Hello family! Well, it’s the halfway point of the transfer. Things are still excellent here! I love California. Seriously. It’s funny how a place becomes your home. I definitely will miss it here. I just love the people and the palm trees and the sunny days and everything else. It still is weird, but this is definitely the place where I needed to be! Who would’ve thought?Let’s see, an update on people.
The Luceros are doing great. For the last week and a half we had planned to read in the introduction to the Book of Mormon with them, and then get Brother Lucero (non member) to pray right then, with us, and then we were going to ask him to be baptized. This is what President Watrous wants us to do with everyone when we first teach them. And even though B. Lucero has been taught for a long time, we wanted to do it with him anyway. And it went really well. The spirit was definitely there, and we asked him to be baptized. He said he wasn’t ready. We pretty much expected that. But we had to ask. That’s what missionaries do! But for the next little bit that we were there talking to the girls about their baptisms, and when we left, he definitely looked like he was thinking really hard. Good! Who knows?The Lopez family is also doing great. Everything’s set to finish up the last couple of lessons and get their program together. And after saying it over and over again, we finally feel like people are starting to fellowship them in the ward. Good!
Raven’s good. 'We are still teaching him. Also still teaching Cesar and getting him ready for baptism. We found out he smokes but just because he’s bored. He said that the addictive properties don’t affect him, and he can completely stop whenever he wants. Alrighty, we’ll see. Cesar understands and remembers everything we teach, but he definitely still has some kind of disability. We don’t know what though. When we started talking about prophets and asked him why it would be good to listen to a prophet he said “because it’s a straight shot to the celestial kingdom.” True, true. We were glad he remembered the lesson about the Plan of Salvation a couple of days earlier! He also asked us if after the resurrection, if the pre-earth life would be destroyed-because there “would be no need for it.” Interesting, I’ve never thought about that one before. This is why it’s great talking to all the odd people we teach, because their perspectives are so different, and their questions are so much fun. I love it!
On Saturday we went to teach Nicole. Oh man. That morning she called and asked me if it was okay that she was already wearing her Halloween costume-because that night was our ward activity and she was going to it. I said that was fine. She said she should’ve called the night before to check with us and she was sorry. But I said its okay, you can be wearing it. She said she just wants to respect us and she’s sorry and blah blah. Really, Nicole is one of the most interesting characters ever. I will try my best to do an impression of her someday. We brought one of our ward missionaries with us to the appointment and when we opened the door, there she was, Snow White! The thing is, Nicole is very small, thin, super pale, black short hair, and always wears red or pink lipstick. So her doing Snow White makes sense. Yet she still wore a wig and oh wow, she looked pretty funny. It was so hard not to be distracted and look at each other and laugh. There she is sitting on the couch as snow white as we talked to her about prophets. Then there’s a knock on the door. Nicole freaks out and doesn’t want to answer it. That’s normal. She asks us if she should answer it. We say yes. She doesn’t want to because she thinks it’s her mom. Then you hear someone say something through the door, and Nicole’s 2 year old son George goes “Grandma!” So Nicole lets them in. It’s her mom and her grandma. We have never met them, and we’ve always been curious about Nicole’s mom. Nicole swears her mom doesn’t love her. Her mom is in these little black stretch pants and leopard print shirt and sweeps into the home and is like “oh Nicole, oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company, oh George! Oh Nicole, have you eaten..blah blah blah.” She was very dramatic and funny and came in with pizza and gave us all pizza as she talked the entire time and kept moving around, doing Nicole’s dishes, and cleaning her house and, well it was pretty hilarious to us, even though Nicole was distressed. I asked her mom where she was from and she said “Oh, we’re Assyrian Babylonian. We’re east Catholic, Nicole was baptized as a child…” and Nicole is going “Mother, please, Mother. you weren’t supposed to come until later. Mother…” Very funny. So apparently her family is from Iran. Who knew? Assyrian Babylonian. That’s a first from me. I guess I’m wrong, but I sure thought the Assyrian and Babylonian empire were destroyed a long time ago. Pretty much her mom is not what we expected. She is just a flashy/dramatic/nagging mom. And as she was doing her dishes, our member said she wishes her mom would come over and do her dishes at her house and Nicole pipes up and offers to come over and do her dishes for her. It was one of the best teaching appointments I’ve had: Snow white and her mom.That’s probably the best story of the week.
There are always lots of good stories. This week we should be pretty busy too. We have to go on splits a couple of times, and that should be crazy. Good to be busy! We’re just trying to find those new investigators, so that after these people are baptized, there will still be people to teach.
Just in case you were wondering what we’re doing here on Halloween…well, we’re doing normal missionary work! Last year we were supposed to be in the apartment at 6:00pm, studying, if we didn’t already have set appointments to go to. But this year we are to be out working as usual! So we’ll be doing that. Trick or treat, we brought you the Book of Mormon! And today we will be carving pumpkins as a district to celebrate!I can’t believe how time is flying. Everyday I love being a missionary more and more! It’s crazy! It’s odd and feels a little, uh, scary, to think I won’t be doing this much longer. So I try not to think about it! We’re still sprinting! I love you all so much!
Love,Emily
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