Week 35 in Mesquite, TX

OK, so this week was not quite as exiting as last weeks but there were a couple of things that happened. first off my companion threw me under the bus. At our first ward council meeting last Sunday (my first Sunday here) my companion told the bishop that i would be willing to give a talk if he needed one in the future. Then on Wednesday we had a meeting with the bishop to discuss the ward and the bishop assigned me a talk. He said that i would fill the time for the youth speaker. Then he told me that my talk would be during a farewell for H. H. and there were a ton of people there. So i talked about time and gardening. How the Lord often refers to his work as a garden and how it is hard to tell sometimes if the fruits or vegetables are ready yet. I compared it to a man who was waiting for his tomatoes to grow and how there were no tomatoes growing, but after he started watering it and digging around it he realized that what he thought was a tomato plant was really a potato plant. and he was able to bring forth much fruit, and stuff like that. Then the man was waiting for big red bell peppers on a Jalapeno plant and he was waiting for his watermelons to grow and ripen from their orange color to bright green. and how he was confused and asked the farmer Old-Mc-Farmer-Heavenly Father for help. and how Heavenly Father told that those watermelons were actually pumpkins. So sometimes we think that people are not ready when they really are ready and we just need to ask and invite. I was glad that my talk was first because after was this really great musical number by H. H. family and it had most of the audience in tears and H talk was amazing. He talked about being an example. He did a great job.

Now on the the more funny part of the week. So we are teaching new member lessons to a girl named M. She was baptized about a month and a half ago . But anyway we do a lesson with these small rubber bears with a light inside when you hit it. We do the Gospel of Jesus Christ (faith, repentance, baptism, holy ghost, endure to the end) and we start by saying that you are clean then we draw on him every time he sins. After that we say he meets the missionaries and gets baptized and throw him into the backpack and pull out a new bear and say he is clean. Then we hit him and we say that he has the light of Christ or the holy ghost and then give it to them. What happened that was funny was that M. is a little sensitive and we drew on him and started to tear up. then my companion thought it would be funny to start to cut it up. and he cut an ear and leg off. and M. is now horrified. After we put the bear in the backpack and pulled up the new bear she said" that is not the same bear!" we ignored that and tried to continue with the holy ghost my companion hit the bear and the light didn't glow. We realized that it was broken. Then he said that he needs to get baptized again and put it back into the back pack pulled the light out from the other one and ripped a hole in the new one and shoved the light in there. He pulled it back out and the bear was deflated and the face had sunk in. It looked terrible. But when we hit it it would not turn on. so my companion reaches his hand in the bear and grabs the light and throws it on the ground and it lights up. then he shoves it back in. and M terrified says"your ruining it"  then we finish the lesson. after she wanted to see the other bear and she wanted us to fix it. so we cleaned the dead bear and she made me melt the leg back on. and that didn't turn out to well. i ended up setting it on fire. after i blew it out the leg had melted off the body and now it looks like a burnt amputy. lesson gone terribly wrong.

My last story for the week was that I caught a chicken. We were doing service at a members house by fixing a fence and they had chickens. so naturally i just had to catch one and hold it. it was pretty exiting. i didn't have my camera so i don't have a picture but another missionary took pictures and i will get it from him and send them to you. 

well that is that. i know that the church is true and y'all have a great week.

 

Below are some pictures taken from some amazing people down in Texas and sent to us via text messaging and Facebook: