Who owes more...

Sweet picture of a car Jenson sent to McKay

Dear all,

Holy week. Training is a real challenge I tell you what. But it's pretty dang rewarding.

Since I last wrote on Monday, lots of stuff has happened, but I'll just fill you in on the highlights.

On Tuesday, we went on Exchanges with the new District Leader. He's a stud. And he speaks English. So that was fun. I learned so much in the few hours we were together. He just has a way to talk to people that they always feel comfortable and then he teaches like no one I have ever seen. It's awesome. But the best part was speaking English. It was so dang hard. Like I had forgotten how to do every day tasks or hold a conversation about missionary work in English. It was super weird.

Then on Wednesday not a whole lot happened, but on Thursday we had kind of a cool experience. Since we don't have a whole lot of investigators right now, we decided to go through the ward list one by one and visit all the people we don't know. To give you an idea of how big a job that is, there are about 350 names on the list, and only about 85 are active. It's crazy. But we've had some cool experiences.

And one super weird one on Thursday. We picked out all of the names on the street where we were going to eat, and then we started knocking (not really knocking cause here you just yell until someone comes out) on all of their doors. And as we were knocking on one, a lady came out of the house next door. We started doing our missionary thing, and she said we could come by and share a message with her. About 5 minutes in we realize she's a member. So we invite her to church, share a message, and she commits to go. Then as we were leaving I noticed a few cigarette butts and a beer can behind her house. Kind of normal here, but it set off a bell. Then as we were eating, we asked the sister if she knew this lady. She was like "uhh yeah why?" So it turns out that on New Years the son of the Less Active lady came over to the party that was going on in the house where we were eating. And here was there for a while, and then he left but said he was gonna come back in a few minutes. And when he came back he had blood all over his face. And he said that his mom had done it. SO by accident we tried to reactivate a child abuser. HAHA wow. So we were more careful with the list of names after that.

Later on Thursday, we went to go visit a contact that I did on Tuesday with Elder Huld, the DL. She was super cool, and at the end of the lesson she told us that while we were talking she felt the same way she did when she started to go to church again. And then we invited her to get baptized and, with enthusiasm, she said yes. So that was pretty cool.

Friday was a pretty normal day, we walked a TON, because I'm trying to show Elder Lopez the whole area, and so we are walking way more than normal. 

Saturday I had a few experiences that I will never forget. Another ward in our District put together "A day in the Mission" for all of the youth. They all got dressed up like missionaries, and the missionaries in their ward trained them on contacting and stuff. And then us and the other missionaries in the District came and we did mega splits. Elder Lopez and I took 3 youth and went to go visit a list of people. Meanwhile, they told us to contact everyone we saw, but after the first hour or so, let the youth do it. So we did it. And it was super cool. And then super weird. First some guy stopped me (which happens a lot being one of few americans here) and asked me about my name. Then he told me he had a question for me. Somehow those questions are never good. He asked me why my country kills so many Mexicans. So yeah. That was fun to answer surrounded by Mexicans.

Then a little while later another dude stopped us to tell us that he was also sent from God to preach the word to a wicked people. Then he started into his "who owes more, the one who pays less or the one who pays more, and which one will be forgiven first" speech which was cool because as the youth sat there not knowing what to say, I jumped in and started teaching about the atonement and how we can all be forgiven, no matter what we owe. And he looked at me and said "are you sure?" and I said "Señor, yo sé que lo que estoy diciendo es la verdad." And then we argued for about thirty seconds before he was like "oh ok, you know I think you're right" and so we left. And I didn't really think about it, but then at the end of the activity, the youth went to go bear their testimony, and one from my group shared what happened. And then he said my answer surprised him, and that it made him really think hard about if he had a testimony. And then he kind of started to tear up and said, "yeah, I do. I'm going on a mission." Holy cow that was cool.

And then sunday was sunday. The person who was supposed to feed us forgot, so we ate with the Bishop, about which I have no complaints. Except he made me eat a super hot pepper and then started laughing at how hard my nose was running. But yeah. And now we're here. Another Monday, and the beginning of another adventurous week.

Les quiero mucho,

Elder Rawlings