Family!
Not too much out of
the ordinary this week. Our branch mission leader moved back to Puerto
Rico this past week, so we all said goodbye to him, and we are now branch
mission leader-less. This member moved here last May, so I was here for
basically the same amount of time as he was. Crazy...
We had a great lesson
with Elian's mom this past week. She came into town for just a few days
to visit, so we met up to talk with her about the baptism that's coming up.
We gave her a Book of Mormon about 2 months ago, and she was on page 350
(!) when we met with her! I have never had anyone read so much of the
Book of Mormon, and understand it too! But yeah, we answered some of the
questions she had about the church, including questions about baptisms for the
dead. It was a powerful lesson, and she was speechless when we read to
her about baptisms for the dead in the bible and testified of the truthfulness
of that doctrine. I have no doubt that she will be baptized when she
comes here to stay. She also said that she believed that God had taken
them out of New Jersey and placed them here in Ohio to save Elian spiritually.
I believe that. He is one of those elect individuals that it talks
about in D&C who only didn't have the truth because he didn't know where to
find it. I know that Heavenly Father took him out of a bad situation and
placed him here so that he could hear and accept the gospel.
In our lessons with
Elian this week, we had him teach us about the restoration and the plan of
salvation. In the second lesson he taught, he said to the
"investigator", "We're not here to pressure you or anything, but
you need to be baptized." =) He's already an awesome teacher, and he's
only 15! He's going to be an amazing missionary!
I went back to my old
area (the one I spent a year in) for an exchange last week. It was weird.
I imagine it's probably how it will feel when I come home.
Everything was really familiar, but it was different as well. It
was all the same people and places, but they had changed, just like I have
changed in the few months since I left. But it was lots of fun working
with Elder Bradford up there; it brought back lots of memories.
Now for a mini-list of
random Dayton-only events:
· Some guy tried to convince me that C++ is a
sport...
· As we were riding on the bus, the bus driver
saw someone having a BBQ in their front yard, so he pulled the bus over to the
side of the road, got out, bought a hot dog, talked to the guy for a few
minutes, then got back on the bus and started driving like nothing happened...
· I have successfully made friends with the
4-year old son of a member family. I taught him how to make a whistling
noise with a piece of grass.
· I helped an Uruguayan man put up a portable
garage in his back yard.
· We arrived at the downtown bus stop to hear a
man singing in a foreign language from an old and tattered bible. Upon
talking to him, we learned that he was singing a special psalm in Latin.
He said that he is one of 1,000 people in the U.S. that fluently speaks
Latin. His name is Kenneth.
· Our zone leaders' phone got stolen, so I took
part in a secret mission to recover the phone, which ended with the phone being
traded back for a power bar.
· As we finished a lesson with a less active
around 9:00, a random guy from Tegucigalpa Honduras wearing a suit
approached us out of the dark and began relating to us his conversion story to
Christianity. Very rarely to people approach us to talk about religion,
especially when it's dark out and the person doing the approaching is a
suit-wearing Honduranian...
One last story that
wasn't random enough to be included in the random-list. As you may
remember, near the beginning of this year I began to cut my own hair. A
certain family in the branch always took pleasure in lightly critiquing my
abilities, and they have never failed to comment each of the 4 or 5 times I
have attempted to cut my own hair. Well, the mom of the family told me
that this past week it was time for her 13 year-old son to get a haircut, so
she asked him how he would like it cut. His response was: "Cut it
like Elder Foote cuts his hair."! So I can now honestly say that my
hair-cutting skills have reached a point that I am causing envy here in the
branch... I might have to tone it down just a bit... =)
And that is all!
Hope all goes well out there in the wilderness! Good luck with
school!
Love,
Elder Foote
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| Elder Foote in Front of a Spanish Church |
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| Elder Foote With Evidence of the Old Debit Card Being Destroyed |
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| Elder Foote's Sunshine Package |
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| Elder Foote With Elian and a Service Elder |