Letter #77: Worth It!

So this week was crazy… Kinda like every week. haha.

So we start off the week and I got to go on exchanges with Elder Madsen and we had a super fun exchange in his area. We worked super hard and had some pretty sweet spiritual experiences. We had one with one of their investigators named A______. We went over and we started teaching her the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is was going really well and we started talking about Baptism and boom! She decides she wants to get baptized! It was really cool because she is struggling with an alcohol addiction but wants to get out and change for her young kids. She is like 30 or so years old. Then we had a couple experiences where we go by someone who was praying for us to come by and we helped them. It was super fun.

Then later on in the week, we were able to go by the guy who gave me the chili de arbol last week, and he let us teach him. His name is D____ and he is super cool. We had a good conversation about our church and about his religious beliefs. So eating that pepper was totally worth it!!!

We had a cool experience where we took I_____ out with us to teach some people. He was nervous at first but he is a natural teacher. We had some cool lessons with him and when we were done he asks us if we could just go on the streets and talk to people so we did that. It was really cool, he just has a desire to share the gospel with everybody.

I have seen quite a bit of police cars around our area lately. The other day they had the city on lock-down because some dude robbed a bank, shot two police officers, and had a hostage just like a mile away from us. We weren’t allowed to leave the apartment for a couple hours until they found him. Pretty crazy stuff. They had a bunch of helicopters just flying by all throughout the night.

On Saturday I had a super cool experience. We went with A______ and I______ to the Newport Beach Temple to do Baptisms for the Dead for their first time. It was a really cool experience to take two recent converts to the temple together and do Baptisms and Confirmations for their ancestors. It was awesome. They both loved it. I love those two.

Man… I love being a missionary. I love being out here. There is no place that I’d rather be.