Monday, September 15, 2014

Eventful Week

This week was a pretty eventful week, right after district meeting me and the district leader switched companions for an exchange. Usually the exchanges are for three days but this one was over night and we switched back that next day right before bedtime. I went up to a super small town called roundup. My companion while I was in Malta a while back, elder Sumner served there for quite a while. I knew this before I went, and EVERYONE knew who elder Sumner was. They still talk about him. Roundup has a rust problem in their water, so it's really bad to drink and so we went to the church and got some filtered water in big gallon buckets. It was pretty fun up there.

Friday night we got home and our neighbor is a big hunter and he was home before us and elder Wilson sees something in the back of his truck. We get a flashlight and go and see what it was. Sure enough, it was a small doe already gutted and bleeding everywhere in the back of his truck, I saw it and almost threw up. I've never seen a dead animal that was freshly dead and already gutted freshly. It was too dark to see the whole thing but I tried to get a good picture. I think it would be cool to go hunting, but I don't think I could handle the stuff you do to it after you kill it, I probably couldn't get the courage to kill the thing either.

We then had dinner on Saturday with the Mc, family, we are trying to save up our miles because we are very VERY limited and we usually run out of miles about this time of the month. So in order to save miles we started walking down the highway 312 which has no shoulder so we are walking on the road and when a car would come close we would walk off and then keep going. It's about 10 miles to their house.

One long walk

We started walking around 3:30 and we had dinner at about 5. As we were walking we saw the dead raccoon on the road which you see a picture attached. We also took some selfies! I'm really bad at selfies. That's probably the 3rd selfie ever that I have taken. It got about 4:45 and we were still really far away from their house. So we called him and he came and picked us up. But he had to drive back to where we lived because he needed to fill up with gas! So it was basically pointless that we walked that far. Some people stopped and asked if we needed a ride because nobody walks along that road. But of course they were women and it's against the rules to ride in a car with just a woman. But the dinner was really good! We also thought that we could just hitch a ride on one of the coal freight trains going that direction we needed to go but we thought that would be a really bad idea. We just laughed about it though.

Apple Enchiladas for dessert
On Sunday we had dinner with the G. family.  It satisfies me to say that It was really good food. But the dessert was the best.
I've never heard of Apple enchiladas. There is a picture attached but it is basically the stuff that your would put in an apple pie but you wrap it in a tortilla and bake it and eat it with ice cream. Besides the name of apple enchiladas, it was the weirdest dessert that if have eaten so far, but it has bee the best.
Hope everyone has had a good week and hope to see some emails come in. 


-Elder Daniels

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Oh my aching back

Our mission is going through a purification process. Sending things home that we have collected over time, and do not need, or non approved media, this is in preparation for the missionaries to go to the temple. Even though I did not have much to send home, I noticed I had a few things. I am so excited to be able to attend the temple in the next two weeks! It is always a good thing to go to the temple whenever possible. Whenever you get the chance, you should always take it. nothing beats going to the temple.

We were able to meet with J. who we have scheduled to be baptized this coming Tuesday. We met with him on Wednesday to make sure that he still wants to be baptized, and also to finish the lessons. We were able to cover the topic of chastity. The topic of chastity is always a hard subject to explain without making weird. We still needed to finish the lessons of laws and ordinances. We were able to meet with him on Friday and finish the lessons, as well as get everything set up for the baptism. We scheduled the baptismal interview to be this Sunday. He is ready to be baptized!

One other thing that happened this week, happened on Friday as well. We got a text from one of our investigators, J. (a different person), who was in town. We went to see him first thing the next day. He still has a desire to be baptized, but his dad doesn't want him to until he turns 18. He told us that his sister got baptized in another church, and his dad let her be baptized even though she was not 18 either. We told him that the devil doesn't care if people get baptized in the wrong church, but he cares if they are going to be baptized in the right church! We are struggling a little bit on how we can help his dad let him be baptized now and not when he his 18.

This ward is a very missionary work minded ward. We are very privileged to go on splits with the members every Sunday and Tuesday. It's kind of hard for me to go on the splits when I don't know the area and the people to well. Most of the time we go and see the people that the members have in mind. I'm getting to know the area better and better each day though.

One other thing that happened this week was really back breaking. We helped our elders quorum president pour some concrete stairs. He had about 20 stairs that wrapped around a retaining wall. We went over at 10 in the morning and helped out making sure the forms that we made were going to hold up and there were not going to be any blowouts while we were pouring. We started pouring around 2 and finished around 6. The reason why it took so long was because he didn't order enough concrete and we had to wait until the truck came back. One thing is for sure, concrete work is really…REALLY hard bending over all day is no fun and for the next day my back was aching, along with Elder Wilson's.
Pouring concrete stairs















Local HS football game
They also went to the local HS football game. Not sure, but we think the second J. may be playing. At the very least, hopefully someone they are working with was at the game. Then again, it is a small town, so maybe almost the whole town  is not home during the games.