Called to Serve

Called to Serve

Monday, July 28, 2014

Asian Thanksgiving

Man it sounds like everyone's having a blast at home!  Too bad you can't have as much fun as me teaching anyone and everyone about the gospel! :) Thanks for the birthday wishes!  Kristopher is going on a mission!  That's so awesome!  My guess is California San Fernando!  That'd be so cool!  Wouldn't be the first time that cousins have served together in this mission. 
Well this week was a pretty good one considering I had the best dinner I've had on the mission so far last Saturday!  Bishop took us to this sushi restaurant called kabuki's and it was amazing!  We had so much sushi!  He got us these two boats full of meat and sushi rolls and whole bunch of other stuff!  He took all the missionaries in our ward.  It was like and Asian thanksgiving!  The bishop really likes us, at least I assume he does.  Otherwise he wouldn't have taken us to sushi!  I'll send pictures of the loads of food because it was crazy!  
On to the actual week.  We had a ton of appointments fall through this last Tuesday.  We had so many lessons set up I thought it was too good to be true. . . and it was.  It was still a great day though.  We taught this white lady from Mexico named Bertha.  We met her last transfer and she had kept pushing appointments back, but we finally met with her and she is super prepared!  She told us that she was raised Catholic and didn't like it.  She wants to come closer to God and the day we met her on the street, she was having a horrible day and asked God to show her a sign that he was aware of her and she met us!  She's super open to learning from us, but she's meeting with a 7th day Adventist every Friday for Bible study.  Hopefully that won't get in the way of things.  We also taught the Indian family again.  I'm starting to think the language barrier might be a bigger deal than I thought.  It's so hard to get the mom to understand and she just wants to keep going to her church.  The kids are awesome though.  We will continue to work with them until the spirit tells us that its not their time yet.  We need some Malayalam speaking missionaries!
We started to teach James again (the mentally disabled one) this past Thursday.  We ran into him while we were street contacting Tuesday and he told us that he wants to have us come over again to read the Book of Mormon with him. Previously we dropped him because we felt that he wasn't in the right state of mind to understand the gospel.  We went over Thursday and had a good lesson about the priesthood and he seemed to comprehend it a lot more than he had previously.  He came to Church on Sunday as well and stayed for all three meetings.  He's praying about baptism now and we'll continue to teach him.  Something seems to have changed about him.  He's very catholic and has pictures of popes and saints and shrines to them all around his apartment, but he said he feels different when we talk to him and when he comes to church.  He shared his testimony about how God answers prayers in Elders quorum.  He told everyone that He had been praying that he would somehow be able to run into the missionaries and start meeting with them again, then he ran into us on the street.  It'll be a process teaching him and will take a lot of patience, but I think he'll get baptized. 
I went on an exchange with Elder Hansen on Friday one of my zone leaders.  He's from West Jordan Utah.  We had a good exchange and we contacted and knocked all day with little success.  It was fun though.  It's starting to get super hot here in the valley.  It got up to like 108 this past Thursday and has been in the 100's the last couple of days. It's great.  
We found and taught an amazing family on Sunday!  The Nicklow family.  We found them knocking.  Kaye, the mother of the family answered the door and told us that she has family in Utah and that her Nieces and nephews served missions.  She said that she had been waiting for 20 years for missionaries to knock on her door and we were the first ones to ever knock on the door!  We set up an appointment for later that night so that her husband could be there.  We ended up teaching her husband Shaun and her daughter Emma.  Shaun was raised Catholic and the whole family is Catholic and goes to catholic school, but that he loves Mormons and knows a lot about them.  We shared the message of the Restoration with them and they loved it!  Shaun told us that he agrees with everything, but that its hard for him to believe in the Book of Mormon and the church with regards to issues that its had in the past like polygamy and blacks and the priesthood.  Those can be over come though.  Neither of them had read the Book of Mormon, but they both want to read it and pray about it.  It was a sweet lesson and the daughter even told us that she would read and pray about it too!  They have at least 3 other kids that didn't sit in on the lesson.  They're a solid family and I hope that things go well for them.  
Well there's my week for ya!  I love you all! 
Elder Nelson      

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