Zarahemla Week 16

Exchanges with Elder Torres

¡Feliz año nuevo! Bonne année! Happy New Year!

It has been super cold, but pretty good week this week! With wind chill, it's hit -40 degrees (C and F) two times this week. It's BITTER! With it being the holiday season, it has been difficult to see a lot of people, but we still were able to be effective.

Piri Piri

Last Tuesday, we went out with a member (from another ward) to Piri Piri. It's a great Portuguese chicken place, and I was really excited to go hoping it was going to be similar to Nando's Peri Peri, my favorite restaurant back at home, but sadly it was pretty different. It was super cool to go through!

Not as good as Nando's, but still awesome!

Wednesday was fairly normal. We went to district meeting which was great, and were able to get a few things done at the mission office. Then we spent most of the day passing by referrals and potentials, but didn't have any luck. We were able to pass by Mauricio again which was awesome, we haven't seen him in long time.

On Thursday, we spent a LONG time getting organized. During a good chunk of weekly planning, we went through a stack of about 200 former investigator records, and organized all of them. We were able to separate them into people that we might be able to start teaching again, and we got a few solid potentials from that. Then, we went to meet with the other Elders to start an exchange. Elder Torres came with me to my area. He's a really great guy, and a super awesome missionary.

Friday was a fairly busy day; we got a lot done. We woke up and were able to do some studies, but had to leave early to meet with Francisco. He was, as usual, super funny and crazy, and we went over the baptismal interview questions with him. He's struggling a bit with baptism, but he really does want to get baptized. He has a few issues we need to solve before he can get to that point. Then we went to Hermana Escobedo, who lives SUPER far away. It took about an hour and a half on foot and bus. She fed us lunch, and it was SO good as always, so super worth it. She's Peruvian, and she fed us some classic Peruvian dishes which were awesome. I've eaten at a couple of Peruvian people's houses, and they always have potatoes with some cool creamy sauce called Papa a la Huancaína that is super good. We eat it every time we go to a Peruvian's house. Then after her, we visited with Hermano Sanchez. We were able to solve some of the problems he has with the church, and hopefully he will want to come back to church soon. He's still really cool though, and really loves visiting with us. Then we went to visit Eddy, but sadly, as we walked up to his door, he called and said that something came up at work and couldn't make it. Then we went back to the apartment, got Elder Torres' stuff, and met back up with the Elders. It was an awesome exchange!

Saturday was really good, and we were able to find a couple of solid investigators which is always awesome. We met with a referral from the Zone leaders I used to live with, and he was pretty interested! He was an avid reader of the Bible, and tried to Bible bash a little bit, but luckily Elder Durgante actually knows a LOT about the Bible so we were able to dodge his attacks a little bit. He was willing to find out more about the gospel though, and give us a chance! Pretty cool guy! We then went down to the metro, and we found a young guy from Venezuala (I think), and we were able to teach him a little bit about the Restoration right there in the metro stop! It was awesome, and he was pretty nice. We then went down to go to the baptism of Ivan, an investigator of some of the sisters in our district. It was really cool, and President even came! It was really special—he's a crazy solid guy.

Sunday was good, although it was hard to do a lot being New Year's Eve. Church was only an hour long, but Jesus (not Jesus the Christ but our investigator—haha) was able to come to church! Yeni couldn't come sadly, but he totally surprised us! Eddy also came, which was nice, since he hadn't come for the past two weeks (which was stressing us out a little bit). We were so happy he was able to come this time. Then after church, we went with two members to visit Hermano Mendoza. He doesn't get many visitors still; hopefully we can work with the ward to get more members to visit him. After that, we went to visit Rafael, the recent convert who we're trying to get to the temple. They ended up feeding us, which was awesome. After that we had the brilliant idea to go contacting on the metro, assuming (and assuming correctly) they everyone would be out, and it was PACKED with TONS of weird people. It was really funny, but we weren't able to find anyone, sadly.

Monday was fairly chill. We spent another decent chunk of time going through the former investigator records, and then spent the rest of the day passing by some of them. One of them wants to start having lessons again, which is great. We spent the entire night walking around visiting these old investigators, and it was SO cold! I thought my toes were about to fall off! But it wasn't really that bad, we were just outside for too long. It's been fun trying to get creative with our time so that we're not outside for too long, but sometimes it's just unavoidable! It's been fine though—we have coats!

All in all, it was a pretty good week, we were able to do a lot of finding and some much-needed organizing. Today I just realized is my 5-month mark on the mission! It's crazy how fast it's already going by, and it's starting to stress me out a bit! The mission is so amazing. I've grown a ton, and have loved being able to focus 100% of my time on serving others. It's such a nice break from the rest of the stresses of the world!

I love you all so much! I hope you have a wonderful new year!

Elder James