Hey everyone. Here's February.
This week was a crazy week, we finally finally met the goals we meant to do, 20 lessons and 140 contacts, it was finally met. We are happy.
So over this past week, we went working really hard out there, we worked on talking to everyone, and we did just that, no matter what we were doing, no matter where we were heading, no matter how fast we were pedaling, we would stop and talk to the people, in their yards, in the street, and just talk about their lives. When talking to someone, a point that they bring up about their lives will always be related to a point of the gospel. It’s been fun and we have found numerous potential investigators this week alone. It’s been a lot of fun.
Monday was a good one, we were able to spend our preparation day with the other elders, we went shopping at Costco, and did all of this stuff. It was fun. After p-day ended we had a chance to have dinner with our bishop and his wife. That was cool, it was the first time we had a chance to get to know him a little bit better, and his wife as well. That was a great appointment and it was an opportunity to get their focus more on missionary work more in their daily lives.
We had made a new investigator the previous week, that was living in the same house as Luis Santos another investigator that we have been teaching, his name is Leo and he is 14. We taught him an intro into the Book of Mormon and talked more about the restoration of the gospel, and he said to come back and share more, so after Bishops dinner we headed over there, our appointed time of 7 pm. But he wasn’t there, his Aunt was there (she’s Luis’ wife) and she was like “I don’t think he was interested much in your message, he just has these bad ideas in his head about what life is, and so he doesn’t want to listen right now” so instead we met with her, and her son, they are both non-members, and so that was good. She isn’t interested in joining the church right now because she has her roots elsewhere when it comes to religion. That was that.
We had to quickly bike up to Redwood City to Cesars house from there in East Palo Alto, because we had an appointment with him at 8, so we got there, and it was the first time we were going to meet with him to teach him the lessons again. Cesar is the husband of the primary president of our ward. He is awesome, and is really friendly with us, we told him we had to teach him the lessons in Spanish even though his English is nearly perfect, so we did just that. It was a great lesson, and he seemed to know a lot more than he puts off to know, and so we asked a lot of questions in order to gain an understanding of his knowledge of the gospel, and most importantly we invited him to act, just as we are called to do. He had a question about why don’t we revere the Virgin Mary the same way that Catholics do (he is Catholic) and so we explained that we revere her and a chaste virtuous daughter of God that was worthy to bear the very Son of God, but that we don’t worship her, because she is but a mere human, and that we worship God and his son Jesus Christ only. He seemed to have took that answer well. We will be finishing the first lesson tonight at 8.
On Tuesday night, we had a great night, we were able to work in East Palo Alto primarily, we were able to meet with the Zamora family, they are a little less active in the church, and they are the ones that have 11 kids. So it was a really great to see how they doing and to see what we could do to help them out right now. They are moving to another house (which is long overdue) and that was good that we were able to lift their spirits some since they are going through a lot of trials right now (all in the game of 11 kids right?)
After that we had a chance with visit with our ‘investigator’ Edgar, he is the son of one of my favorite families here in the ward the Alfaro family, he just turned 8, but his parents want him to have the whole missionary lessons before he gets baptized in order to make sure that he understands the gospel as best as he can to make the proper decision to be baptized or not to be. We have to teach him really slow, and with a lot of visuals of course, and we can not take more than 15 minutes to teach. Teaching 8 year olds is hard work. But we manage to help him understand, so it’s good. We were fed some by the Alfaro’s as we always are, this week they had homemade chile rellenos (they were really nice mom)
After that we had the Ruiz family (as we do every single Tuesday) for dinner. This week was delicious, it was catered (he has some catering points with another restaurant so I think he got this food for nearly free from them) it was from another restaurant called Paradise, and it’s Persian/Iranian food. Basmati rice, beef kebab, chicken kebab, seared tomatoes, and seared jalapenos. It’s quite amazing. Brother Ruiz had taken us there a few weeks back, and he loves that restaurant. He tells us in the 20 years he has lived here in the US he has never eaten commercialized food in restaurants like McDonalds or Panda Express. He’s a boss.
Some other highlights from this week is that we have been able to get to know a lot of the members in the other areas this week, and had dinner with 3 of them. It was awesome, but the downside of that is, is that 3 members took us to Panda Express 3 days in a row this week. It was interesting to have that much panda express.
We did a lot of work, and we had 7 non-member lessons. The most interesting non-member lesson this week was on the street last night(Sunday night) on University Ave in Palo Alto (it’s basically about a mile+ of really expensive stores and restaurants, right down the street from Stanford) their names were Kevin and Shannon, and they looked visibly… under some influence, but still at the same time, normal enough to listen. I was with Elder Terry temporarily, and so we taught them about the basic tenets of the church. They understood, but they somehow took what we talked about, and brought into how drinking is bad and drugs are okay. So we heard their 10 minutes about how drugs are okay for your body and mind since they were put on the earth. We then kept bearing testimony about the church and the gospel, and asked them if we could leave them with a prayer, they then asked if they could kneel because that's how they pray, and so at 9 pm on University ave, on the sidewalk we knelt and prayed with them. Pretty weird and cool at the same time haha. After the prayer, he was like “This is going to sound super weird, but I want to give you a momento for this time we spent together this evening, and he pulled out a mini pink lighter, and signed his name in it with sharpie, and so did Shannon, and then they walked away. Super weird.
I know I’m supposed to write about my experiences on my mission, like about lessons and stuff, but I love writing about food experiences (I should go into foodblogging?... nah) anyway there’s always a best meal of the week, usually it’s with the Ruiz’s here, but this week it was different. Elder Phillips my companion has been wanting to go get sushi like for the past 3 weeks. Just non-stop nagging “Let’s go to Little Madfish and get some sushi” so finally on Saturday, we got 2 other Elders to come along, Elder Payne and Terry, and we went to this restaurant in Redwood City called Little Madfish, and we all got sushi, it’s basically selling sushi by the roll, and so I must say I have had sushi a few times on my mission, and have never really liked it a whole lot, just kind of like “Well okay, I can see why people would like it, but…” but this time was a lot different, this was really good stuff. I thought you needed to pay 40 dollars to get full at a sushi restaurant, but this place, 10 dollars and I was satisfied. I got the Philadelphia roll and the California Roll. From what I have here it’s http://www.littlemadfishrwc.com/Menu/menu.html
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