24 May 2011

Hello family!

I'm back in the tri-companionship again. Elder Farley left Wednesday morning. Our mission president came to pick him up at 6:30. While he was at our apartment, he mentioned how nice and clean it was. We didn't do any extra cleaning so that was cool!

This morning during our companionship study we heard lots of yelling and screaming next door, and some loud crashes. We weren't really sure what to do, because it could have been one thing our another, but eventually the cops showed up and broke up a fight. Apparently he was beating his girlfriend and such. Never a dull moment around here.

A few updates on our teaching--

I don't know if I even told you about our/my investigators. I say "my" because we still divide our ward boundaries. Elder Farley and I worked north of the highway, and Elder Gale and Elder Fackrell work south of the highway. Now that E. Farley is gone, I still cover north of the highway by myself, so the priests in the ward and other members go on splits with me all the time.

I have 3 good investigators. One is Christian [edit]. He's about 21, and is dating a less-active member of the church. His brother Josh just got baptized about two months ago. Their mom, Georgina, takes lessons from the Spanish missionaries. They all come in for the lessons. It's really fun to be teaching a family for the first time. They have quickly become good friends and almost like family to me. Christian wants to get baptized but either has to marry Joselyn (his girlfriend) or move out first. They don't have any money to do so right now, so we are waiting until they can. Right now we have a goal for a baptism on June 25. They all come to church every week and have strong testimonies.

Elder Farley and I also found a young couple in the Marines (LOTS of Marines around here, especially in our apartment complex). Robert (goes by West) and Ceyda (Jay'-duh) Bridger. They are both in the Marines and have a little girl. They have always admired the Mormons they've known for being such happy people. She has a Christian background, but nothing too deep. He has basically been religion-less. They are growing in their testimonies very quickly and are loving everything we've taught so far. He is going to be deployed in about a month or two, for the third time. We will try to set a baptism date tonight.

One funny story--the other day we taught West and Ceyda, and we brought by Brother Coleman, the Ast. WML. He likes to talk about doctrine without realizing he's confusing people. We talked a little about the word of wisdom, and we all discussed the bad things caffeine does to our body. Then West left the room. Bro Coleman then brought up the fact that caffeine does have great medicinal uses if used properly, as well as other positive things. West came back in, and looked befuddled. Eventually we stopped talking and asked him why he looked so confused. He said "just a minute ago caffeine was awful, then when I came back it was awesome..."

Yesterday we had zone conference. Toward the end, President Cook and one of the APs was doing a demonstration on using the scriptures to help answer concerns. The Spirit had been really strong for several hours and had been really peaceful and quiet. He asked Elder Gale (one of my companions, and a goofy kid) to go up to pretend to be the investigator. Elder Gale had to come up with a concern. He said something along the lines of "last week was a really hard week. I work on a ranch, and my dog saw a rat, and started chasing it. It ran into the road, and my dog ran after it, and a truck came and hit my dog..." There was a moment of silence, then President Cook busted out laughing really, really hard. About a minute later, he tried to gather himself and continue with the demo, and then started laughing again and again. It was really, really funny.

Apparently the world was supposed to end last Saturday. I'd heard about it since last September. We've been joking about it to ourselves the whole week. There were a few people that were really worked up about it, and LOTS of people were out Friday and Saturday night drinking and drinking and drinking and having parties and etc... The last week there were a lot of people that yelled and cussed at us (nothing new), but this time they included "you Mormons are all liars!! You idiots! The world is NOT going to end on Saturday! Stop LYING to people!!" We got a kick out of that one.

Well that's about it for this week.

Love you all, have a good one

Elder Jon La Follette