This Thanksgiving Week

This week has been pretty sweet! We met with Ty and Atiti again. They are doing very good. Atiti had a question for us because she said her mom was a devout Southern Baptist. We had taught Atiti last time that not just anybody can baptize, and how you need to have the proper authority. She said she had told her mom that, and her mom flipped out and said we were wrong, and that it didn't matter who baptized you. She asked us if there were any scriptures in the Bible that she could show her mom to prove to her that you need to have the proper authority. Which is really cool because everything we've taught her has just made sense to her.

We also had a great thanksgiving! We ate at our Ward Mission Leader's house with his family. We ate most of the same food as we eat in Utah, but NO MASHED POTATOES! We did have some sweet potato pie though. We also had some "cornbread dressing" it's really just stuffing, but for some reason it's called cornbread dressing down here.

We met with Rita again. She's doing very good. We are going to setup another baptism date since she couldn't make her last one because of a doctor visit.

We also met with Bone again. He's doing OK, but he's really just having a hard time with the Word of Wisdom. He'd be able to quit drinking a lot easier if he would get out of the empty lot he hangs out at a lot of the time (since most everyone there struggles with the Word of Wisdom).

We also went on exchanges twice this week. I went out to our Zone Leader's area one day, and we met some really interesting people. We met a Deacon from one of the many Baptist churches down here. We were talking to him in his front yard. We were explaining the Restoration, and he was certainly not open to it, but we kept talking for about ten minutes. He said to us, "You mentioned there was a modern day prophet, who is it?" I said it started with Joseph Smith, and as soon as I said that he flipped out and said, "Nope, nope, nope, nope. If it's anyone other than Jesus then it's wrong." He then walked inside and as left we said "What about Noah, or the other prophets?" But he was done with us :(

We also met a guy who was actually genuinely interested in the Gospel. While we were teaching him on the street, his phone kept going off, and he'd pick it up and say "just come by" and hang up. He actually had about 4 different phones on him, and when we asked him why, he said they were for work. He also said he was making way good money. Then, after we were done teaching, and walking away, he asked us if we wanted some drugs... We said no and kept walking. He was really nice though.

It's been a pretty good week. We will see what happens next week!

Also, one more thing, the church is doing an initiative called Light the World. Y'all need to go to www.mormon.org to check it out!

Love,

Elder Jones

It's almost thanksgiving!

This week was very interesting. First off, we have a new person on
date for baptism! His street name is Bone. We met him last Friday when
we were on bikes. He flagged a down and said he was ready to hear us
out. I guess some other missionaries had tried to teach him before. He
was sitting in an empty lot where there are a lot of homeless people
and drugs and alcohol (and gang violence) but we decided to stop by
anyways. We taught the restoration and gave him a pamphlet. That was
all last Friday, and so this Tuesday we came back at 4:00 like we
scheduled with him, and as it turns out, he was actually there, and he
had read the pamphlet.
Then we taught him about the Book of Mormon.
The next day we met him again and he had read 4 chapters, so we taught
him the plan of salvation.
The next day he had read through the pamphlet a lot and had some
questions on how we repent, so we taught him that and also taught him
about the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The next day we taught him about the word of wisdom, and yesterday we
followed up with him on that and taught him some more commandments.
It's going to be very interesting to see where this goes. A lot of
times people are apprehensive about baptizing homeless people because
they sometimes just get baptized so they can get bishop's store house
food for free, but we don't get that feeling about Bone (Michael). But
it will be interesting to see where this goes.

We also met a completely crazy lady. She told us she was married to
bugs bunny. Here is a quote from her
"Bugs bunny! buuugs bunny! BUGGS BUNNAYYY! 7, 7. Lucky number 7! You
see the slots, you want 7. 7. 7. Lucky 7. BUGGS bunny. Born 1987.
Illuminati bugs bunny. I gave a man $5,000,000. Then I gave him 7. 7
milllliiioooon dollars! 7. Beyoncé."

I'm really not making any of that up. It was really weird, but also really sad.

We also taught these two girls named Ty and Atiti. We had been trying
to teach her friend Timeka, but she is always really busy. Ty and
Atiti are actually really open to the Gospel. We had a really good
lesson with them, and we'll be meeting with them tomorrow, so we'll
see how it goes!

We haven't been able to meet with Rita lately because her friend got
cancer and she's been busy helping her.

We had dinner with the Larsen family in our ward. They are really
cool. Brother Larsen has a whole factory in his shed where he makes
bullets which is really cool. He also went on a huge rant about the
election, and how the results of it lifted him out of a deep
depression.

Anyways this week was pretty great! I can't wait for thanksgiving!

-Elder Jones