you ask them what in the world could such a picture mean? And most people who are unfamiliar with Lehi's dream have no idea, it's just one of the oddest pictures they've ever seen. Then you jump to 1 Nefi 11-12 and read the selected passages where the Angel describes to Nefi what all the elements in the dream symbolize. I told them that all of these things were symbolic, and we had a little chat about symbolism just to make sure everything knew what symbolism was. They did. So we went through and read the verses and after reading each verse and I would ask them what X represented. It would go something like this:
Scripture: "X=Y"
ER: "Okay Hno. so from that verse that you just read, what does X equal?"
Hno. :"X=W"
ER (patiently):" Not quite.... what does it say in the verse?"
Hno.: "X=W or maybe X=Z"
ER: "Okay let's read it again, X=Y"
Hno. "Oh okay, so X=W"
ER: "DAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
That's kind of how a lot of our lessons have been with all sorts of people lately. Well I'm out of time so have fun in Japan Ma n' Pa. And I'll be seeing y'alls later.
-- Elder Rice
Hello family.
Sounds like y'all are having fun in Japan Mom and Dad. Also remember to see if you can get me a Japanese soccer jersey while you're there. And don't get one that's huge! Actually since all the people there are pretty small you might have to get one that's huge for them.
Well down here there's not much going on. It's been brutally hot, everyday we try to think of things to do other than walk around outside tracting or something because of the heat. Actually it's easy because nobody else is outside as well. The lack of rain really worries the locals who say that means that there will be a hurricane this summer. Which would be cool, I would like to see a hurricane before I go home. I don't know how ethical it is to want a destructive hurricane to come to Houston and flatten everything just for my amusement.
Oh kay. I got something to write about. So here's the latest chapter in the Minerva and Dianna drama. And I fear it might be the last chapter as well. So neither of them have come to church for the past two months due to an endless mountain of excuses, but Dianna has gone to mutual almost every week. Well this one week the YW had a "campout" in the YW leader's house, basically a sleepover. Well SOMETHING happened, we're not sure on the details but it had something to do with an investigator of the other elders who is a young woman as well and went along, who needs to wait a couple months before she can be baptized, she had to have an interview with President Cue, President Hansen's spanish-speaking counselor who does interviews for people who have serious issues. Well whatever happened, the YW leader freaked out and called the bishop. And the bishop talked to Dianna and told her that she couldn't come to mutual anymore but she could still come to church on sunday "if she wanted". So Dianna decided she doesn't want to go to church anymore and Minverva, who will only go if Dianna goes because she is her seeing-eye-human, and who always feels sick sunday morning, wouldn't be going either. We talked to them about losing out on our blessings if we don't go to church. And then Minerva says that well if they couldn't make it to the church a friend or someone is offering to take them to their Pentecostal church. Her reasoning was "Well yeah it's bad to not go to church and we lose blessings but I think if we go to another we can get some blessings, better than sitting at home right?" Well we told her NO. And that when Joseph Smith asked Jesus which of all the churches was true Jesus replied that none of them were true, thus meaning that all churches except the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is completely false. Furthermore, In both the Bible and the Book of Mormon it speaks of the last days as only having two churches, the church of the lamb and church of the Devil, and since we've all figured out that our church is the church of the lamb, it means that every other church is in fact founded by the devil, including that stupid pentacostal church. (Which happens to be across the street from our building).
So therefore it would in fact be better if they sat at home rather than go to another church. We talked about their baptisms and how they had made a PROMISE with God and stop going to church would be to break that promise they made with God, which is a big NO-NO. Now I didn't blow up like I've been doing a lot lately because they're not stupid, and I love them very much, they're part of my family away from family and I honestly told them that I didn't want them to suffer the same fate that I've seen countless other recent converts suffer for almost two years now. Well despite all of this we got a 'well we'll think about it' response. So we left them with homework to read at least one chapter out of the BoM everyday and pray together afterwards, and we have called them every night since to remind to do it. They did it for the first couple days then the following ones they slacked off and came up with a bajillion excuses as to why they didn't read their scriptures. Yeah so I was kind of depressed the next couple days. Out of all our recent converts, only half of them still make it to church.
Oh and the cherry on the top of this cake is when we brought it up in ward correlation (the ward mission leader didn't come to church so we had to fill in for him, and I actually wasn't in the meeting either, I was giving a baptismal interview to some other elders' investigator but my companion and one of the other elders in our ward were in there). So they brought up Minerva and Dianna in there and how they don't to come anymore and how they want to go to another church. The bishop said: "Oh that's natural, of course they feel like that." And then he dropped the subject and moved on. Now normally I would be really upset with this stupid ward again but I'm so used to it by now that I don't feel that upset at all, sure it's sad that the bishop and the other ward leaders don't care about people but this is so normal now that it was no surprise.
Yup, so... Nothing much going down on here. Actually one more amusing anecdote. So we were having a lesson with Tomas, Rubiel, and Hno. Galeano. All of them are recent converts, and the first two are our recent converts. We were doing the fun activity where you read selected verses in 1 Nefi 8 and have everyone draw out the whole Lehi's Dream with the tree and everything. But you don't explain what it is. Then after everyone is finished you ask them what in the world could such a picture mean? And most people who are unfamiliar with Lehi's dream have no idea, it's just one of the oddest pictures they've ever seen. Then you jump to 1 Nefi 11-12 and read the selected passages where the Angel describes to Nefi what all the elements in the dream symbolize. I told them that all of these things were symbolic, and we had a little chat about symbolism just to make sure everything knew what symbolism was. They did. So we went through and read the verses and after reading each verse and I would ask them what X represented. It would go something like this:
Scripture: "X=Y"
ER: "Okay Hno. so from that verse that you just read, what does X equal?"
Hno. :"X=W"
ER (patiently):" Not quite.... what does it say in the verse?"
Hno.: "X=W or maybe X=Z"
ER: "Okay let's read it again, X=Y"
Hno. "Oh okay, so X=W"
ER: "DAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
That's kind of how a lot of our lessons have been with all sorts of people lately. Well I'm out of time so have fun in Japan Ma n' Pa. And I'll be seeing y'alls later.
-- Elder Rice
Hacendoso
May 31, 2011
Hello Family.
Well... Not much to report once again. Ummm.... There's got to be something to say, some sort of funny story... Hmmm... I'm looking through my planner, looking at what we even did this week... We had a leadership training meeting and a zone meeting. Both were very long and very boring. We did a lot of service on Saturday. Hurricane season is coming around so in church they have these emergency preparedness classes and things and the elder's quorum has being going around and helping people cut down trees in their yards. Better to cut it down now than to have it fall onto your house during a hurricane. So we went and helped because of course only 4 of the men from the elder's quorum actually showed up. So the four of us missionaries made up half of the work force. But it was fun, I learned how to sharpen a chainsaw, change the chain on the chainsaw, how to fix a chainsaw, everything about chainsaws except for actually using a chainsaw. The hermanos had brought like 8 chainsaws and all of them would not function and one time or another so we spent a lot of the time simply taking them apart and fixing them. We did that and most of the manual labour. None of them wanted to do the menial tasks of dragging all of the fallen foliage out to the street or hauling the logs away, they like doing all of the important things like cutting the trees down. Which was just fine with us since we never complain about anything and we didn't really want to be up in those trees with a not-quite-fully functioning chainsaw cutting off the larger sections which would dangerously swing about threatening to knock you off the tree. That nearly happened to one hermano, two more were nearly flattened when pulling down a rather large tree with a rope. They barely dove out of the way. So we were just fine watching and dragging the branches around.
We had a ward FHE, which we were in charge of. It was really funny actually, we taught about the Book of Mormon and the activity we had was a Jeopardy type trivia game. When we made the game up we knew that we would be dealing with hispanic members so we tried to dumb the questions down a bit. But nevertheless it proved to be a bit too difficult for them. We also felt kind of bad for the investigators that showed up, they didn't have a clue what was going on but we had a good time. One my favorite questions was: "Who was the only person in the book of Mormon who did a push-up with out his head?" They were pretty dumbfounded by that one. One hermana actually got it right by sheer guessing. We gave them a hint that it was in the book of Ether and she randomly guessed Shiz, and she was right. Even simple scripture mastery was just barely beyond their grasp. The thing is that mexicans don't really like to read, at all. Someone showed us a poll once, worldwide countries and on average how many books each person read on a yearly basis or something like that and Mexico was almost at the very bottom. The top was like Finland or something but the U.S. was close to the top as well. Even for the active members who study the scriptures on a somewhat regular basis it's a serious chore for them. It's just not something they do, so they learned quite a bit.
Well that's all the interesting things that happened this week. I hope you all have a good week. PEace out!
-- Elder Rice
Hello Family.
Well... Not much to report once again. Ummm.... There's got to be something to say, some sort of funny story... Hmmm... I'm looking through my planner, looking at what we even did this week... We had a leadership training meeting and a zone meeting. Both were very long and very boring. We did a lot of service on Saturday. Hurricane season is coming around so in church they have these emergency preparedness classes and things and the elder's quorum has being going around and helping people cut down trees in their yards. Better to cut it down now than to have it fall onto your house during a hurricane. So we went and helped because of course only 4 of the men from the elder's quorum actually showed up. So the four of us missionaries made up half of the work force. But it was fun, I learned how to sharpen a chainsaw, change the chain on the chainsaw, how to fix a chainsaw, everything about chainsaws except for actually using a chainsaw. The hermanos had brought like 8 chainsaws and all of them would not function and one time or another so we spent a lot of the time simply taking them apart and fixing them. We did that and most of the manual labour. None of them wanted to do the menial tasks of dragging all of the fallen foliage out to the street or hauling the logs away, they like doing all of the important things like cutting the trees down. Which was just fine with us since we never complain about anything and we didn't really want to be up in those trees with a not-quite-fully functioning chainsaw cutting off the larger sections which would dangerously swing about threatening to knock you off the tree. That nearly happened to one hermano, two more were nearly flattened when pulling down a rather large tree with a rope. They barely dove out of the way. So we were just fine watching and dragging the branches around.
We had a ward FHE, which we were in charge of. It was really funny actually, we taught about the Book of Mormon and the activity we had was a Jeopardy type trivia game. When we made the game up we knew that we would be dealing with hispanic members so we tried to dumb the questions down a bit. But nevertheless it proved to be a bit too difficult for them. We also felt kind of bad for the investigators that showed up, they didn't have a clue what was going on but we had a good time. One my favorite questions was: "Who was the only person in the book of Mormon who did a push-up with out his head?" They were pretty dumbfounded by that one. One hermana actually got it right by sheer guessing. We gave them a hint that it was in the book of Ether and she randomly guessed Shiz, and she was right. Even simple scripture mastery was just barely beyond their grasp. The thing is that mexicans don't really like to read, at all. Someone showed us a poll once, worldwide countries and on average how many books each person read on a yearly basis or something like that and Mexico was almost at the very bottom. The top was like Finland or something but the U.S. was close to the top as well. Even for the active members who study the scriptures on a somewhat regular basis it's a serious chore for them. It's just not something they do, so they learned quite a bit.
