you never know when you'll be the answer to someone else's prayer!

 

I tried to make the ginger snaps, and you didn't put molasses on the recipe you sent me, so I currently have a bowl full of almost cookie dough in our fridge and I bought a jar of molasses today, I'm just not sure how much to add. It was funny because I put in all of the things you sent me and was looking at a bowl full of essentially just dry ingredients and I was like, now that can't be right... ;) Then I still wanted cookies, so I threw together some peanut butter cookies without a recipe, and they actually turned out okay! I was very proud of myself.

As far as the rest of the week, we didn't really meet anyone super interesting, but our investigator Terry we've been teaching has been doing really well. He's been thinking about the things we teach him a lot, and he's been progressing slowly but surely. When we first brought up the sabbath day he told us he was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to do it, and in our most recent lesson he committed to try to keep it as well as the rest of the ten commandments. Then he came to church on Sunday, and it was like every single speaker prepared their talk specifically for Terry. One person even stood up and told us that even though he hadn't ever done it before, he was going to put away his prepared talk and speak on something else because that's what the spirit was telling him to do, then proceeded to talk about a bunch of Terry's concerns we've been trying to address. It was so cool, always act on spiritual promptings, you never know when you'll be the answer to someone else's prayer!

That's all I really have to report this week. Happy late birthday to Ammon and happy early birthday to Josh! I hope your day was/is amazing! Life is good, the ward is great, and the mission is fantastic. I hope you all have a good one!

-Elder Clark

Fathers Day

So this week was an adventure. It started on Tuesday when we were finishing up our daily planning and our phone decided to factory reset. It did it while I was in the middle of writing a text message to confirm an appointment for the night, so I tried to set it back up then and there so I could at least send the message, but we needed wi-fi to finish the setup, so we did our studies then got in the car to drive to the misison office and get it figured out. As we got in the car, Elder Vaitai pointed out that my floormat was missing, and I realized I had left it at the car wash we went to on Monday. So we decided to go to the car wash first to see if they had the floor mat, then go to the mission office. To get to the car wash you have to drive past it and U-turn because there's a median and you can't turn left, and when I was making the U-turn another car pulled out where I was trying to go, and in the process of watching him and making sure I didn't hit his car I wasn't paying attention and took the U-turn too sharp, causing the bottom of the car to scrape on the median. I drove the rest of the way to the car wash and we got out of the car to assess the damage. We found a small rubber part that had come loose. We weren't really sure what the purpose of the part was, so we figured we'd just ask the vehicle coordinator Elder Tolley what to do about it when we went to the mission office to get the phone fixed. We asked the car wash people if they had our mat, and two different guys were searching all over for it for quite a while, but they didn't have it. However, it turns out that one of the people who was looking for it was a manager for the car wash, and he was a really nice guy. He gave us two free car wash coupons for our trouble, so that's pretty cool. We went back to the mission office and Elder Tolley was outside. We told him I had lost the mat and gone over the median, and he pulled the mat out of a car they were about to sell and came over to assess the damage. He looked at the rubber thing, wiggled it around a little bit and it came off in his hand. He told us it didn't really do much anyways, so he just kept it and told us we were all good. We went in to set up the phone, and when we finally got it up and running all of our previous texts and contacts were gone. Fortunately most of the numbers we need are in our area book planner app, we just have to plug them back in. So we've kind of just been making profiles for people as we go along, it's been quite the adventure. Then as we were wrapping up Elder Tolley came inside and told us that we had missed something while we were assessing the damage. He led us back to our car and pointed out that I had scratched and dented the bottom of the car by the driver's side door, so I had to fill out and accident report and he switch us to a different car. The good news is it was characterized as a "serious accident" so I'm still allowed to drive, I just feel really silly for not being smarter. :P

Other news for this week:

▪I tried to make a stir fry with noodles, and discovered that I don't actually know how to make a stir fry. I ended up with something that kind of resembled egg noodles. It didn't taste at all how I wanted it to, nor did it look great but it was alright. Do you think you could email me the process you're actually supposed to follow for stir fry? I'm guessing I missed a step or two. ;)

▪We taught our investigator from Germany who is super Catholic, and after we finished our lesson he was slightly more educated on the Mormon faith, and still super Catholic. The tentative plan is to bring a certain member from our ward who was going to be a Catholic priest, but converted to our church and let them chat for a little bit. 

▪We also were able to give our investigator who has the fears about changing a blessing, and it went really well! He fell off a ladder while he was picking fruit and hurt his back. We gave him a blessing and he felt and recognized the spirit when we did it and is feeling much better now! He also came to church on Sunday and really liked it, it's super exciting.

