Hola Familia!
The past week and a half has been pretty tough for us in the work. We had interviews with Pres. on Thursday and we told him that we’ve been struggling to find appointments and that tracting hadn’t been very successful lately. He shared a passage out of Helaman…5 I think? it basically tells a story of when the Mulekites go to where the Jaredites used to be and they find that there is not wood there to make houses. So instead, they learn to be great cement mixers. Our Pres. told us that maybe we need to find the ‘cement’ in our area and work with that instead.
We’ve been looking for things all week that may qualify as ‘cement’ but so far we’ve been unsuccessful. But now we’re going to try to get the members more involved by sharing with them a talk by Elder Bednar called ‘becoming a preach my gospel missionary’ that has a lot of stuff about member missionary work in it.
We had a pretty cool experience yesterday. All this week we had been out tracting every night from 8:00 to 9:00 because all of our appointments would fall through or nobody would schedule us that late. I don’t really like tracting that late because people don’t like to answer the door when it’s dark and when they do answer the door, they’re usually not very receptive. So we were tracting last night at 8 again and we knocked three doors with no answer like usual. We have been trying to figure out why our nights have been so slow in the work and last night we came to the conclusion that maybe we should try to be more positive about tracting. So on the fourth door, right after we made that decision, we ran into a family who’ve had missionaries teach them before and they let us in. We had a good ‘get to know you’ lesson and they said that they’d like to have us back sometime later in the week. It was a cool experience and now we’re more resolved to be more positive about everything in general.
We’ve been running into a lot of Hispanic contacts lately in the trailer parks around our area. But the trailer parks are the only places we’ve been having success lately so we have 5 Spanish appointments this week. Luckily there is a family in our branch that can translate for us. Its funny too because I have to say Book of Mormon as “El Libro De Mormon” or the Spanish people don’t get it. Maybe I’ll come home knowing a different language after all.
Last week I went on a companion exchange with the zone leaders and I got to stay in Lake Orion for a night. We ate with a member who was Melba Crow’s Grandson! (A Ward member)You’ll have to tell her when you see her.
The members here have been giving us alot of food so I haven’t had to buy much. Fruit is really cheap out here. Especially apples and strawberries so I have been eating a lot out here. Romeo is famous for their apple orchards and the cider they make is AMAZING. If you buy it straight from the orchard then it comes unpasteurized and tastes great.
Tomorrow we’re doing some service for our Branch President to help them get ready for a Halloween Youth dance this Friday in their barn. They said they usually have about 100-150 youth show up which is cool because we only have about 10 in our branch. This branch does a TON of service projects so the town knows us really well.
On Saturday we went to a members house to help them cut wood. It was fun and I got to teach Elder Erickson how to use a chainsaw. Oh and I got to cut a tree down too which was pretty exciting/nerve racking.
Romeo Michigan is a pretty fun town. The Lake we’re closest to is Lake Orion but I’m not sure exactly how far away it is. One of the members told us that unless you’ve had 3 generations of family living in this town, you’re considered an “outsider”. A couple other cool things I found out about Romeo – The town used to be the last stop before Canada on the underground railroad. A lot of blacks just decided to stay here so we still run into a lot of black neighborhoods. Also, after Hitler attacked Poland in WW2, a lot of Poles came and settled here. Because of that, there are a lot of different last names here.
Everyone out here LOVES Halloween. It’s pretty different from Detroit where everyone hated Halloween. We ran into a lady who has a huge Halloween Village kind of like our Christmas one. She said that she loves Halloween more than Christmas haha.
We’ve only biked a couple times because it’s been raining the past week. Most of our appointments are pretty far away too so we take the car usually.
That’s awesome PG is doing well! And great that Davis beat AF!! Especially at they BYU competition because that one always seemed to favor AF.
Hope everyone is doing well and BYU keeps up the wins! Tell the kids I love them and they better keep the band going!
Elder Rushton