Well that's all the interesting things that happened this week. I hope you all have a good week. PEace out!
-- Elder Rice
Alumnos y Porristas
May 23, 2011
Hello Family.
This week was much better than the previous one. The principal reason being that I now have a new companion, Elder Cawley. He's really quiet, extremely quiet but cool enough we get along pretty well. Also with Elder Green gone we can now try to do different things in the area, the results of which are showing. The area has been pretty dead lately but this week we've been focusing more on finding new people to teach, we picked up a few new investigators this week and we've done some other adventurous activities.
So... With our favorite family of nutcases,. we had a long discussion about commitments and priorities. They admitted that they hadn't been that great lately and we recommitted to the whole thing. Rosa said she wouldn't be able to make it to church this week but next week she could. Irma could make it to church but she didn't want to because it starts at 9:00. What followed was pretty funny. One of Irma's daughters comes in and says that they don't need to go to church on sunday because the world was going to end on saturday. Now we had heard this from some other people previously last week. Apparently someone somewhere that it says in the bible that the world was to end on may 21st at 3:00 or perhaps 6:00, and it's been spreading around. We just laughed but they all were actually concerned about it. We told them that it was extremely unlikely, if not impossible for two reasons. First, that Jesus said that nobody, not even himself, knows when that's going to be. Only God the Father knows. And Second that there are certain events that need to pass before such a thing happens. We told them a little bit about what the book of Revelations says (which is odd since most people try to use that book against us, this was one of the few occasions I've had actually using it to prove one of our points). We told them a bit about what is supposed to happen with Armageddon and the two prophets being slain in Jerusalem as they are defending the Jews. And we said that obviously none of that has happened yet so therefore unless all of that happens on within the next day then the world was not going to end on saturday. Now by this point we had wandered far off the subject of commitments, baptism, priorities, and going to church. Luckily though an opportunity came up to help them realize some of the things that they need to be doing. I said: "Okay let's suppose for a moment that world is indeed going to end on saturday. We used that to point out that life is short and the time to repent, be baptized, and go back to church is now. Now is the time to focus on important things. Work and other stuff is important but the things of God are even more important, so they should reorganize their priorities a little bit and put God as #1. Meaning that they needed to read the chapters we leave them to read, pray, and go to church and stop giving us lame excuses for not doing this things. So it went pretty well, and since then we've been calling them every single night reminding them to do their homework, and to go to church on sunday. Well sunday came and Irma and one of her daughters actually showed up! A half hour late but they came none-the-less. It was the first time she's come in like 7 years. I was surprised.
I think that's about all of the interesting things that happened this week. On saturday we had a soccer game with our ward and the other spanish ward that shares our chapel. not too many people came, even though we announced it a month ago and have announced every sunday since. But we had a good 20 or so people come and we played for most of saturday evening. It was great to take a break from the monotony of driving around and finding people not home or knocking doors. Just a couple of hours of playing soccer in the park. It was great. The other elders had some investigators come too and they got to know some people and see that the mormons aren't as boring as they had always thought.
Well that's about everything. The pictures are the following: 1) The Granados family and Rubiel, they left to Mexico, they were originally going to leave in June but something happened, we're not sure what and we didn't really want to know the details but for whatever reason someone threatened to kill them all, and I guess it was serious enough that they decided to leave a month early. Hno. Granados is not in the picture, he left to Colorado but he and his wife were sealed in the Temple just a few weeks ago. The mom and the kids; Irais, Ana, and Eric. Left for Veracruz and the Hno. is going to go down there and join them in a couple months. Rubiel just lives there with them, so we got a picture with them the night before they left.
The rest of the pictures are of with Hna. Silva making tamales. She was making Tamales one night and I asked if she could show me how to make one. So I made one. It's really not that hard, I don't know why they always make such a big fuss about making tamales, my companion and I concluded that they fuss about how time comsuming it is because every time they make tamales they make like 50 million of them.
Yup, so that's all for today. I hope you all have great week.
-- Elder Rice
Chabacano
May 2, 2011
Hello family.
Once again nothing to noteworthy has happened this week. It's the same old stuff, our newest important inestigators Rosa and Angelica, aren't doing so great. It's great whenever we have a lesson with them but they couldn't make it to church this week because Rosa's husband wouldn't let them go. Whoever this dude is, he's becoming a huge problem. He refuses to meet with us, and there's really not much we can do about it.
What else did we do this week? Oh yeah... So this Wednesday we're to have a 'Church Tour' training with our ward leaders. A few months ago a new 'tactic' was introduced to the mission, a thing called 'church tours'. What they are basically, is you have the investigator come to the church and show them around a bit and then have a short lesson in the room where the baptismal font is, after showing them the font. The whole idea is not to show them the church, but rather to teach someone in a dedicated building (they will be able to feel the spirit better) with no distractions like TVs and other noisy things that people keep in their homes. According to the handout we got these church tours were originally started by the Washington Tacoma Mission. Once they got a formula figured out and applied it their baptisms doubled in one year, and then doubled again the next year. They found that 1 out of every 10 people who went on a church tour got baptized and 1 out of every 3 got baptized if there was a member present in the tour and lesson.
Naturally when our mission found out about it they were eager to adopt it, President Hansen is a business man and figures like that would say something to him. Now the thing about these tours is that they have a very rigid order, it's a specific formula that, as our leaders are always reminding us, must be followed to the letter. Basically it's this: You start in the foyer, have an opening prayer, briefly talk about our basic doctrines (faith, repentance, baptism, gift of the holy ghost etc.), go into the chapel show them the sacrament table talk briefly about the doctrine of the sacrament, show them the podium and explain that we don't have a paid ministry, and have them choose where'd they like to sit on Sunday. Then you go into the relief society room where the baptisimal font should be, and you open it up and show them, and you show them a the picture of John baptizing Jesus on the wall and then talk about baptism. Then you sit down in there are have a brief lesson on the Restoration of how all of this came to be and you challenge them to baptism.
Sounds all well and good but there are few problems, mostly because our chapel is built rather retardedly. For example we have the scariest looking baptisimal font ever, it looks like a cage to put animals in, the font is not in the relief society room, it has it's own room. And another element of the tour is, as your walking along in the hallways is to point at all the pictures of Christ and drive the point home that we are a Christ-centered church. Well we don't have a single picture of christ from the foyer to the font. Just pictures of pioneers burying other pioneers, Lehi's boat, and Mormon compliling the plates.... yeah.... And we don't have a picture of Jesus' baptism so we (or rather the other companionship) went and found a small card stock one and pretty much nailed it to the wall next to the font. It looks so tacky but most hispanics don't seem to have a tacky filter. Also the tour insists that you use Mattew 3 to teach the doctrine of baptism and Jesus' baptism.
So this week we went and translated the handout that goes through the whole thing into spanish and hopefully when we have our training this wednesday with the ward leaders we can get them on the same page with us.
So yup. That's pretty much all that's going on. This week will be weird, on Thursday I hit 21 months on the mission and on Friday I hit 21 years of mortality. Kind of weird. Well I hope you all have a good week and enjoy the cold because we are dying in the heat down here....
I almost forgot, we haven't heard on the times when we will call home this sunday but it will likely be in the evening 6-7-8ish. Happy mother's day! I love you mom.
-- Elder Rice
Hello family.
Once again nothing to noteworthy has happened this week. It's the same old stuff, our newest important inestigators Rosa and Angelica, aren't doing so great. It's great whenever we have a lesson with them but they couldn't make it to church this week because Rosa's husband wouldn't let them go. Whoever this dude is, he's becoming a huge problem. He refuses to meet with us, and there's really not much we can do about it.
What else did we do this week? Oh yeah... So this Wednesday we're to have a 'Church Tour' training with our ward leaders. A few months ago a new 'tactic' was introduced to the mission, a thing called 'church tours'. What they are basically, is you have the investigator come to the church and show them around a bit and then have a short lesson in the room where the baptismal font is, after showing them the font. The whole idea is not to show them the church, but rather to teach someone in a dedicated building (they will be able to feel the spirit better) with no distractions like TVs and other noisy things that people keep in their homes. According to the handout we got these church tours were originally started by the Washington Tacoma Mission. Once they got a formula figured out and applied it their baptisms doubled in one year, and then doubled again the next year. They found that 1 out of every 10 people who went on a church tour got baptized and 1 out of every 3 got baptized if there was a member present in the tour and lesson.
Naturally when our mission found out about it they were eager to adopt it, President Hansen is a business man and figures like that would say something to him. Now the thing about these tours is that they have a very rigid order, it's a specific formula that, as our leaders are always reminding us, must be followed to the letter. Basically it's this: You start in the foyer, have an opening prayer, briefly talk about our basic doctrines (faith, repentance, baptism, gift of the holy ghost etc.), go into the chapel show them the sacrament table talk briefly about the doctrine of the sacrament, show them the podium and explain that we don't have a paid ministry, and have them choose where'd they like to sit on Sunday. Then you go into the relief society room where the baptisimal font should be, and you open it up and show them, and you show them a the picture of John baptizing Jesus on the wall and then talk about baptism. Then you sit down in there are have a brief lesson on the Restoration of how all of this came to be and you challenge them to baptism.
Sounds all well and good but there are few problems, mostly because our chapel is built rather retardedly. For example we have the scariest looking baptisimal font ever, it looks like a cage to put animals in, the font is not in the relief society room, it has it's own room. And another element of the tour is, as your walking along in the hallways is to point at all the pictures of Christ and drive the point home that we are a Christ-centered church. Well we don't have a single picture of christ from the foyer to the font. Just pictures of pioneers burying other pioneers, Lehi's boat, and Mormon compliling the plates.... yeah.... And we don't have a picture of Jesus' baptism so we (or rather the other companionship) went and found a small card stock one and pretty much nailed it to the wall next to the font. It looks so tacky but most hispanics don't seem to have a tacky filter. Also the tour insists that you use Mattew 3 to teach the doctrine of baptism and Jesus' baptism.
So this week we went and translated the handout that goes through the whole thing into spanish and hopefully when we have our training this wednesday with the ward leaders we can get them on the same page with us.
So yup. That's pretty much all that's going on. This week will be weird, on Thursday I hit 21 months on the mission and on Friday I hit 21 years of mortality. Kind of weird. Well I hope you all have a good week and enjoy the cold because we are dying in the heat down here....
I almost forgot, we haven't heard on the times when we will call home this sunday but it will likely be in the evening 6-7-8ish. Happy mother's day! I love you mom.
-- Elder Rice
Chamuco en la Regadera
April 25, 2011
Hello family.
Again another mostly boring week.
On the bright side after long weeks of fruitlessness we found two new investigators and they accepted the challenge of baptism. They're some family of a less active family in the ward. They actually live right next door to them as well. It's another Mother-Daughter combo, Minerva and Dianna being the last one. They're named Rosa and Angelica, both seem much more intelligent than our last mother-daughter combo, they also have they're own car too. Prospects are looking bright.
