Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Winter is Coming!

Summer is ending and the cold is coming! Right now it's like 65 degrees and overcast, which is my favorite weather, so hopefully we'll have more days like this! This past week was hectic, but it was good! Transfers changed a lot of stuff!

So I had four guys in my flat, we cover Daveyton 1 (that's me) and Daveyton 2, but my comp and both elders in Daveyton 2 got transferred, so there's 3 new guys in the flat! My comp is Elder Rini from South Africa and he's sweet! He speaks xhosa, which is the coolest language here, so he's been teaching me some stuff. It's a flipping difficult language, the clicks are weird, but I'm getting better! I always tell people "mena xhosa (I'm xhosan)" and they just laugh hahaha. People here are the best.
But yeah me and another elder, Elder Tye, took like 6 black trash bags and just cleared out our flat, because there was so much junk from previous missionaries, so we just threw everything away! The flat's a lot cleaner now, which is awesome because the Spirit can be there a lot more now. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, eh?

So yeah so I'm leading the area now, which is a little hectic, but I'm learning a lot. Learning how to set appointments at the correct times, so we don't have to bike back and forth, learning how to manage my time better so I can get places on time, learning how to get members to feed us hahaha. It's good.

This week was fine with our investigators, for some reason everyone and their mom was gone, so we didn't get to see some of our most promising ones, but we still had some great lessons! You hear those stories about golden investigators who get baptized two weeks after missionaries knock on their door, but I've come to realize just how rare that is! We've found a lot of people like that, who are just awesome and gain a testimony right away, but there's always something holding them back from being baptized, always a lesson that they have a hard time accepting. For some it's the word of wisdom, others it's the law of chastity, but we had some people this past week who are too sick to leave their house, have been in prison, or had abortions, or just can't accept the law of tithing, so it's hard, and we have to learn to work with these people and try to help them with their problems. Usually the only way we can help them is just by inviting them to pray and ask for help, because God knows them better than us, and he knows how to help them in their lives. So that's what we've had to do a lot these past two weeks, just invite people to repent and pray about the things that we teach them.

We had this one guy and his wife, and we stopped by two weeks ago because the wife randomly came to church, even though she didn't know anything about it, and we taught them the restoration and left them with the Book of Mormon. The husband was kind of a joker, but it was fine. So we went back this week and I asked if the husband wanted to join us for the lesson (he was working on his car) and he was like "Yeah, sure." So we started the lesson and asked them if they were able to read the Book of Mormon and he was like "Yeah I wasn't able to read all of it, I'm only about half way through." And I was just like......wait, you read the entire first half in a week? And he was like..."yeah," hahaha I didn't even know what to say hahaha, the most any of our investigators have ever read is like 3 chapters, and he read about 200 pages! He still doesn't know if it's true, but I was like "Dude I promise if you finish it and pray you'll be able to receive an answer," so we'll see if he does it! I'm pretty excited to go back to his house this week haha.

So yeah, that's about it for this week, Elder Rini and I have just been biking and eating peaches like crazy (like every other house has a peach tree, it's magical), so it's been great! Love you all, have a great week, I'll talk to you next time!