8 April 2013

Lovely animals in Arizona

 
Dear Family and Friends,

Everything until Friday was awesome this past week.

Remember the new person we are teaching I wrote about last week? The one who works at the temple? So we went by and taught him on Monday and he gave us both a 4"x4" slab of the tile going inside the Gilbert temple. It's awesome! We taught a great lesson and at the end we extended a baptismal invitation and he said, "I think so...I want to...I need to!"

The week could not have started off any better. But it only got better. The next day we got a phone call from his fellowship saying that he was looking for tickets for general conference because he was going to take the guy we are teaching all the way to Salt Lake City. 'You can put your money on the prophet!' Wooo! We were super excited and looked all over. We found them two tickets to the Sunday afternoon session but they said they would have to take work off on Monday to do it. They kept looking and found two for the saturday afternoon session. On Thursday we got a phone call from his fellowship again saying that the supervisor at the Gilbert temple said that he wanted to get a copy of the conversion story of the guy we are teaching (we'll call him John for the sake of anonymimity) so that he could put it in the temple cornerstone. WOWOWOWOW. Yeah, we were pretty excited at this point. He loved church, he wanted to get baptized, he was going to the conference center for conference and his conversion story was going in the temple cornerstone! Finally after 6 really hard weeks we had a ray of light.

And then we got a phone call from his fellowship on Friday saying that his boss had fired him for going to conference and that he no longer worked with 'John.' (The fellowship lives in Mesa). Also turns out that 'John' wasn't able to make it to conference. We hadn't met with him all that week because he was so busy prepping to go and with work.

Dang. So we settled with inviting him to watch conference on Saturday or Sunday. He was in New Mexico for both and wasn't able to see it.

Now we haven't met with him for 7 days and we're starting to get a little stressed.

sigh.

We didn't have any investigators watch conference. It's a pretty bad thing if you can't get a single person to watch one of the five sessions.

It's hard to stay optimistic when everything falls apart. Why can't anything be easy?

Last night we went driving to visit a former investigator again hoping for luck this time. Just before I had put a bunch of names into the GPS from the YSA ward that we didn't know. On the way to the former we just happened to drive past a place marker for someone in the YSA ward. We decided to get out and meet them but they weren't home. His brother, returned for 2 weeks from his mission, was there and we talked with him. I asked him if he knew anyone interested in the gospel and he said that he had a friend who had been reading the Book of Mormon on and off for four years. We got her information and are planning to stop by today. We're hoping something comes from this. I need something to...

On a less depressing note I've been sleep talking alot apparently. I woke myself up the other day by saying, "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE FLAVOR!" I dreamed about a giant mountain berry blast powerade. Those things are so good.

How fast are roadrunners?

Why does ice break when water touches it?

Yesterday we heard some planes flying over en route to landing at the airport. They were 737 size. Three different ones flew over in about five minutes and every time they reached a certain point in the sky the engine sound changed dramatically and made a very strange sound like that of the THX audio sound when the sound changes from high tone to low tone. The weird sound only lasted a second or two. Why? Does it have to do with flying over the mountains at relatively low altitude?

Two days ago we were walking around at 8:30 at night seemingly alone on the street. Just then a chihuahua (spelling?) darted out from a house and ran at us. I was really bored so half chased it and when I looked up the owner was starting at me blank faced. Haha it was super embarrassing so we walked away. Turns out that was the house we were supposed to visit. We'll probably wait a while till we go back again...

General Conference was pretty sweet, eh? Lots of really great talks and too many pages of notes to write down. I did see Westin Levitt and Susie Sowa singing though! I also noticed someone from my political science class at BYU who was always making really...interesting... comments. Small world.

I think the best talk of the weekend was Elder Scott's. I don't remember why or what exactly he spoke on haha but it was my favorite. And then there was the one quote about how 'it doesn't matter where we raise our kids but how.' I got a good laugh at that one.

We went to the priesthood session 30 minutes early in order to get a decent seat. Thinking it would be crowded, we planned ahead. When we walked into the chapel at 4:30 it was completely empty haha. It was pretty empty until 4:50ish when everyone rushed in. Classic. We had good seats.

For those that went to the priesthood session, do you remember the story about the football quarterback and the girl that was getting bullied? The quarterback is from Queen Creek and was sitting three rows in front of me. He is in our roommates' ward. Turns out the girl isn't a member so we told them to pick it up haha. You can't be shown in general conference and not be a member! (that's not true, but she should be!)

I also got a good laugh out of the story about the guy given the stake clerk calling who was "struggling at getting to church every week." At BYU I slept through church two weeks in a row and the next week they gave me the calling to print off the programs before church. I never missed a sunday after that. I thought it was funny how similar his story and mine are.

How do they do security at general conference?

I think what I'm going to remember Queen Creek most for are the really weird animals we keep finding near the house. (See attachment)

Thanks for the letters Scott, Mom, and Natalia!

Love,

EJ