The downside is that they are just as Minerva and Dianna, we call them every night to remind to read two pages of the pamphlet we left with them and they still haven't done it. And perhaps the biggest "threat" would be that Rosa has a husband, who doesn't want anything to do with us whatsoever. We can't even teach them in their own house, we have to teach them next door in their mothers house which is a crazy nigthmare as it is a tiny house yet there are always at least a couple dozen people going in and out. We call it the house of short-shorts because in addition to the army of small children running in and out of the door there are like 5 or 6 teenage girls going in and out of there always wearing short shorts and high heeled sandals that hispanic women are so fond of -we've never seen them wear anything else ever, even the little girls who are 5-6-7 years old wear short shorts and high heeled sandals, we didn't even know they made that stuff child size! It's difficult to teach in such a place with people coming in and out and yelling at each other, doors slamming, the old grandma yelling at the children and chihuahua puppies everywhere. It's just a huge mess, a lot of clutter and garbage all crammed into a tiny house. And they live a couple streets away from the train tracks so periodically some enormous train will just roar through and lay on the horn like nothing else. I always have a headache after having a lesson over there.
Other than that things are the same. The ward is actually doing a lot better with, well, running itself, and keeping up with our recent converts. Oh this is pretty funny, our last recent convert, Tomas, we've noticed they keep pulling him out of elder's quorum every week, and we've been wondering what they've been doing with him. He has no idea, we asked him one day and he said it was just another class the same as elder's quorum, one day we asked the 1st counselor while at his house for dinner and he said that they've been taking him to be with the High Priests.... We didn't even bother to ask why, who knows what motives the ward leadership has. We thought about it a long time and honestly couldn't come up with a rational explanation as to why the high priests group would be better for Tomas, he's not that old or anything. Well we decided it's not worth worrying about. We only need to worry about if he actually comes to church or not, what they do with him there is up to them.
So yup... That's about all interesting that has happened lately. I hope you all have a good day.
-- Elder Rice
Hello family.
Again another mostly boring week.
On the bright side after long weeks of fruitlessness we found two new investigators and they accepted the challenge of baptism. They're some family of a less active family in the ward. They actually live right next door to them as well. It's another Mother-Daughter combo, Minerva and Dianna being the last one. They're named Rosa and Angelica, both seem much more intelligent than our last mother-daughter combo, they also have they're own car too. Prospects are looking bright.
The downside is that they are just as Minerva and Dianna, we call them every night to remind to read two pages of the pamphlet we left with them and they still haven't done it. And perhaps the biggest "threat" would be that Rosa has a husband, who doesn't want anything to do with us whatsoever. We can't even teach them in their own house, we have to teach them next door in their mothers house which is a crazy nigthmare as it is a tiny house yet there are always at least a couple dozen people going in and out. We call it the house of short-shorts because in addition to the army of small children running in and out of the door there are like 5 or 6 teenage girls going in and out of there always wearing short shorts and high heeled sandals that hispanic women are so fond of -we've never seen them wear anything else ever, even the little girls who are 5-6-7 years old wear short shorts and high heeled sandals, we didn't even know they made that stuff child size! It's difficult to teach in such a place with people coming in and out and yelling at each other, doors slamming, the old grandma yelling at the children and chihuahua puppies everywhere. It's just a huge mess, a lot of clutter and garbage all crammed into a tiny house. And they live a couple streets away from the train tracks so periodically some enormous train will just roar through and lay on the horn like nothing else. I always have a headache after having a lesson over there.
Other than that things are the same. The ward is actually doing a lot better with, well, running itself, and keeping up with our recent converts. Oh this is pretty funny, our last recent convert, Tomas, we've noticed they keep pulling him out of elder's quorum every week, and we've been wondering what they've been doing with him. He has no idea, we asked him one day and he said it was just another class the same as elder's quorum, one day we asked the 1st counselor while at his house for dinner and he said that they've been taking him to be with the High Priests.... We didn't even bother to ask why, who knows what motives the ward leadership has. We thought about it a long time and honestly couldn't come up with a rational explanation as to why the high priests group would be better for Tomas, he's not that old or anything. Well we decided it's not worth worrying about. We only need to worry about if he actually comes to church or not, what they do with him there is up to them.
So yup... That's about all interesting that has happened lately. I hope you all have a good day.
-- Elder Rice
Churasco
April 18, 2011
Hello family,
Well, again not too much to report this week. It was slightly better than last week, we've found some more people now and we have more people to teach. We'll see where they go. And....... yeah...
So my tiredness is still prevailing, on exchanges with Elder Armstrong we were visiting a member, it was his birthday that day and he's old and blind, his family was outside preparing a surprise party for him so they wanted us to go inside and stall him. We were supposed to stall him until they got the fajitas cooked on the grill. So we sat there and talked with him, shared a scripture, and I was really tired and went out instantly. Which was perfectly fine since this Hno. is blind and didn't notice. Armstrong informs me that I was asleep for 20 minutes, and he was getting pretty sleepy too so he was about to wake me up and then we would switch off and he would sleep while I carried on the conversation with this Hno. Actually it was funny that I fell asleep first because Elder Armstrong is probably the most torpid person ever, he always falls asleep. He even fell asleep standing up once. Well one of the kids got home from school and that woke me up, and then we sat there for another half hour or so talking to him, or rather listening to him talk. Finally they motioned to us that the party outside was ready and his daughter led him out and it was a surprise and we stuffed ourselves with fajita. It's been kind of weird actually, this months seems to be fajita month because for the past couple weeks everyone has been feeding us fajita. Which is great, of course that's not good for our health.
Since I got to this area in December I've gained about 10 lbs. We have 6-7 fixed dinner appointments every week, we get almost no exercise and the consequences are starting to show. Since gyms are banned, and our apartment is tiny, and our neighbourhood is not one you'd want to go out running in, early in the morning for fear of getting mugged, we've started going to the chapel every morning and running around in the gym. It's stupid but better than nothing.
So today is day 5 without hot water. It hasn't been fun at all, showering with cold water. We're starting to feel like real missionaries, missionaries that serve in 3rd world countries and live with things like this. Also the dryer hasn't been working for the last month so every P-Day we just hang dry everything in our apartment. Now the members we live are unaffected by the water, they have a separate water heater for their house, and the non-functioning dryer doesn't phase them, they said they'll get a new one eventually. Today the people are supposed to come and fix the water heater or whatever is wrong with it. We think it might just be the lack of gas for the water heater since the stove doesn't work either, there is no gas running to anything. So yeah... We're almost the point of real missionaries now.
One more amusing anecdote them I'm done. So on that same exchange with Armstrong we were in a McDonald's working on the weekly progress report for our meeting that night with the ward mission leader. He's supposed to take the same progress report to PEC the next day on Sunday, but he rarely goes to PEC, he never wakes up in time, he barely makes it to church on time. So we were in McDonald's sitting there and filling this thing out, when this black guy, who was behaving rather oddly, as though he was trying really hard to not be noticeable comes up to us holding two spray bottles, they were name brand cleaning chemicals for car interiors. Well he comes up and starts talking to Armstrong, I didn't hear a single word he said and if I could have heard what he said it's doubtful that I would have understood any of it. It looked like at first that he was asking us to move so he could clean the tables, but he was dressed in civilian clothes, he didn't look like he worked there, then he puts the bottles down on the table right in front Armstrong and sits down across from him, still talking the whole time, and miraculously produces 5 or 6 more of these same bottles from within his pants! I was impressed, he was able to smuggle in like 6 of these thing in his pants without looking like he had them! Then again, most black dudes around here wear such baggy clothes that they could hide all sorts of things in there. Well it was apparent that he was trying to sell us these chemicals (I don't think you can do that in another business establishment). Armstrong, being the mellow soul that he is just kind of sat there looking like he was about to say something. It was about then that the genes I inherited from Dad kicked in and I told the guy rather brusquely that we were not interested and to go away. I would have done it sooner but the revealing of all the spray bottles that he smuggled into there in his pants was impressive enough that I was kind of speechless.
Yeah, so that's pretty much all that's happened this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week. Peace out
-- Elder Rice
Hello family,
Well, again not too much to report this week. It was slightly better than last week, we've found some more people now and we have more people to teach. We'll see where they go. And....... yeah...
So my tiredness is still prevailing, on exchanges with Elder Armstrong we were visiting a member, it was his birthday that day and he's old and blind, his family was outside preparing a surprise party for him so they wanted us to go inside and stall him. We were supposed to stall him until they got the fajitas cooked on the grill. So we sat there and talked with him, shared a scripture, and I was really tired and went out instantly. Which was perfectly fine since this Hno. is blind and didn't notice. Armstrong informs me that I was asleep for 20 minutes, and he was getting pretty sleepy too so he was about to wake me up and then we would switch off and he would sleep while I carried on the conversation with this Hno. Actually it was funny that I fell asleep first because Elder Armstrong is probably the most torpid person ever, he always falls asleep. He even fell asleep standing up once. Well one of the kids got home from school and that woke me up, and then we sat there for another half hour or so talking to him, or rather listening to him talk. Finally they motioned to us that the party outside was ready and his daughter led him out and it was a surprise and we stuffed ourselves with fajita. It's been kind of weird actually, this months seems to be fajita month because for the past couple weeks everyone has been feeding us fajita. Which is great, of course that's not good for our health.
Since I got to this area in December I've gained about 10 lbs. We have 6-7 fixed dinner appointments every week, we get almost no exercise and the consequences are starting to show. Since gyms are banned, and our apartment is tiny, and our neighbourhood is not one you'd want to go out running in, early in the morning for fear of getting mugged, we've started going to the chapel every morning and running around in the gym. It's stupid but better than nothing.
So today is day 5 without hot water. It hasn't been fun at all, showering with cold water. We're starting to feel like real missionaries, missionaries that serve in 3rd world countries and live with things like this. Also the dryer hasn't been working for the last month so every P-Day we just hang dry everything in our apartment. Now the members we live are unaffected by the water, they have a separate water heater for their house, and the non-functioning dryer doesn't phase them, they said they'll get a new one eventually. Today the people are supposed to come and fix the water heater or whatever is wrong with it. We think it might just be the lack of gas for the water heater since the stove doesn't work either, there is no gas running to anything. So yeah... We're almost the point of real missionaries now.
One more amusing anecdote them I'm done. So on that same exchange with Armstrong we were in a McDonald's working on the weekly progress report for our meeting that night with the ward mission leader. He's supposed to take the same progress report to PEC the next day on Sunday, but he rarely goes to PEC, he never wakes up in time, he barely makes it to church on time. So we were in McDonald's sitting there and filling this thing out, when this black guy, who was behaving rather oddly, as though he was trying really hard to not be noticeable comes up to us holding two spray bottles, they were name brand cleaning chemicals for car interiors. Well he comes up and starts talking to Armstrong, I didn't hear a single word he said and if I could have heard what he said it's doubtful that I would have understood any of it. It looked like at first that he was asking us to move so he could clean the tables, but he was dressed in civilian clothes, he didn't look like he worked there, then he puts the bottles down on the table right in front Armstrong and sits down across from him, still talking the whole time, and miraculously produces 5 or 6 more of these same bottles from within his pants! I was impressed, he was able to smuggle in like 6 of these thing in his pants without looking like he had them! Then again, most black dudes around here wear such baggy clothes that they could hide all sorts of things in there. Well it was apparent that he was trying to sell us these chemicals (I don't think you can do that in another business establishment). Armstrong, being the mellow soul that he is just kind of sat there looking like he was about to say something. It was about then that the genes I inherited from Dad kicked in and I told the guy rather brusquely that we were not interested and to go away. I would have done it sooner but the revealing of all the spray bottles that he smuggled into there in his pants was impressive enough that I was kind of speechless.
Yeah, so that's pretty much all that's happened this week. I love you all and hope you have a good week. Peace out
-- Elder Rice
Agriio
April 11, 2011
Hello family.
Well not much to say this week. It's just been the same old stuff, actually this week I've been so tired, I haven't been this tired since I first got to my last bike area. I've been falling asleep during studies, at church (I've almost mastered how to sleep sitting up), at meetings, in the car (not while driving), and even during lessons with people. They mostly just think it's funny.
Other than that not much to report, we're mostly just making sure all of the recent converts keep coming to church. And the other day we fixed someones computer. It occurred to us that it's amazing how far a high-school education will get you. Most of the people we associate with dropped out of school as a child so they could help their families work, then they move here to the US and struggle in school, they usually make it to high school but then their interest in such things wanes dramatically and they drop of out of high school and work the rest of their lives as mechanics, construction workers, cooks, housewives, janitors, and yard workers. They don't read or write very well and many of them simple can't (not at all helpful to us when we try to leave them with homework of reading the archaic scriptures). Reading is just something not very fun for them. So we translate their mail, tell them about how to read a bus map, instruct them in traffic laws, help them pay taxes, help their kids with their homework, use dictionaries, fix their computers, show them how to use the Internet, end e-mails, and just all sorts of stuff like that. We've been doing so much of that for the last couple weeks and they think we're so smart for knowing all of this and all we did was just graduate high school.
Yeah, so that's pretty much all we've been doing. No pictures this week, nothing really amazing has happened. I love you all.
-- Elder Rice
Hello family.
Well not much to say this week. It's just been the same old stuff, actually this week I've been so tired, I haven't been this tired since I first got to my last bike area. I've been falling asleep during studies, at church (I've almost mastered how to sleep sitting up), at meetings, in the car (not while driving), and even during lessons with people. They mostly just think it's funny.
Other than that not much to report, we're mostly just making sure all of the recent converts keep coming to church. And the other day we fixed someones computer. It occurred to us that it's amazing how far a high-school education will get you. Most of the people we associate with dropped out of school as a child so they could help their families work, then they move here to the US and struggle in school, they usually make it to high school but then their interest in such things wanes dramatically and they drop of out of high school and work the rest of their lives as mechanics, construction workers, cooks, housewives, janitors, and yard workers. They don't read or write very well and many of them simple can't (not at all helpful to us when we try to leave them with homework of reading the archaic scriptures). Reading is just something not very fun for them. So we translate their mail, tell them about how to read a bus map, instruct them in traffic laws, help them pay taxes, help their kids with their homework, use dictionaries, fix their computers, show them how to use the Internet, end e-mails, and just all sorts of stuff like that. We've been doing so much of that for the last couple weeks and they think we're so smart for knowing all of this and all we did was just graduate high school.
Yeah, so that's pretty much all we've been doing. No pictures this week, nothing really amazing has happened. I love you all.
-- Elder Rice
Chipocludo
April 4, 2011
Hello Family.
This week was rather slow, really boring, Conference was a good end to it, though we mostly just poked and jeered at each other, mostly to the missionaries who have little time left, whenever one of the many talks about 'GO GET MARRIED NOW' came up, which seemed to be like almost every other talk. Luckily I wasn't the oldest missionary in my district, there are two who go home like a month before me so they received the brunt of our jeers.
Actually the week wasn't too bad because I spent most of it on exchanges. The one thing I like about being in leadership is that you can go on exchanges with other elders pretty much whenever you want. It's pretty fun, it's kind of like a vacation, you get a vacation from your area and your companion, and when in another area you have 0 responsibility to call the shots. It's great. Far too many times on my mission on exchanges when I've stayed in my own area it'll be a day where we will have absolutely nothing to do and you have to say, 'well, I guess we'll go tract or something'. When you're in someone else's area you just to sit back and have them take you around everywhere. So that was fun, most of this week was spent on exchanges.
Other than that....... Not too much has happened. We have only one real investigator at the moment, named Carlos. He's a Catrracho in his 60's or 70's now. The members that live next store to him drag him to church every week and we get to teach him about twice a week, but he won't even touch the Book of Mormon, or eat anything that has the meat of an animal with cloven hooves. He just clutches his little Bible to his chest every time we try to teach him and will refuse to read anything that's not in it. (He hasn't ever read it). We suspect that he's been in with the Adventists or J-Dubs or some other such sect that clings tenaciously to the bible and has dietary commandments that make our Word of Wisdom look weaksauce. The rest of our time is spent doing retention work, guess how many of our recent converts made it to conference? TWO! That's quite good, I was definately expecting worse, but those two, the most recent ones, Rubiel and Tomas, only made it to the sunday morning session. Actually that's pretty much the only one that the members made it to. Often I realized that I took for granted the fact that in Utah you can watch it on TV without needing cable and listen to it on the radio. It's not the same out here, if you have you cable your fine but if you want it in another language that's a whole different story. I don't remember what we did last year to get it to work at some member's house that had cable but basically it's easier for the hispanic members to simply go to the chapel.
Speaking of which... Guess who showed up on saturday morning to set everything up? No one.... We had been told a week before that the satellite box was now functioning. Of course we were the first people to show up and we got it all to function this time, except that the speakers were burned out in the chapel or something was wrong because the sound quality was horrible and you could barely understand anything through the static. The spanish broadcast was to be played in the chapel and english in the Relief Society room. The sound was fine in the other rooms for the english and on the TVs but not in the chapel. We could not figure it out but we came up with an alternate solution, we brought a TV into the chapel, had it going on there as well as the projector screen in the chapel, killed the chapel's audio and turned up the volume all the way on the TV, and it worked well enough.
So that was this week, the transfer also ended, Conference was a good way to end the transfer. Transfer calls came and nothing has changed really, I'm still going to be here with Elder Green. But there were very few changes made. Everyone speculates that President Hansen is trying to freeze everything as best he can, change as little as possible to make it easier for the new mission President who comes in June. I also realized that it will be pretty lame to have my final departing interview with the new president, someone I don't even know, I'd really prefer to have that with President Hansen, he's been a great mission president, I'm going to miss him a lot.
Okay I'm done. I hope you all have a good week, peace out.
--Elder Arroz
Wapiti
March 28, 2011
Hello Family, how's it going?
Not much to say this week, in fact this email will be short. I received an e-mail saying that my registration date is April 5th, which is like next week. So I'll be spending most of my time looking at classes and junk. I really have no idea what to take.
Couple of quick highlights of this week. We had another baptism. This is pretty crazy, like 3 weeks in a row of baptisms. Totally weird. Tomas was baptized, the funny thing is that we've only taught him, like 3 or 4 times. His work schedule is such that he is only available on sundays so we taught him once a week for a few weeks and then he was baptized. Something like that never happens, it was rather amazing. He's the one next to me in the picture, the two members are Hno. and Hna. Galeano, the members who are friends of Tomas and have been bringing him to church.
The only other really interesting thing that happened was that we ate octopus one day. This member family just plopped down these huge plates of octopus tentacles in front of us. They were prepared simply by boiling them with a bit of salt. But served cold. Well as always we can't be rude so we choked them down. It actually didn't taste that bad, but the texture just wasn't fun, kind of rubbery but yet mushy at the same time, and when you bit into it the suction cups on the tentacles would pop off and bounce around everywhere in your mouth. Luckily we had condiments and I was able to eat all of it after drowning it in lemon juice and burying it with lettuce, tomato, onion, and salt. Blech...
So that's all, the other pictures are of some more sweet graffiti. Oh and I will probably send an e-mail off either today or next monday with the classes I want to be signed up for. I'm thinking about maybe having Kent do it, he registers a day before me and there is this sneaky thing you can do where you have someone who registers before you sign himself up for your classes to hold a seat and then drop it right before you register. We'll see I send that e-mail soon. Well I hope you all have a good day. Peace
-- Elder Arroz
Gandalla
March 21, 2011
Hello fam.
This week was pretty good. Slower than usual but good. We had a baptism on the weekend. Rubiel Hernandez Cruz, he's really cool. We've taught him for only two weeks, we set a baptisimal date on the 2nd visit. He's really smart, a deep thinker, and always does the homework we leave him. Would that I could say the same about the member family he lives with. But the coolest thing is that we got Daniel (the man who was baptized last week) to baptize him! He got the Aaronic priesthood last sunday and we asked him to baptize Rubiel. Poor Daniel was terrified, but we spent a whole night going over how to perform the ordinance and everything. He was far more nervous about the baptism than Rubiel was. But the baptism went fine. Rubiel is happy and content and very interested in the way the church works.
Now for an update on Minerva and Dianna. Turns out that the supposed hospital bill of $4000+ wasn't really a bill. It was just showing them what they would to have paid if it had not been covered by their insurance or something or another. I dunno, but whatever the case it's not a problem anymore. Now for a particularly funny but horrible story with the two of them.
We went by last night to see them, they didn't go to church yesterday. So we came in and Dianna proudly showed us her new piercing in the top of her ear. We were like "Cool.... but.... uhh.... Not really". We talked a bit how extra piercings look nasty such as ones in the nose and lips, and she was like, why? We then explained that there's this sort of standard that we have in the church and modern prophets counsel us that we ought not to have any piercings anywhere except for women and just on the ear lobe. We mentioned the same about tatoos and she was kind of bummed because she had always wanted to get a tatoo on her backside (no pun intended). And then Elder Green whips out 'For the Strength of Youth' and decides to have a lesson on the section about 'Modest Dress And Grooming'. We read through it and oh my gosh, That is the last time I teach out of 'For the Strength of Youth'. It was really funny and really akward because Dianna usually does not dress very modestly at all and she wasn't too happy while reading through that. But Minerva was loving it, she said "Good, we can throw out all of your short-shorts and mini-skirts." Well Dianna wasn't very happy and said that such a change would 'take time' because she 'didn't want to be a hypocrite' and dress like a person she was not. Now I had been frantically pulling the eject lever during the whole thing but Elder Green was really fized on talking about this with her. Her imodesty had been bothering him lately.
Now this is one of the funny things about Elder Green. The other day we were at a less active family's house and we were talking with their kids and one of them had seen they were about to turn 16 and Elder Green says "So are you excited that you will be able start dating?" He got a bunch of blank looks from the whole family and I leaned over and whispered "Elder Green.... We're not in Utah." He was kind of offended and retorted that they were members. I told him that it doesn't matter, we're not in Utah, such standards simply don't exist here. It's true really, the members of the Church in Texas are very different from those in Utah, especially the members in the Hispanic wards, it's an entirely different world. So anyway Elder Green has started this sort of personal crusade to educate everyone of the standards held among members of the Church in Utah.