▪I went on an exchange with the Spanish speaking misisonaries in our district, and Elder Dalton taught me how to conjugate present tense verbs in Spanish. 

▪The maintenence guy came in and fixed the light in our bathroom. It's one of those long, skinny light bulbs like they have in schools, so we had to wait for the leasing office to send someone to fix it. In the meantime, we needed light in the bathroom, so we pulled one of our full sized lamps into the bathroom. The only place the cord reached from our one electrical socket that didn't block the door was right smack in the middle of our bathroom, so that's where we had it for about a week. (picture included)

▪We took a selfie in front of a gigantic house in a crazy neighborhood we knocked on. When I found out I was transfering to Santa Ana and Tustin I thought I would be in a poorer and more humble area. I was wrong. (picture inluded)

That's my week! Until next time!

-Elder Clark

Blocks

I've been behind on my journal writing all week, and looking through my journal is how I remember what I want to put in these emails. The only day I have a good journal entry for is Tuesday, so I'll talk mostly about that. In the morning we went to a lesson with one of our new investigators, and she wasn't home. There isn't any free parking where she lives, and we had paid for an hour of parking expecting to be teaching a full lesson. So, we knocked on some doors around her apartment to try to make use of our parking. No one was answering doors and the area was highly hispanic so we came to the conclusion that even if someone opened their door the odds of us being able to communicate with them was slim. So we left with 40 minutes on the parking meter. But hey, someone might have been able to use it. ;) Later that day, we decided to visit a former investigator who lives close to our apartment. He was home, and he invited us in to talk to him. We said a prayer with him, then he started asking questions about the Book of Mormon. It seems that he read the whole book, including the index, and didn't really understand any of it, so I'm not really sure how to help him with that... Brownie points for reading all the way through the index though. After we finished up with him we ate dinner and went to try contacting people at a park. When we got to the park there was a kid throwing a basketball to try and get his soccer ball out of a tree. We talked to him for a minute, then continued talking to people. On the way back, we saw that things had gone exactly as you would expect and the soccer ball and the basketball were both stuck in the tree. The kid's dad had joined them at the bottom of the tree and they were both staring rather defeatedly up at the tree. So, I figured I would just climb the tree and knock them down. I did it all the time when I was little and thought it would be easy. I quickly realized I was a lot heavier and harder to pull up a tree than I used to be, but I had committed to it so I wasn't about to give up. I'm proud to say it only took about four attempts to pull myself up onto a branch, and I was finally able to get them both down. I wish I could say we had a great gospel conversation because of it, but unfortunately they only spoke Spanish, so we just gave them a pamphlet and went on with our day. It was quite an adventure though.

That's all I wrote down that seems worth repeating, so that's it for this week. Till next time!

-Elder Clark

Picture: We were helping a member clean out their house and they had these blocks, so we took this picture. That same member also has a son in law who works at Disneyland, and his exact words were, "If you come back to the mission after you're done, I insist that you call me first because I can get you and your family in free." Then proceeded to make us promise we would take him up on that, so maybe we will have that option after all.

Summer

Wow, I forgot how green it gets in Cache Valley. You definitely don't see anything like that in this area. :) 

This week was really good! I got to meet most of our investigators we have right now, and they're some pretty cool people. On Tuesday we had a lesson with a new person who was found by the Spanish Elders in our area, and she was pretty cool. Then on Wednesday I met an investigator they've been teaching who would totally be ready for baptism except his wife is against him joining our church. He told us he really wants this and that we shouldn't give up on him, so we're trying to think of ways to help warm her up to the church a little bit. Then there's a guy from Germany who I think is more interested in converting us to the Catholic church than in learning about the gospel, but we've only taught him once, so we'll see. The other two investigators they were teaching before I got here are a man who knows he needs to get baptized, but is nervous about making the lifestyle changes to prepare himself for it and a 16 year old who is practically a member already, but her dad wants her to wait until she's eighteen to get baptized. 

We also found two new investigators on Saturday! I was going to do a baptismal interview, but it got rescheduled for a different week, so we had an hour or so where we didn't have anything planned. We decided to try some complexes by our apartment, but as we were walking there the gate to get into a neighborhood Elder Vaitai had never been able to get into was open, so we slipped in right before the gate closed. It was like Indiana Jones, except less intense because there wasn't a giant rock or angry tribal people behind us or anything like that. Then the first door we knocked on someone invited us in and we were able to teach the first lesson to a man and his wife! It was super awesome.

There's a few selfies we took because the street was called Panorama, except we didn't know how to take a panorama shot, so we just took what we could get. 

Love you all!

-Elder Clark