WEEK 5 BAY CITY

Hey everybody!

another killer week out here. thank you all so much for the letters and support!

so this week had a few crazy things that happened. on tuesday i was on a trade off with elder derricott (my companion in the MTC)! cool huh? we had a lot of fun! except neither of us has driving priveledges so we were on bikes all day.... haha i do not know how missionaries used to get anything done! it is sooo hard to get places with bikes! we just had to keep leaving them by trees when we would go door knock and things. and there are hardly any sidewalks in bay city so we were biking on the side of some huge roads! not fun at all.

we picked up some new investigators through one of our recent converts, Eloisa. That was awesome! we will be teaching these new pickups this week. Things in Eloisa's life have not been easy. they have some MAJOR issues in her house. like.... MAJOR. haha i dont wanna go into too much detail, but her children and grandchildren get into a lot of trouble, including with the law, so whenever we are over there it is drama central.

wednesday we went and taught some more lessons and things and had another good day. dennis (mentioned before, one of our ivestigators) has been an eternigator (someone who investigates for eternity). So we sort of threw down in our lesson with him about the importance of baptism and things. then guess what? he came up to us at church yesterday and said he made the decision to get baptized!! how awesome is that? but there are A TON of moving parts there and he needs to get married first so it might be a while haha. then we visited justin and chanielle and that went well. they were both progressing so well months ago, but have since stopped. but they are starting to move along a little better now. we are going to start our stop smoking program with them asap so elder stevenson and i have been studying that a lot.

thursday we randomly decided to visit joseph’s old house to see if his sister knew where he went. and guess who answered the door? joseph! so we talked with him and he just kept saying how he was praying we would come back and things! he is such a sweet old guy. so that was a miracle that he was still around. he also said he had been cutting back on his smoking! without us even asking him to! so we have gone back a few times to teach him and things, and he was so excited for church and we got him a razor and cream to shave and everything. but he has a problem with his memory... so when we went to get him for church he had forgotten which was so sad cuz he is one of our top investigators. hopefully things will go better next sunday.

we were able to get in contact with the moskals this week and teach them a few times. they LOVE looking at the pictures in our scriputres and things. they do that forever! haha and they are all SO EXCITED to get baptized, but they haven’t come to church except that one time. so that has been a struggle. we will continue to work there. but last night we went there and started playing some street ball with parell when a bunch of black guys from the moskals house came out so we all started playing! it was soo sick. we didn’t play a game, just shot around and stuff. it was really cool. check that off my mission bucket list haha.

2 more things. so last week we knocked into Connie, super prepared looking for a church and things. we wet back to visit her cuz she didnt come to church this week. and she came out gunz-a-blazin and was like i read the BoM and it seems like it is just a personal record of stuff that happened and this isnt for me. she kept rolling like that forever saying some pretty unintelligent stuff. everything she said elder stevenson and i could have refuted soooo hard and shown bible scriptures to back it all up, but we didnt. she was just saying some of the most ridiculous stuff, and would barely let us talk. so we just bounced. we are pretty sure she got anti-mormon preached to on sunday cuz the stuff she was saying was not true at all. claiming she read the whole BoM and stuff when she clearly didnt. satan knows how to deceive even the elect, so be wary!!

saturday night we had permission to stay out late and see the fireworks which were ok, not as good as everyone says. but i felt like i was in a zombie appocalypse movie because there were cars parked EVERYWHERE and there were soo many people just wandering the streets. it was nuts! we met a tent-full of catholics who were selling hot dogs and they were very nice. they bought us hot dogs and things and that was so awesome.  then we started talking to a lady named gloria in her driveway. she was super educated on the bible and was hostile about the bom at first, but we were able to talk to her about it and clarify some things. then she started talking about how hard her life has been because of her husband (they just separated) and things. it was extremely sad. we talked with her forever! she was definitely prepared to meet us, so we will go back and visit her soon.

im runnin out of time! so thats it for this week! oh except dad, it is sooooo humid and hot here and guess what? no one here believes in air conditioning!~ i dont get it!!! we go into houses and they are barely cooler than outside! people just live their lives in sweat and it is miserable! i HATE IT! haha thought you would appreciate that.

love you all!! have a good week!