Now I'm all for everyone having standards... But that is definitely NOT the job of the missionaries. It was horribly akward but also hilarious, it's a good thing Minerva and Dianna know us so well or it could have been very, very, very, very akward. So basically that's a subject better suited to be taught by the YW's leaders and NOT by missionaries. I think mentioning the standards would have been fine, but teaching them and then commiting her to live them? Not so much.
So yeah... I think that's pretty much all that's interesting that happened this week. There's this one family that loves to feed us and takes requests and I've been asking them to feed us lots of authentic mexican food, the weird stuff. So last monday we had liver, apparently they love liver in mexico. So we had this liver cooked in grease and onions with beans, rice, lettuce, and tortillas to make tacos. I've never had liver before but it was pretty good. It tasted just like meat only it seemed like it had been vacuum packed into a liver shape. I liked it, Elder Green was choking it down. He was definately not a fan. It's pretty funny because he's not a fan of mexican food. He hates beans, spicy foods, and greasey or oily foods. So the fact that he's on a spanish speaking mission is hilarous. So this week we will be having tacos de lengua. (cow tongue) I've never eaten tongue before so I'm excited. Well I hope you all have a good week and I'll get you those pictures mom.
-- Elder Rice
Los que Tranzan no Vanzan
March 14, 2011
'Ello fam.
Well this week was really crazy. We're just so busy all the time driving around everywhere, visiting many people, and getting fed way too much. We've eaten so many beans, chicken, and tortillas this week that I'm sick of it all and feel as though I just want to eat salad for the rest of my life. Well as you can see in the picture we had a baptism. Daniel was finally baptized, we've been teaching him for a long time. It was amazing to see the change in him. When we first started teaching him he was a nervous wreck in the middle of an ugly divorce. After a month of teaching him he wanted to be baptized but he had some issues to take care of so we had to push his baptism back two months.
The two kids are a family that we took over after the other area was closed down. The mom, the blond lady, Rocio, is a less active member with two kids, Alexa and Kevin, 10 and 8. A long time ago the sister missionaries started visiting her after she had divorced from her husband and they got her to stop smoking and get rid of other bad habits. Alexa would have been baptized a long time ago but the husband didn't want the kids baptized into the mormon the church he wanted them to be catholic. Even though they've been divorced for a while now they still share the kids but I believe Rocio still has the legal guardianship. But she is still intimidated by her ex and so for a long time now the kids haven't been baptized. Well the elders we replaced got close and had their baptisimal forms filled out and their interviews done but they couldn't get Rocio to stand up to her ex. Well we came along and taught her about how we ought to fear God more than other people and that we need to do the right thing in the face of pressure. Well it worked and we set a baptisimal date and they were baptized. Now here's the cool thing, that man in the black is the ex husband. When Rocio finally stood up to him and told that they were getting baptized and that he had no say in the matter I guess he took it well and wanted to come. So he came and they were pretty happy to see each other. Weird...
The baptisimal service itself was very nearly a disaster. It was supposed to start at 7:00. Daniel was the only one who showed up on time, we had asked him and the family to be baptized to show up at 6:30 so we could get them all dressed up. Most everyone else started showing up at about 7:20ish. We know that MST (mormon standard time) is about 5-10 minutes behind regular time. But add MST to HST (Hispanic standard time) and thusly the service started at 7:40. Other problems were that the closet that contained all of the baptisimal clothing didn't have any clothes at all that would have fit a child. Everything was huge, apparently in the 3 wards that share this chapel nobody is ever baptized at 8 years old because there was not any clothes at all that were small enough for Alexa and Kevin. That was pretty stupid. And of the clothes they did have they had yellow stains and stuff all over them. It was frankly embarrassing as we were with them going through this closet looking for something that would fit them. Well we found the smallest clothes we could and rolled up the pant legs and we even used white ribbon to hold their pants up. Ridiculous. Oh and we realized that nobody from the bishopric was there. Our ward mission leader was supposed to have made all of the appropriate calls but nobody from the bishopric was there. When a baptism is performed you have to have the bishop or one of his counselors there to preside over the whole thing. Luckily, one of them was in the building. Every saturday night the stake has some sort of marriage classes in the building, he and his wife were in there so we yanked him out of there so he could preside over the whole thing. So we finally started and everything was going well until we got the portion were the ordinances were to be performed. Kevin was baptized, but Rocio wanted him to see his sister's baptism so we had to wait until he got dried off and changed. Then Alexa was baptized, then came Daniel's turn.
Well the other elders have been teaching Daniel's wife for a while now and they haven't seen each other in like 6 months, but they told her about his baptism and she was thinking about coming. We tought it would be really cool for her to assist his baptism and have both of them feel the spririt at the same time. Daniel didn't know she was coming. Well she didn't show up and Danile and Elder White were down there in the water when the other elders said to stop and wait till she got there, they had called her and she said she was on the way. She took 20 mintues to get there (she lived 2 mintues away). And there was a long akward moment as both of them just stood there in the water with everyone else in the room just watching. We closed the accordian wall and had some people share their testimonies, then there was a false alarm as someone thought she had just come in so they opened it back up. And it would have been even more akward to close it again so they left it open for another 10 mintues and everything was just akward.
Well she finally showed up and Daniel was baptized. Now I'm down to about 4 mintues so I'll have to go really fast here but. It was all good and we blew everyone away with a special musical number done by all of the missionaries, we had everyone in tears, even Rocio's ex, it was great. I'd like to describe what it was but I don't have time for that and I'm typing really fast so there's probably a lot of mispellings and things but oh well I'm oput of of time we're having a baptism this week as well sot hings are thgoing tgood. Peace out and have a good week I lvoe you all bye.
-- Elder Rice
Mitzmutzatzacuiltitimanizque
Hello family.
Before I forget I'll let mom know that my release date is August 10. Sorry it took so long but I read the letters and by the time Monday comes around I've already forgotten anything that you asked me to do. But yeah, that's my release date. Oh and Minerva and Dianna are from Mexico, like everyone else around here. They're from one of the more northerly provinces of Taumolipas. Speaking of them I appreciate how you want to help them out Mom. Minerva, unfortunately does not speak english, she's also pretty blind, she has to hold things right in front of her nose to see anything. I forget what it was that happened to her or that she has but it has something to do with cataracts, I think that's what they're called. Somehow someway her eyes got messed up and she can't see. She is %100 dependent on Dianna just to get around or do much of anything. And being undocumented citizens living on $70 a week they're opportunities for medical help are rather limited. In fact just recently they got the bill from the Mental Hospital where Dianna was and it came out to be a little bit over $4000. They were rather beside themselves what to do about that, their nearby family is all chipping in a little bit but all of them are generally unhappy about that. The whole episode is rather embarrassing, especially seeing as though it was the Bishop who checked her in there and as far as we know, is leaving them to hang on with this huge bill. So needless to say they haven't been all that happy lately. But at least the Adventists haven't come back since we drove them off last saturday. It's an improvement, instead of defending them from a whole other church and our own ward, now we only have to defend them from our own ward.
Despite all of that this week was pretty good. Actually it was great. The area we've taken over contains many wonderful opportunities. This week we set baptisimal dates with three new investigators on the very first time we taught them, which were in members' home with the members themselves present. Which is perfect, that's really the ideal lesson, teaching an investigator in a member's home with the member actively participating in the lesson. The part is both of these guys have been coming to church to weeks now, one of them actually lives with a member family and recent convert, and the elders who were in this area before never knew about them at all. When we talked to them we told them about all of this and they were just like "Hhuh... That's cool." They didn't have any idea that a couple of member families had been bringing investigators to church for a few weeks now.
We also had a "specialized training" meeting this week with the Mission President and his wife. One of the many subjects was 'working with the ward council'. Which was the perfect opportunity see if we could get some of the higher powers in the local church authorities to fix some things about our ward leadership. One of the ZL's in the meeting asked me to sort of describe some of the difficulties we have with working with the our ward council. I then explained about how our ward council insists that investigators should get themselves to church and that members were not to give any rides, I also described about how we generally avoid working with the ward council and we ask individual members to give rides to investigators and ask them not to mention it to the Bishop. At that point President interrupted and said that has to stop. We can't make the members choose between us and the ward leaders that creates unhealthy divisions in the ward and makes us enemies of the Bishop (Too late!). He said that the system we have in the church must be upholded and even if it isn't running how it should be we should respect our leaders. He then said that our leaders definitely don't seem to be doing what they should be doing and that he would have a word with the Stake Presidency (success!) and would see what he could do. He said that we must do all we can to help the bishop and other leaders realize what their responsibilities are. He then made an interesting comment that we (the missionaries) have to come at them or pressure them from the bottom, that he and the stake leaders had to come down or pressure them from the top, and that others have to pressure them from the sides. We need to be doing all we can to get the ward leaders to do their job but at the same time we can't tell them how to do their job, we just have to 'teach correct principles and let men govern themselves'. He encouraged us to make visits to our ward leaders and go through a few things out of Preach My Gospel with them and do it in a non-offensive non-condescending way.
YEah... So that battle still goes on, though now we finally got the momentum of the stake leadership coming down on the bishop's head so hopefully we can expect to see things improve soon. So that's all I have to say today.
The pictures are of some graffiti and me and a part member family, Artemio, Maria, and Katrin. The girl, Katrin is a member, her parents aren't baptized because they're not married to each other and they can't get married to each other yet because they're not yet divorced from their spouses, both of which are in Mexico and they haven't seem them for like 10 years. It's been a frustrating nightmare trying to get ahold of layers, the Mexican consulate, and people who might know anything about how to get divorced from someone who lives in another country and don't know his or her whereabouts. They're way ready for baptism, they just need to get married. Also they're really, really, really simple people. They're so ignorant of so many things it's almost cute. Artemio grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere Mexico, never went to school, can barely read and works as a butcher. Maria grew up on the outskirts some little Indian village on the slopes of some Volcano somewhere in Mexico, likes to talk a lot, and teaches us all of these cool Aztec words and sayings. For both of them the world of lawyers, laws, parking tickets, licences, and other such trappings of the modern civilized world are completely alien to them. And they're trying to go through this horribly complicated legal situation. All we've been doing is telling them to go to the Mexican consulate (which lies out of the mission boundaries, so we can't go with them) and get some lawyer to divorce them. I'm so afraid that some lawyer will just take total advantage of them and rob them of all of their money and leave them no better off than they were before. It's scary just telling these two to go down into the downtown and go into the consulate and having them work it out themselves. So we ask around and we have the Ward Mission leader help them out a bit, but the ward in general is generally unhelpful (no surprise). They're so funny though, we stopped by one Friday night and all of three of them were just sitting in their little two room house doing a puzzle! A puzzle! Friday night, a small family together and doing a puzzle and enjoying each other's company?! Crazy! Who actually does that? It's hilarious! They're just so happy all the time! How do they do that? I really love them, they're one of my favorite families and I hope we can figure out how to get them married somehow.
Okay. Well that's all for today. Have a fun week, peace....
-- Elder Arroz
Que Fracaso
February 28, 2011
Hello Family.
