Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Superbowl Sacrifice = Missionary Memories

Well, it's always nice to receive your email updates every week, and It's good to hear that all is well.  Things here are going great in Manhattan.  This Last week hasn't been a super eventful one, but things have been going well.  Jesse's still doing well.  Coffee has still been a little bit of a struggle, but he's getting better, and not drinking it every day, so that's great.  That's definitely one of the biggest struggles of Dominicans; they love their coffee.

The Last few days the weather has been hanging around 10-12 degrees Celsius, which is crazy.  And I've really been enjoying it, because I haven't had to wear a jacket, so that's awesome.  Although I do miss the snow a little bit because it's always nice to have some variety, and the days it is cold I wish it was snowing.  Unfortunately it seems that every time we receive precipitation it's warmed up enough that it rains.  And that's not my favorite (in other words, it sucks!).  The really cool awesome thing is that here in New York we almost don't have to be outside because all our tracting is done indoors anyways, and the transit is really good because it can get you almost anywhere you need to be relatively dryly.  But I always have an umbrella just in case.

Anyways, so here's my cool experience.  The other day we had a Blitz (a two hour time period where everyone meets and works in the area of one of the companionships to help them out).  So Elder McMullin and I went knocking doors, and at the first building we had no success at all, but then we went to this other building and found these people who I wasn't aware of, but they've been investigating for 10 years now.  They refer to themselves as Dry Members, or members that aren't baptized.  And right now their big concern is that they don't want to get baptized if they might fall away after their baptism.  So yeah, we taught them yesterday, and I'm really not all that sure what to do with them to help them make the decision to be baptized.  Do you have any advice?

And then in the same building we met this old Lady named Patricia who is bedridden.  Her nephew invited us in, so we went and talked to her and she asked us to say a prayer on her leg which Elder McMullin offered, and miraculously after wards she started to move here ankle a little bit, and it seemed that something had happened.  We asked her if she was able to move it before hand, and she said that she hadn't been able to move it up until the time we said the prayer, so that was really cool.  We'll probably go back there sometime this week, and see how she's doing and try and teach them the gospel.  I know it would definitely bless her life.  But yeah, that's pretty much what’s happened this week.

On another note, we had a really good Multi Zone conference with President Smith yesterday, and that was awesome.  Unfortunately President Smith informed us that even though the NY Giants are in the Super bowl, we can’t watch it :(  JK.  But it was a great meeting in which we talked a little about the doctrine of baptism and stuff related to that, pretty much our mission purpose.

My district is also doing pretty well, and we have 4 baptisms planned in the next 2 weeks, which is fantastic.  As for your question about the languages, there are 5 languages here: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and ASL (American Sign Language).  And we live with two other Elders.  Anyways, that's about all the time I've got for today.  I hope you all have a great week, and that life continues to treat you well.

Love, Carson