Letter #50: LA Calling

This week has been awesome!!!! I am loving my new area up in Whittier it is awesome!

So to start it off we had a Noche de Hogar (FHE) with the Familia C__________. They are this really cool young family who hold a FHE every night and ask us to invite different people who we are working with to come join. So we had J_______ our recent convert, and then M________ a 17 year-old less-active girl who we got to come and invite her friend. It was a really good lesson and hopefully we are going to try and start teaching M________’s friend which would be sweet!

Then afterwards J_______ took us out to get taco’s from a taco truck, it was really cold that night but the taco’s were so good and they had this stuff called Champurrado (prob spelt that wrong) which was kinda like hot cocoa. It was so good. But we were talking with him and he has been divorced twice and hasn’t seen his kids in at least 5 years, and has no idea where they are currently at. He is such a nice guy. He was talking about how he feels like the church is a family and how he wants to help out as much as possible, so he could continue to feel that way. I love that fact about the church. Anywhere you go you can be part of the family of God and love and support each other.

We did service at the InterFaith Food Center which was fun. And we stayed after a bit to help the guy who runs the place unload a couple of extra things and he thanked us a bunch afterwards and gave us each (there were four of us) each a giant frozen rack of ribs… I am not sure how we are going to cook them but we might give them to a member and have a sweet bbq one of these days haha.

We have been working a lot with A_______ and her family. They are struggling a bit, basically it is just from lack of communication and differences in culture. We took the old bishop with us to a lesson and we kinda had a mini couples therapy with them. They seemed to have gotten better and they all came to the Thanksgiving activity that the ward put on, and then to church on Sunday which was good. We went over yesterday and there house was pretty chaotic so we decided to help them out and cooked them pancakes and then had a lesson which was super spiritual. It was cool how service set the tone for our visit and helped bring the spirit pretty quick.

We started teaching this lady named I______ who is really cool, we could tell she is kinda lonely and loves our visits. She calls us her ninos haha

We had a experience where we were going by this lady who was a referral from somewhere but we go by and we knocked and she comes to the door and before we say anything she invites us to come in… Pretty sweet, doesn’t happen to often haha. But we ended up not being able to go inside because there is a rule that you can’t enter a home unless there is a total of three males or three females over the age of 18. And she was just home with her daughter. But she told us to come by the next day. And so yesterday we go by and with the G______s they are a young couple, both converts and just super solid member missionaries. But we go by and they let us in and we had a super spiritual lesson with them. The mom and her daughter who is like 22 with a baby, both committed to coming to church. They loved what we talked about and want to learn more!!! Another thing which was funny was there house was already decorated for Christmas so we gave her a card from the LA temple visitors center which had a bunch of Christmas events on it and she was soooooooo excited about it. She loves Christmas more than anybody that I ever know. haha its a bit ridiculous.

Then today was our TEMPLE P-DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Man I love the temple. It was so nice and relaxing to go and do a session. We went to the LA Temple and boy that temple is huge! I got some dope pics that are pretty much worthy to put on an Ensign cover. The only bad part was waking up at 3:45 to get ready and go. I will send some pictures that Elder Lesa and I took. We bought some sick matching ties at JC Penny’s for three bucks!

Yeah that’s pretty much it for the week. I am so pumped for Thanksgiving and I will give y’all an update next week!