This week has seen a few interesting things. As I mentioned last week our area is now twice as large and we cover a lot of ghetto now. It's super ghetto, I thought our area before was ghetto but no it's nothing compared to what we have now. It's really junky. To illustrate we had an appointment with an investigator that lived next door (literally like 5 feet) away from a less active family in the ward. Well the investigator wasn't there but the dad of the last active family was out ambling about in front of his porch. We had never met him before so we went to say high and he was quite intoxicated with something or another. Probably alcohol, the other elders had told us that he hasn't been to church in a while and is an alcoholic. Well that sure seemed to be the case. His eyes were completely yellow and bloodshot and he was talking really funny and holding a rather sharp looking paint scraper. Well he wanted us to come in and talk with him. He obviously out of his mind and I didn't think that would be a very good idea so I asked if we could stay outside, the weather was good and all. He kept trying to get us to come in but I wouldn't budge, Elder Green almost went in, he was kind of spooked about the whole thing, I don't think he's ever had to deal with someone completely plastered before. We convinced him that outside would be fine and we talked with him for a bit and he was just completely drunk and was almost crying telling us about how he never wanted to be baptized but the sister missionaries made him get baptized and he wanted to quit drinking and he was just generally crazy. Elder Green, as usual was just being stupid and trying to get him to read D&C 89. Yeah so he was crazy and we got out of there and left. But we did manage to get him to throw away all of his beer into the trash can.
A few days later on Friday night we had an appointment with this same family and we went over and the wife opened the door and said that now probably wasn't a good idea because her husband was drunk again and had said to her if the missionaries came by he would chase them off his property. Then she just started crying and was telling us all of this stuff about how she just couldn't take her husband drinking anymore and it was all really sad. The really sad thing is there isn't much we can do about it. We can only teach and encourage people to do the right thing. During her sobbing and sad stories I just took a minute to look around and it was Friday night, not the best time to be in the ghetto I guess. Down the street there were a bunch of teenagers with alcohol fighting and on the other side a house full of noises of revelry and crude language and then some car books it down the street at 40-50 mph driving backwards. The whole neighbourhood itself smelled like human waste and there was garbage strewn everywhere. So I just stand there while all of this is going on and I just say to myself. "What in the world is wrong with this place?" I have never felt father away from civilization that I did at that moment. Crazy!
Well the next most noteworthy event was on saturday. We had an appointment at 5 with Minvera and Dianna, our favorite drama prone recent converts. Well we get there and knock and door and Dianna opens up and seemed rather surprised, she jumps out of the door and then turns around and opens it up and she has that sort of embarrassed smile that she always has on her face when something very awkward is about to happen. (We knew that look quite well by now). So we walk in and Minerva is sitting on the couch with a bible open on her lap and on the other couch is two old women with their own bibles and some printed propaganda. Well it turned out that they were none other than the 7th Day Adventists. Well.... Hmm... How to best describe? Well they were nice at first but you could tell they were just ready to jump at as any moment. For a while they had been visiting Minverva and Dianna while we have been visiting them but we had never encountered each other at the same time. And both of us had been teaching them and telling why the other church was completely wrong. Thus came the conflict and the day of reckoning. Now I hate bible-bashing so I was thinking about saying that we could come back another time. But there were our recent converts and we couldn't just leave them here all defenseless with their tiny fragile testimonies of the truth against the sophistries of the Adventists.
Well we were invited to sit down and as we sat they offered to say the opening prayer. And one of them did. After the prayer was finished they said to Minvera, "Now what was it was it you were confused about? The SABBATH?" I interjected and said. "Okay, we know there's a conflict here. We belive that the sabbath is on Sunday and we know that you all believe it's on saturday, now we don't want to-" I was about to say we don't want to get into a battle here and we'll leave since there's no point in arguing, but I was interrupted by the larger of the two who said something along the lines of: "We don't believe the sabbath on on saturday, we KNOW it is, and we know the commandments, and we obey them, you can't say we believe this or that and blah blah blah." And then they started on the normal routine that the Adventists always take, starting with Genesis about how God sanctified the 7th day and blah blah blah, God can't change blah blah blah, the law cannot change blah blah blah, we must obey the law blah blah blah." Elder Green had started to say something but I kicked him and motioned for him to be quiet, knowing Elder Green I decided that it was best that he didn't say too much. They had us turn to a scripture in Mark that says that the Lord is the Lord of the Sabbath and we must keep his Sabbaths. They substituted sabbath for saturday like they always do, I don't know if that's how their bible reads or if they just automatically do that. Anyway we had Elder Green's bible open. And we pointed out that our Bible didn't say saturday at all, it just said sabbath day, it didn't specify which day. They told is it was saturday because if you went and looked into a dictionary you find that sabbath meant saturday. I said that it was kind of stupid that they were getting their doctrine from the dictionary, we get our doctrine from God! That's probably a better source than the dictionary! They then ranted on a bit about how in their church they have scholars who study hebrew and know what all of these things mean and blah blah blah.
Now I didn't have my bible with me at the moment bible, but I do carry around a small notecard with all of the useful scriptures written on it. I told them that indeed the sabbath was on saturday under the law of moses but that it was changed with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. They said exactly what I thought they would say and said that the law cannot change. I had them flip to Hebrews 7:12 where it says the following: 'For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law.' That was the mortal blow, they spent the next twenty minutes trying to come up with explanations why that scripture doesn't say what it says. It was kind of funny really. They said the law can't change, over and over, and they quoted the usual 'not one jot nor tittle hath passed away from the law..." And I said "Then why does it say the law changed right here?" They'd would ask for a one scripture, just one, that said that the law was changed. I would say "We already read it, it's right here, it's pretty clear, it says the law the was changed." They were getting pretty mad by this point, they're faces were red, they kept interrupting us and talking us down, and talking quite fast. Elder Green just didn't say anything, I could tell he was way angry, he gets frustrated really easy. I just kept a chill and smooth disposition. Perfectly calm and collected, they kept trying to tell me to turn to other scriptures but I kept telling them that we still haven't finished with this one yet, because it says quite clearly that the law was changed. They're were like: "NO you're very confused my child, you're taking this completely out of context! Rawr rawr rawr!" They said that we didn't keep the law but that they were perfect keepers of the law. I asked them if they still sacrificed goats and things, they said no... Then they thought they had us.
"Aha! That's what changed, this verse is talking about the sacrificial rites! That's what changed! Aha!"
They were pretty excited, they thought they had us. I thought about telling them that it said LAW rather than sacrificial rites, but I had a better idea. I said:
"Okay, okay, so why did they do those rites?"
They explained why.
"Okay, okay, so who told them to do those rites?"
"Well... God..."
"Uh-huh, and then he took them away so they didn't have to do it anymore."
"Yes..."
"So therefore God gave something and took it away, he changed something, God changed something he gave, God can changed whatever he wants, including the law."
Well they got really mad at that part, foam was flying from their lips almost. Then I decided to use a secret weapon. Minverva and Dianna had been cowering this whole time and I asked them how they knew our church was true. They started to bear their testimonies, and it drove the Adventists so mad that they packed up their things and left.
Now I've left out a lot but I have to log out in two minutes. But basically VICTORY! We totally got them! Haha! We defended our recent converts and it was great and we won and it was Minvera and Dianna who with their infant testimonies delivered the killing blow.
Okay I'm out of time. I love you all have a good week bye.
Hello Family.
This week has seen a few interesting things. As I mentioned last week our area is now twice as large and we cover a lot of ghetto now. It's super ghetto, I thought our area before was ghetto but no it's nothing compared to what we have now. It's really junky. To illustrate we had an appointment with an investigator that lived next door (literally like 5 feet) away from a less active family in the ward. Well the investigator wasn't there but the dad of the last active family was out ambling about in front of his porch. We had never met him before so we went to say high and he was quite intoxicated with something or another. Probably alcohol, the other elders had told us that he hasn't been to church in a while and is an alcoholic. Well that sure seemed to be the case. His eyes were completely yellow and bloodshot and he was talking really funny and holding a rather sharp looking paint scraper. Well he wanted us to come in and talk with him. He obviously out of his mind and I didn't think that would be a very good idea so I asked if we could stay outside, the weather was good and all. He kept trying to get us to come in but I wouldn't budge, Elder Green almost went in, he was kind of spooked about the whole thing, I don't think he's ever had to deal with someone completely plastered before. We convinced him that outside would be fine and we talked with him for a bit and he was just completely drunk and was almost crying telling us about how he never wanted to be baptized but the sister missionaries made him get baptized and he wanted to quit drinking and he was just generally crazy. Elder Green, as usual was just being stupid and trying to get him to read D&C 89. Yeah so he was crazy and we got out of there and left. But we did manage to get him to throw away all of his beer into the trash can.
A few days later on Friday night we had an appointment with this same family and we went over and the wife opened the door and said that now probably wasn't a good idea because her husband was drunk again and had said to her if the missionaries came by he would chase them off his property. Then she just started crying and was telling us all of this stuff about how she just couldn't take her husband drinking anymore and it was all really sad. The really sad thing is there isn't much we can do about it. We can only teach and encourage people to do the right thing. During her sobbing and sad stories I just took a minute to look around and it was Friday night, not the best time to be in the ghetto I guess. Down the street there were a bunch of teenagers with alcohol fighting and on the other side a house full of noises of revelry and crude language and then some car books it down the street at 40-50 mph driving backwards. The whole neighbourhood itself smelled like human waste and there was garbage strewn everywhere. So I just stand there while all of this is going on and I just say to myself. "What in the world is wrong with this place?" I have never felt father away from civilization that I did at that moment. Crazy!
Well the next most noteworthy event was on saturday. We had an appointment at 5 with Minvera and Dianna, our favorite drama prone recent converts. Well we get there and knock and door and Dianna opens up and seemed rather surprised, she jumps out of the door and then turns around and opens it up and she has that sort of embarrassed smile that she always has on her face when something very awkward is about to happen. (We knew that look quite well by now). So we walk in and Minerva is sitting on the couch with a bible open on her lap and on the other couch is two old women with their own bibles and some printed propaganda. Well it turned out that they were none other than the 7th Day Adventists. Well.... Hmm... How to best describe? Well they were nice at first but you could tell they were just ready to jump at as any moment. For a while they had been visiting Minverva and Dianna while we have been visiting them but we had never encountered each other at the same time. And both of us had been teaching them and telling why the other church was completely wrong. Thus came the conflict and the day of reckoning. Now I hate bible-bashing so I was thinking about saying that we could come back another time. But there were our recent converts and we couldn't just leave them here all defenseless with their tiny fragile testimonies of the truth against the sophistries of the Adventists.
Well we were invited to sit down and as we sat they offered to say the opening prayer. And one of them did. After the prayer was finished they said to Minvera, "Now what was it was it you were confused about? The SABBATH?" I interjected and said. "Okay, we know there's a conflict here. We belive that the sabbath is on Sunday and we know that you all believe it's on saturday, now we don't want to-" I was about to say we don't want to get into a battle here and we'll leave since there's no point in arguing, but I was interrupted by the larger of the two who said something along the lines of: "We don't believe the sabbath on on saturday, we KNOW it is, and we know the commandments, and we obey them, you can't say we believe this or that and blah blah blah." And then they started on the normal routine that the Adventists always take, starting with Genesis about how God sanctified the 7th day and blah blah blah, God can't change blah blah blah, the law cannot change blah blah blah, we must obey the law blah blah blah." Elder Green had started to say something but I kicked him and motioned for him to be quiet, knowing Elder Green I decided that it was best that he didn't say too much. They had us turn to a scripture in Mark that says that the Lord is the Lord of the Sabbath and we must keep his Sabbaths. They substituted sabbath for saturday like they always do, I don't know if that's how their bible reads or if they just automatically do that. Anyway we had Elder Green's bible open. And we pointed out that our Bible didn't say saturday at all, it just said sabbath day, it didn't specify which day. They told is it was saturday because if you went and looked into a dictionary you find that sabbath meant saturday. I said that it was kind of stupid that they were getting their doctrine from the dictionary, we get our doctrine from God! That's probably a better source than the dictionary! They then ranted on a bit about how in their church they have scholars who study hebrew and know what all of these things mean and blah blah blah.
Now I didn't have my bible with me at the moment bible, but I do carry around a small notecard with all of the useful scriptures written on it. I told them that indeed the sabbath was on saturday under the law of moses but that it was changed with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. They said exactly what I thought they would say and said that the law cannot change. I had them flip to Hebrews 7:12 where it says the following: 'For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law.' That was the mortal blow, they spent the next twenty minutes trying to come up with explanations why that scripture doesn't say what it says. It was kind of funny really. They said the law can't change, over and over, and they quoted the usual 'not one jot nor tittle hath passed away from the law..." And I said "Then why does it say the law changed right here?" They'd would ask for a one scripture, just one, that said that the law was changed. I would say "We already read it, it's right here, it's pretty clear, it says the law the was changed." They were getting pretty mad by this point, they're faces were red, they kept interrupting us and talking us down, and talking quite fast. Elder Green just didn't say anything, I could tell he was way angry, he gets frustrated really easy. I just kept a chill and smooth disposition. Perfectly calm and collected, they kept trying to tell me to turn to other scriptures but I kept telling them that we still haven't finished with this one yet, because it says quite clearly that the law was changed. They're were like: "NO you're very confused my child, you're taking this completely out of context! Rawr rawr rawr!" They said that we didn't keep the law but that they were perfect keepers of the law. I asked them if they still sacrificed goats and things, they said no... Then they thought they had us.
"Aha! That's what changed, this verse is talking about the sacrificial rites! That's what changed! Aha!"
They were pretty excited, they thought they had us. I thought about telling them that it said LAW rather than sacrificial rites, but I had a better idea. I said:
"Okay, okay, so why did they do those rites?"
They explained why.
"Okay, okay, so who told them to do those rites?"
"Well... God..."
"Uh-huh, and then he took them away so they didn't have to do it anymore."
"Yes..."
"So therefore God gave something and took it away, he changed something, God changed something he gave, God can changed whatever he wants, including the law."
Well they got really mad at that part, foam was flying from their lips almost. Then I decided to use a secret weapon. Minverva and Dianna had been cowering this whole time and I asked them how they knew our church was true. They started to bear their testimonies, and it drove the Adventists so mad that they packed up their things and left.
Now I've left out a lot but I have to log out in two minutes. But basically VICTORY! We totally got them! Haha! We defended our recent converts and it was great and we won and it was Minvera and Dianna who with their infant testimonies delivered the killing blow.
Okay I'm out of time. I love you all have a good week bye.
Sangargarinconado
February 14th 2011
Hello family..,
Well this week was horribly cold, again. Like 30 degrees once more for a few days, actually I guess it wasn't too bad because we did go to the Temple on Tuesday but other than that it was not a good week. It came to a final and brilliant climax of epic on Sunday (this seems to happen a lot, I wonder if there is a pattern here). Not a single investigator came to church, we were doing our usual sunday morning round up and even though it wasn't raining and the weather was reasonable nobody wanted to get up to come to church. We even had two people who when we stopped by were getting ready to go to church and yet they never showed up. Not very many members came either. The gospel principles teacher didn't come (which is odd because she's the bishop's wife, she's usually always there) so it was up to us to teach the lesson. There were like 4 people in gospel principles, four people other than us 7 missionaries I might add. It was probably just as well that nobody came because we were woefully un-prepared, and it was a dumb topic anyway, about the the scattering and gathering of Israel, something completely unimportant to investigators and new members.
Well after church we decided to swing by Minerva and Dianna, they didn't make it to church for some mysterious reason. We went to see if they were okay and to remind about a youth fireside that night. We go in there and they were a little bit more cold than usual, it was weird, and then we found out why when they started demanding that we show them where in the Bible it says that Sunday is the Sabbath Day. Apparently the day before they had some neighborhood friends over who just happened to be the 7th Day Adventists who filled them full of lies and false doctrine. Well we clearly and calmly explained to them that under the Apostolic Ministry the sabbath was changed to Sunday in honor of Christ's resurrection, for he was resurrected on the 1st day of the week. We told them that we know this through modern revelation that we get through modern prophets and there really isn't much convincing evidence in the bible that it was changed (there's like two rather vauge verses that mention breaking bread on the 1st day of the week and the saints collecting on the 1st day of the week, I've used them before when talking with the Adventists but they just don't work all that great). So even after we carefully explained all of this that we know this because we get our doctrine straight from God and not so much from the Bible, they still weren't very pleased, and they wanted us to leave them the scripture references so they could show them to these "friends" of theirs. We didn't, the last thing we want is our new members with their delicate new testimonies trying to bash with people from another church. They were so put out by this that they didn't want to go the Family History Center and enter in the information for Minerva's mother who she was planning to get baptized for. The youth and all of the recent converts of our ward are going to the Temple on Thursday to do baptisms for the dead and we want Minvera and Dianna's first experience to be very personal being baptized for their deceased family. It was quite frustrating and disheartening, luckily we managed to coax them into going on Wednesday to the Family History Center and do it. I just hope that they can still do it the day before, I'm not sure how the system works. We're really quite worried for them, but we figure if we can just get them to the Temple they'll have an epic experience there and that they'd never give in to the lies of their "friends". Man, the 7th Day Adventists are the worst, they're far worse than the J-Dubs, it's easy to prove with the Bible that Jehovah and Christ are the same person but there really just isn't too much proof in there that Sunday is now the sabbath day.
So we drove away feeling rather down, we went to the house to go eat and do studies, well as we got there we noticed this thug out in the street limping down the road toward our house. His neck and chest was drenched in blood, and we thought about pulling over and asking him if he was okay, well right in front of our house, or rather the Ayala's house with whom we live. There was a truck in the middle of the street blocking the road, we parked in our usual daytime parking spot on this patch of grass in front of our house but a little ways back, we were about to jump out and ask the guy if he was okay, when he stomped up the truck, yelling and screaming, this other guy came out of the neighbour's house with his 2 year old toddler in his arms, shaking his fist, yelling and screaming, and there were like three guys in the truck all yelling and screaming. Well they all converge on the truck and the guy who had come down the street rips one of the doors open and tries to get into the truck, while the guy inside, who we noticed had a hole in his head and just blood everywhere, started fighting him. They're all hispanics by the way. And then the guy with the kid jumps into this fight too and we were like: "Oh my gosh, at least put the kid down you idiot!" But no, he jumped right in there while his kid started crying. It was at this point that we decided that this probably wasn't the best place to be at the moment. Now we have this rule that when you're backing up your companion has to be out of the car and making sure you don't run into anything. We decided to disobey that rule, and I started backing out but I stopped when I realied that we were starting to back into the deep ditch on the side of the road behind our patch of grass (every road in Texas has a deep ditch on either side). So our only escape was forward and there was a truck with this brawl going on in the way. So we sat there and watched for a minute, the other neighbors were already outside on the phone with the cops so we just watched. There's something just very disturbing and unsettling about watching human beings trying to tear each other to pieces, and the poor kid just terrified out of his poor little brain right in the middle of it all. Well the guys inside the car succeeded in ejecting the thug with the blood all over his chest out of the car, and they close the door and started to drive away, but he jumped into the bed of the truck and we watched them drive off while he tried to bust in the windows with his fist, they started swerving all over the road trying to throw him off. They turned a corner and went out of site, while the guy with the kid just walked after them shaking his fist and screaming some more. We decided that we probably ought to leave and go visit some people or something and come back for lunch and studies later. We drove away and when we came back a half our later the cops were just all over the place, search helicopter flying low and circling the area, when we turned onto the road like 6 police cars just booked it out of there sirens going and everything, spreading out and looking for them. Now with the street completely deserted except for us and a few groups of inquisitive neighbors - we decided to parked and go in. During our studies some of the cops came back and pulled up in front of our house and started talking to the neighbors, Elder Green suggested that it was our 'civic duty to report what we had witnessed' and that we go out and talk to the cops. I frankly disagreed and told him it was best that we don't get involved, he protested but I made him stay in the apartment.
The rest of the day was a rather fruitless, nobody was home, or rather, wouldn't open their doors when we knocked on them. But it ended well, we got two new investigators from Guatemala who remembered being taught by missionaries many years ago in their country, and we stopped by a less active family who just happened to be having a big carne asada so we finished the night by stuffing ourselves with fajita. So not a bad end to the week I guess.
Well that's all, I hope you all have a good week and... yeah. Peace out
-- Elder Rice
Hello family..,
Well this week was horribly cold, again. Like 30 degrees once more for a few days, actually I guess it wasn't too bad because we did go to the Temple on Tuesday but other than that it was not a good week. It came to a final and brilliant climax of epic on Sunday (this seems to happen a lot, I wonder if there is a pattern here). Not a single investigator came to church, we were doing our usual sunday morning round up and even though it wasn't raining and the weather was reasonable nobody wanted to get up to come to church. We even had two people who when we stopped by were getting ready to go to church and yet they never showed up. Not very many members came either. The gospel principles teacher didn't come (which is odd because she's the bishop's wife, she's usually always there) so it was up to us to teach the lesson. There were like 4 people in gospel principles, four people other than us 7 missionaries I might add. It was probably just as well that nobody came because we were woefully un-prepared, and it was a dumb topic anyway, about the the scattering and gathering of Israel, something completely unimportant to investigators and new members.
