Hello family and friends. A HUGE thank you to my marvelous family for the package! I will keep getting fat on candy, and then get skinny by playing frisbee. It's genius! I hope you all enjoyed your reunions and family time. I was able to stay busy enough and laugh enough that I didn't really think much about home.
We'll get the fun, random stuff out of the way first.
The 4th of July was a little uneventful. We went up to this super sweet hill that over looks downtown, and it looked like there were people setting off fireworks right downtown. That was cool. On this hill, you can see my old area in the distance, and I could only imagine how crazy in was over there. I hope I'm back in East LA for next 4th of July. We had to be inside before any of the big fireworks started. Everybody was having BBQs and was acting like we didn't exist. Kinda lame. We were really hoping for an on-the-spot invite. (On the note of on-the-spot invites, we had two this week, and both involved carne asada tacos, MY FAVORITE!! I was excited about that)
I thought about Emmy on the 4th when we were eating at a place called Foster's Freeze. It's a lot like Ripples. (it's on Fletcher Drive near the LA river if you want to Google Maps it) We were in line and this guy starts mocking us under his breath to his wife. We start ignoring it, and then we hear another voice that was like, "oh wow..." kinda like "oh wow, are you really talking about them like that?" We thought that was cool and we turned around and started talking to the guy. He was super, super cool. Now, here's why I thought of Emmy. His wife is the President of Forever 21. Cool, huh? They are temporarily living in my area in some sweet new modern homes on a street I pass everyday. He went to a Singles ward with his friends back in the day all the time and said he always had a blast. He said he wasn't interested, but he came and sat at our table as we ate the whole time. He is about 40 or 50 and retired because he sold his Porsche restoration company and is now working for Jerry Seinfeld Porsche. So there's California for you. Super nice guy. Coolest part is that he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Looked super normal. But ya, there's the random story of the week.
Now, the "I love Latinos" story. We come home to our apartments, and there is a massive birthday party going on outside. I think it was the manager's family member or something. We live in a apartment complex full of latinos in the middle of Armenian-ville. So there's the party going on, they have live Mariachi, and the manager is right at the front and he offers us tacos. I'm pretty sure it was a peace offering so we wouldn't have any hard feelings about the noise. We go back into our house, and the music was so loud, that it sounded like it was coming from inside our house. It was hilarious. It gave us a chance to laugh out some frustration and stress with how our areas are going right now.
So now, down to business:
Elvia FINALLY GOT CONFIRMED! For little things, she missed the 3 weeks following her baptism, but she's back and every week she felt super bad that she wasn't there. She'll be solid. We're going to start pestering the bishop a bit to give her a calling or an assignment sometime soon.
So this week, I was in a trio with an Elder named Elder Alvarenga from Salvador. The last two transfers (2.5 months) he was one of our zone leaders. I will be in a trio this upcoming week as well, then he will be getting a trainee. We are trying to learn as much as possible in the time we have with him. We have the responsibility (pleasure, burden, opportunity, not sure how I feel about it) to cover two areas right now -- the area of me and Elder Smith, and the area of Elder Alvarenga and his future trainee. Our new "area" as a companionship is about 10 miles long, so we are using the car a ton...a little too much. There will be a lot of biking near the end of the month. We both had a bunch of stuff set going into this week, which required us to bounce back and forth a lot. We tried to be in each other's area a lot each day, but this upcoming week, we are probably going to take days in areas so we can "get into the groove" as the disco kids say. We'll also be a lot better at having members go out with him so that we can still go do our stuff.
As for new investigators, there's nobody that looks super prepared at the moment. We are still sorting a lot. We are going to start being a lot better at being consistent with the people that have the most potential. We're figuring out that our lack of working with the members is starting to hurt us a bit. We will be repenting this week. We have some good stuff planned and we are starting to figure out when people are actually in their houses, so this week will be pretty sweet.
I hope all went well this week with everybody. Next week, there will be fewer random stories, and more awesome inspirational missionary stories. Love you all so much!
Elder Christensen
No comments:
Post a Comment