Abilene Week 7

Just had to Plover and take a picture!

 Hey dude, what are you doing? Why are you stopping the car?" "C'mon man.  It's Plover street"  We just had to stop the car and get a picture.  Haha....get it?

Transfers happened, as you already know. Here are our two Mexican Elders that are heading out. They both know Spanish fluently, so now it's just the gringos left here to speak the Spanish. The first one, Elder Rivera I actually met in the MTC, so it was pretty cool that when I arrived here he was in my district. Dad, for the whole Spanish thing it works a little different here in Texas. Unfortunately, us "Spanish Elders" aren't always "Spanish Elders." The new zone leader that arrived here this week, Elder Martin, (who has been here for a year) says the last time he was in a Spanish speaking area was when he was being trained... ouch. It's tough because since we're out in the middle of nowhere there are some places where there aren't even enough English speakers to make a ward so they send 2 Spanish Elders to that random town so that they can talk to the like 5 Spanish people there... if they ever even see them. So there are lots of Spanish Elders here who don't really do much Spanish speaking. Even right now we don't get to speak all that much.

Elder Hancock & Elder Pasqualle

New Elders, Elder Hancock and Elder Pasqualle. They both are about 18 months into the mission and are doing a good job here already. 

Bike Day

So I finally brought my camera out on bike day. This first picture was,yes, taken on the ground in the middle of the road. We didn't have someone to take the picture so we just used the 10 second timer to this one together. I actually thought it looked pretty cool. We were a little scared about a car coming by and destroying our cameras, but we figured we would be able to see one coming easily enough since nothing was around us.

2 flat tires

Well, my tires were flat in the morning when we got  our bikes out to go. I told Elder King we shouldn't ride our bikes. He said to pump my tires up and we should be fine. So, I pumped my tires up. Then an hour later they were both completely flat. We ended up doing a loooooooot of walking. We knocked doors for like 3 hours that day, which isn't really my favorite, but we didn't have very many appointments this week, so there wasn't really much else to do. We randomly knocked into this old guy from our ward who neither of us knew. He doesn't really come because of his physical problems. I got some revelation for our knocking this week. Instead of some of the other approaches we have been trying, we used service as our main door approach. The first thing we did was just to always ask people what we could do, if there was any service we could do to help them out. Then we went with the gospel message. No one wanted to take a lesson, but everyone was definitely more open to us, and I think we were able to soften up some people's hearts at least with that approach. Just planting seeds. Anyway, that second picture is just us waiting to be picked up with our bikes by the Zone Leaders after realizing there was no way we could walk like 5 miles home in time. 

LOOONG DAY!

About the most exciting news you can hear it that KAYLA CAME BACK!!! She came back Friday, and we met with here and reviewed everything we had taught before. Of course, she's a genius and she remembered it all. Then we asked her when she wanted to be baptized? She said tomorrow! Well, we couldn't really arrange something like that in less than 24 hours. Buuuuut, her baptism is scheduled for next Saturday, the 10th. She asked Elder King to baptize her and me to give her the gift of the Holy Ghost. Super exciting! I've never done that before. This will be a good week. I know it.

Well, at this point, anything I say will be frivolous, unimportant details but I guess I shall go on. Actually, we do have some other exciting news. We met with Juan and Elva this week, some Spanish potentials from many years ago. We taught the restoration in Spanglish. Straight Spanglish. We switched in and out every other minute. And Juan liked saying stuff in Spanish then all over again in English too. I think he was afraid we weren't understanding him. Hey, that's fine with me. I need to be sure I got it all right. We set a baptism date with both of them for the 17th of August. We already know we will have to change that since they didn't come to church this week, but I think there is some real potential there. My favorite part of any lesson ever is sharing the first vision. Repeating Joseph Smith's experience in his own words always brings in the Spirit so strong. The atmosphere changes every time. You can just feel the Spirit getting thicker and thicker. Then at the end you always need to give it a little pause to let it sink in. You know they felt it. You can see it in their eyes. You can see that their hearts are swelling and their minds are whirling over what just happened. I love it. So powerful.

Other exciting news. Courtney and Carolyn dropped us. Jacob wouldn't talk to us this week. And all of our other serious English investigators in English we handed over to the other Elders. So, we taught a total of 0 English lessons this week. Well, it was a rough week with numbers. But I am really excited about Kayla and the potential of Juan and Elva.

A Rainbow

 Couldn't resist taking a picture of this beautiful rainbow. Hope you enjoy it!

Love, Elder Moffitt