Well after church we decided to swing by Minerva and Dianna, they didn't make it to church for some mysterious reason. We went to see if they were okay and to remind about a youth fireside that night. We go in there and they were a little bit more cold than usual, it was weird, and then we found out why when they started demanding that we show them where in the Bible it says that Sunday is the Sabbath Day. Apparently the day before they had some neighborhood friends over who just happened to be the 7th Day Adventists who filled them full of lies and false doctrine. Well we clearly and calmly explained to them that under the Apostolic Ministry the sabbath was changed to Sunday in honor of Christ's resurrection, for he was resurrected on the 1st day of the week. We told them that we know this through modern revelation that we get through modern prophets and there really isn't much convincing evidence in the bible that it was changed (there's like two rather vauge verses that mention breaking bread on the 1st day of the week and the saints collecting on the 1st day of the week, I've used them before when talking with the Adventists but they just don't work all that great). So even after we carefully explained all of this that we know this because we get our doctrine straight from God and not so much from the Bible, they still weren't very pleased, and they wanted us to leave them the scripture references so they could show them to these "friends" of theirs. We didn't, the last thing we want is our new members with their delicate new testimonies trying to bash with people from another church. They were so put out by this that they didn't want to go the Family History Center and enter in the information for Minerva's mother who she was planning to get baptized for. The youth and all of the recent converts of our ward are going to the Temple on Thursday to do baptisms for the dead and we want Minvera and Dianna's first experience to be very personal being baptized for their deceased family. It was quite frustrating and disheartening, luckily we managed to coax them into going on Wednesday to the Family History Center and do it. I just hope that they can still do it the day before, I'm not sure how the system works. We're really quite worried for them, but we figure if we can just get them to the Temple they'll have an epic experience there and that they'd never give in to the lies of their "friends". Man, the 7th Day Adventists are the worst, they're far worse than the J-Dubs, it's easy to prove with the Bible that Jehovah and Christ are the same person but there really just isn't too much proof in there that Sunday is now the sabbath day.
So we drove away feeling rather down, we went to the house to go eat and do studies, well as we got there we noticed this thug out in the street limping down the road toward our house. His neck and chest was drenched in blood, and we thought about pulling over and asking him if he was okay, well right in front of our house, or rather the Ayala's house with whom we live. There was a truck in the middle of the street blocking the road, we parked in our usual daytime parking spot on this patch of grass in front of our house but a little ways back, we were about to jump out and ask the guy if he was okay, when he stomped up the truck, yelling and screaming, this other guy came out of the neighbour's house with his 2 year old toddler in his arms, shaking his fist, yelling and screaming, and there were like three guys in the truck all yelling and screaming. Well they all converge on the truck and the guy who had come down the street rips one of the doors open and tries to get into the truck, while the guy inside, who we noticed had a hole in his head and just blood everywhere, started fighting him. They're all hispanics by the way. And then the guy with the kid jumps into this fight too and we were like: "Oh my gosh, at least put the kid down you idiot!" But no, he jumped right in there while his kid started crying. It was at this point that we decided that this probably wasn't the best place to be at the moment. Now we have this rule that when you're backing up your companion has to be out of the car and making sure you don't run into anything. We decided to disobey that rule, and I started backing out but I stopped when I realied that we were starting to back into the deep ditch on the side of the road behind our patch of grass (every road in Texas has a deep ditch on either side). So our only escape was forward and there was a truck with this brawl going on in the way. So we sat there and watched for a minute, the other neighbors were already outside on the phone with the cops so we just watched. There's something just very disturbing and unsettling about watching human beings trying to tear each other to pieces, and the poor kid just terrified out of his poor little brain right in the middle of it all. Well the guys inside the car succeeded in ejecting the thug with the blood all over his chest out of the car, and they close the door and started to drive away, but he jumped into the bed of the truck and we watched them drive off while he tried to bust in the windows with his fist, they started swerving all over the road trying to throw him off. They turned a corner and went out of site, while the guy with the kid just walked after them shaking his fist and screaming some more. We decided that we probably ought to leave and go visit some people or something and come back for lunch and studies later. We drove away and when we came back a half our later the cops were just all over the place, search helicopter flying low and circling the area, when we turned onto the road like 6 police cars just booked it out of there sirens going and everything, spreading out and looking for them. Now with the street completely deserted except for us and a few groups of inquisitive neighbors - we decided to parked and go in. During our studies some of the cops came back and pulled up in front of our house and started talking to the neighbors, Elder Green suggested that it was our 'civic duty to report what we had witnessed' and that we go out and talk to the cops. I frankly disagreed and told him it was best that we don't get involved, he protested but I made him stay in the apartment.
The rest of the day was a rather fruitless, nobody was home, or rather, wouldn't open their doors when we knocked on them. But it ended well, we got two new investigators from Guatemala who remembered being taught by missionaries many years ago in their country, and we stopped by a less active family who just happened to be having a big carne asada so we finished the night by stuffing ourselves with fajita. So not a bad end to the week I guess.
Well that's all, I hope you all have a good week and... yeah. Peace out
-- Elder Rice
Gangosos
February 7, 2011
Hello fam...
Well this week's e-mail ought to be slightly longer and more interesting than last week's. First of all it was stinking cold all of last week. Like brutally cold, the average was 30 throughout most of the week. We had heard from the people that it was supposed to snow on Friday, they were pretty freaked out, all the schools planned to close down that day and nobody was going to work, all of the businesses were to shut down, you'd think the plague or something was on it's way. We didn't think it was going to happen. Well come Friday and sure enough it didn't snow. It was really cold though. And it actually helped us out a lot. It was so cold that nobody wanted to leave their homes so it was really easy for us to finally catch people at home. Few if any people were outside, driving or whatever, it was like a ghost town, absolutely still and frozen outside. We were the only people out their driving around.
On Tuesday Hna. Hernandez taught us how to make gorditas and pupusas. As you can see in the pictures, it's really easy actually. A gordita is basically the same thing as a pupusa except that after you cook it, you slice it open and insert whatever you want. A pupusa you seal up whatever you want in it before you cook it. That's only difference, oh and pupusas are fried in grease, whereas with gorditas you can chose to dry cook it in a pan or cook it in oil, either way it was way easy. Or so I thought.
A couple days later I attempted to make a monster pupusa at our apartment. We already had all of the necessary ingredients, I had planned to make a huge pupusa with beans, onion, and cheese in it. Well my first mistake was to put too much beans in it, so that it all wouldn't fit inside the dough, there wasn't enough to wrap around all of the beans and stuff. So I thought I just make more and build around it, like an igloo. So I made more dough and made this mountain of dough and beans and dropped it in the pan. It weighed like 2 pounds. I wasn't going to cook it in oil or grease or anything but even so the abomination was too huge to be maneuvered effectively and the beans and stuff would start to ooze out of the cracks forming in the crust of my tectonic nightmare. After flipping it over a couple times it started to break apart, thus forming new continents, the whole experience reminded me of the super continent of Pangea that was around several millions of years ago and how it started to break up and drift thus forming the continents as we know them today.
Well my monster pupusa under went a similar experience, and the dough was so thick still that the outer crust was blackening while the inner just barely warm. I gave up and dumped the abomination in the trash. I decided to try again but making smaller ones, and I was out of beans so I made two normal sized ham and cheese pupusas. And they were pretty good. I'm definitely going to be making more such creations this week. And tomorrow Hna. Hernandez is going to teach us how to make sopes.
Well... Moving on to the next notable madness of the week. I got a letter from Dad on Saturday describing the great ineffectiveness of a ward he was in on his mission. It's really funny, because it foreshadowed the events of the following day. Sunday was to be Stake Conference, but it was some kind of regional type conference where it was to be broadcasted to us from Salt Lake. We alerted all of our investigators and made intensive plans to get everyone to church at the right time. Well come sunday and we show up to the church an hour or so before it's to start. We get there and the bishop and his wife were right there in a the door and basically said: "Oh elders thank goodness you're here, do you know how to set the machines up?" Well... To their credit they did find the projector. Well the next couple hours demonstrated..well I won't go there..
For some reason they couldn't receive anything through the satellite receiver, they couldn't get any signal at all out if it. And in the best priesthood leadership fashion they were pushing random buttons, flipping switches, plugging and unplugging things and whatnot. All of this about a half-hour before the broadcast was to start. One elder who had been in this ward for the last general conference said this was exactly what happened last conference. They didn't think about it till an hour beforehand and they started randomly messing with things until they gave up and let the missionaries mess with it until it started. They said that last year they didn't get it working until a half-hour into the first session, and they didn't get it in spanish until the 2nd session.
One elder in our district, Elder White, before his mission worked for a few years selling and installing cable systems and satellite dishes, and he was the one who had got it to work for the previous conference. So just picture about 20 or so men in suits in the gym crowded around a tiny door that lead into the room with the satellite box watching two bishops randomly push buttons for an hour. I stood in the back with Elder White (they wouldn't let him look at it just yet). And he was saying all they needed to do was let it reboot. It's exactly what happened last conference, you just had to turn it on and let it sit for a few minutes. But they wouldn't wait, they wanted it working right then.
So we're standing there and this crazy old white guy, I think he is the elder's quorum president, in the english ward kept suggesting we give the box a priesthood blessing. Everyone ignored him, then he started pestering us, the missionaries, to give the box a blessing, we kind of ignored him, and then told him that we can't give inanimate objects blessings and that maybe we could say a prayer or something.
While He was arguing with some of the elders about that, my companion heroically fixed an outlet in the primary room. We had wheeled a TV into the primary room for people to watch, when my companion noticed that the telephone outlet was askew and the actual line could not be reached really easy. Now one thing about Elder Green is that he can't sit still, he has to always be doing something, and not just like keeping himself entertained, he has to always being doing something to "fix" the situation and show everyone how intelligent and useful he is. So he daringly spent twenty minutes taking apart this outlet with his keys and putting it all back together again, making a big of it and how useful he is to everyone.... Yeah...
Well during this I was talking to some of the elders of the spanish ward who had been there for a really long time and had said that by now they had learned NOT to invite investigators to general conference or anything that had to be broadcasted to the chapel. Which seemed like a good idea, We had three investigators there, and they along with everyone else was sitting around wondering what was going on. The conference was being broadcasted to the stake center several miles north, the stake center next to the mission office. Towards the end the white people in the english ward started complaining loudly, that they had been told to come here and not to the other building, and they started making a big scene and lots more wonderful things... Somebody called somebody high up and supposedly, Salt Lake told them that the "line was fried". Elder White finally got a chance to look at it and it indeed appeared that the line was fried or something because he couldn't get it to work.
So to make a long and sad story short they recorded the broadcast at the stake center and said that they would show it at 1:00 and we would all have to drive up to the stake center for it. Well our investigators weren't too happy about that, and even after we got rides for them, and gave them directions and offered to guide them there and everything not a single one of them showed up to it....
It was a good conference though. President Monson and Elder Ballard spoke. It was great, we were pretty bummed that none of our investigators came. This all could have been avoided had they decided make sure everything worked the night before or something. But that kind of foresight would be asking a little too much now wouldn't it? XD
So that's how the week was. Lots of madness and cold, and it's all just very funny... It's all so ridiculous that I just laugh at it all now. Elder Green was rather upset and frustrated at all of this but I've learned just to laugh it off and don't worry about such things. Sure it was disappointing that our investigators missed out on hearing the prophet speak but whatever... There's nothing we can do about it except laugh.... Okay. I'm done, other pictures include this crazy car we saw in someone's driveway, my new nametag, and some Chihuahua puppies that were so cold that this family made little sweaters for them and hammocks for them out of their hats. So that's all I have to say, yesterday it was 70 degrees so it was back to short sleeves. I love you all and hope you have a great time... peace...
-- Elder Arroz
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