Family!
This past week was a
crazy week. But crazy in a good way, so all is well! Let me tell
you why it was crazy.
We got two new Spanish
missionaries.
So now there are 4 of
us here in the Dayton Spanish area. The new Elders arrived on
Thursday, and they have been living with us since that then. It's been a
little crazy having 4 Elders live in the apartment after spending all this time
only having the 2 of us. We weren't prepared to have them come live with
us, so our food that we normally eat ran out pretty quick, and all of those
stories you hear about missionaries living on ramen noodles and pop tarts came
true! But we made it to P-day, so we have food once again!
The new Elders are
super awesome. Their names are Elder Taylor and Elder Garcia. One
of them speaks Spanish as their native language. Can you guess which one?
=)
But anyway, with 2
more Spanish Elders, we'll be able to cover this massive area (it's literally
so big that I don't even know where the boundaries are) a little bit
better. They'll be living down south in Dayton when their apartment is
ready, so they will most likely cover the south part of the area and me and
Elder Graf will work up north. Hopefully that division will allow us to
focus more on specific areas and people instead of trying to cover
everything. But with this change, we've already seen a huge increase in
interest for missionary work in the branch. They are all getting more
excited, and it's pretty amazing to see how almost overnight their excitement for
the work completely changed. I think this addition is really going to
help the work get moving here.
I had a few cool
things happen this past week. We got back in contact with one of our
investigators who we hadn't seen in almost a month. We had been teaching
them pretty regularly, but all of the sudden they stopped answering their
phone. We tried stopping by, but we could never catch them home.
Then this past Sunday we sent them yet another text, and they
responded! Their phone had been broken, and they just barely got it
replaced. We were super excited! We also found out they had
actually been trying to get our number by calling the church, so that was super
cool too!
We visited a less
active we hadn't been able to see for a while this week, and we compared him to
the Lamanitish woman Abish. (Alma 19:16) It might sound a
little weird, but for his circumstance it worked pretty well. We were a
little apprehensive about comparing him to a Lamanitish woman handmaiden, but
it ended out being a pretty good lesson.
We finally got to play
futbol again, and I'm still not all that great. To illustrate that
point: I tried to steal the ball from our branch president and ended up
slipping and falling flat on my back. I'm going to buy cleats later today,
and maybe that will help...
Just before coming
here to the library to email, I got to do my first anointing for a blessing...
in Spanish! We went to give a blessing to a lady who works with one of our
members. She had a brain aneurysm, so she wasn't conscious for the
blessing. But her whole family was there, and it was a little
nerve-wracking doing the anointing in another language, especially since they
were recording the whole thing. But the Spirit was there really strong,
and it was a great experience.
Well, I'm just about
out of time, so I'll wrap this up. Thanks for the emails and
letters! Hope you all have a great week!
Love,
Elder Foote
P.S. I'll try to
do better with pictures next week.