Chicken & Gift of Tongue (Tacos)

May 21, 2012

Connor -- I finally got a semi weird food for you. On Saturday night we walked past a taco truck that one of the less actives we are trying to work with runs to see if he was there. He was and he gave us each two free tacos.  I ordered a pollo for one and lengua for the other. Chicken and Tongue. It was good.

And you have already read the Book of Mormon five times all the way through?!? Can you please come out here and help our investigators get into that habit? I only read it all the way through twice before my mission and a lot of the missionaries have only once. Elder Sterling read it all the way through for the first time on his mission.  Keep it up bro!

So this week we started advertising hard core for the English classes we are starting.  We hung up probably about fifty fliers, each with 32 of the little tear-off pieces with the address and our phone number and all that.  And off course it started raining today.  So we get to go replace them all and put up new ones now.  Woo!!!

We have put so much work into organizing our area and advertising for these English classes this week we haven't had too much time to do much else so it might be a shorter letter this week.

On Wednesday we learned that the Flores' (a really cool family in the branch we visit a lot) five year old son has leukemia. They ran a bunch of tests on him and it looks like it is still in the really early stages which is good news.  But we ended up spending about five or six hours at their apartment that night.  We even cooked dinner for them.  Our chicken turned out really nice.  But we tried to make a Mexican style rice to go with it.  And after we were done we were reminded quite harshly that we are gringos.  It wasn't terrible but it was pretty wet and had a very strong herbal flavor.  How you make Mexican rice is you just blend up some tomato, onion and garlic into a puree and then you pour that in with the rice.  We did that, but the Flores' had some fresh oregano that smelled really nice and we figured would taste nice in the sauce.  Ended up being about all you could taste.  But the chicken was really good.

On Friday we had the baptismal interview for Alex, who is a twelve year old that some of the other elders in the area are teaching.  He is super solid and he is twelve so we figured that the interview would be pretty quick.  We were outside waiting for about an hour and a half before they stepped out.  So Alex plays baseball and a lot of his games are on Sundays, but they are in the afternoons so he could still go to church and so that had never really been brought up. But in the interview Elder Scoffield just felt really strongly that he had to stop playing altogether before he can be baptized.  Alex is so solid that after a lot of tears he committed to give up baseball, even though it will disappoint all his friends and especially his mom and grandpa. So we all gave him a blessing and then had him call his mom.  She was not happy, so then it took about another hour of Alex and some of the missionaries talking to her on the phone trying to explain it to her and then she still wouldn't take it.  So she won't let him get baptized until after the season is over.  Oh man that was a stressful couple of hours.  He is still super solid though and he will go down as soon as the season is over.

Yesterday in Sacrament meeting they forgot to confirm Delilah.  For like the whole second half of Sacrament meeting I was just trying to get eye contact with someone in the branch presidency and making all the hand signals I could think of to remind them. I didn't want to stand up in the middle of sacrament and walk up to remind them because Delilah is really shy and wouldn't like that kind of attention (I had to do that with Misael's confirmation).  They got that I was talking about confirming someone, but they were thinking about Rafael, who got baptized on Saturday and wasn't at church, so they were getting confused. Then right after Sacrament I went up to talk to them and there was just a big, 'Ooooohhhh, that's what you were trying to say... oh shoot we did forget.' So then we went and talked to her family and they just want to do it next week.

Then last night we went over to Jenny and company's house and talked to them.  It more or less turned into a two hour rebuke for not reading their scriptures and coming to church.  We were explaining to them about how God isn't going to just give us a testimony because we want one. We have to do our part get it.  Antonio was talking about how he thinks it is more just that God has a moment of realization for everybody, where they will have to make that choice.  We kept telling him that we have to make that moment, put our hearts in a condition where we can receive that testimony. So to prove his point he told a story about his dad and how his dad used to just smoke, drink, always had his pistol with him, just a really rough guy but one day he changed and now he is a really good, go to church every week Christian.  I got most of the story but I missed some of the details and Elder Scoffield was trying to figure out how to respond to that and he was stumped and so he explained the story to me in English and one of the big details I missed was that the day he changed his wife had dragged him to church. Somehow everybody seemed to miss the significance of that detail in the story and when I pointed that little fact out Elder Scoffield almost started laughing because it was so obvious and Antonio was just silent for about thirty seconds with just an 'oh ya' look on his face.  So hopefully they will start doing their part a little more now.  The Spirit is so strong every lesson we have with them, they will catch on sooner or later.

Well that's about it for this week. I will keep you all in my prayers.

Love you guys,