Elder Nick Moffitt: Abilene week 15

While we were down in Midland we had to take a picture next to the famous "Rockin Rodeo" sign. Some missionaries made a bunch of songs a couple years ago that they put to the beat of real songs, but then added their own missionary lyrics. They did that down in Midland and named the CD they made Rockin Rodeo. Of course, those missionaries are "apostate missionaries" as we call them. All completely against the rules to be doing any of that or listen to those songs they made. BUT, when I get back I want to check all those songs our because they're really funny. And apparently, this Rockin Rodeo CD they made is famous in other missions all over too. Pretty cool!

When we were driving back from Midland I saw this big old thing rolling down the highway. There are a bunch of restaurants here called "Texas Roadhouse," and when I saw this house... in Texas... on the road... I had to tell everyone, "hey look! It's a Texas Roadhouse!"

This is outside of Sweetwater. I hear it's the biggest windmill farm in the world. Another fun fact about my mission is that President Uchtdorf lived here when he was learning to fly planes. Awesome, I know right?

This Saturday it rained like crazy. And of course we don't have a car. So we walked around in it. It seriously never storms here. This first picture is only like 10 minutes after it started pouring. You can see the water flying out of the gutter and a little stream forming in the grass. This is the view from right outside of my apartment by the way.

And here is me in my nice jacket you got me for my mission (which is super nice. And the inside zips out so it can be used when it's warmer too). And I thought the twirling umbrella looked pretty cool in the picture too. Anyway, just to put it in perspective of how much rain we got: there is this stream bed that we go by that is always completely dry, but Saturday when we went by, it was 5 feet deep and 30 feet across. No joke.

Seriously, my cooking skills are improving. Out of necessity. I don't really like eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches every day, so I am branching out. How do my turkey burgers look? Because they tasted delicious. I also bought a blender this week and I am now making fruit smoothies every few days which are healthy and super tasty.

We wanted to get in sooooo bad!

End of summer Branch party. It was really fun, but man, it was so hot and that water was sooooo inviting!

Elder Moffitt and Elder King

Well, we are now officially in the second half of this transfer already. We were able to set a baptismal date with Sofia for the 19th of October this week. She could definitely be baptized then no problem, especially with her mom there supporting her the whole way. The only problem is, we are trying to work with Damian, her dad, too and get them baptized on the same day. The only reason we may move her date is so that we can get her dad baptized with her. That would be awesome. We'll have to see.

We met with Eliseo this week and had a good lesson. He has been reading the book of Mormon. We didn't set a date because we thought he was leaving this week for an undetermined amount of time. But it turns out it'll only be about a week. So now we want to set a date with him tonight. Him and Nita were both at church Sunday.

We had 2 lessons with Katarino this week. The first one was just about prayer. He is prayer shy, but we're working on that. He always forgets how to start a prayer. That stroke is working so hard against him. But we also taught him the Word of Wisdom this week and he remembered the whole thing. Weird how those things work. Leonardo (remember the guy who hadn't been to church for 20 years that we found?) came with us to the lesson. Leonardo rocked it. He shared his testimony, and did a great job teaching. My favorite part of the lesson was when Katarino (due to childish nature) opened the gospel principles book he was holding to a picture of Jesus Christ's second coming. He asked me to read what it said. We were in the middle of our WoW discussion at this point. I said, "well, it talks about the blessings of the word of wisdom." Then I slipped a WoW pamphlet in front of it and started reading from that. Elder King got this huge smile on his face, and I almost cracked up like 5 times while I was reading. It was great. It totally worked too.

This week we had an awesome treat. We were visited by a general authority, William R Walker. We drove more than 2 hours down to Midland Texas to see him. He is definitely an inspired man. I loved the whole meeting. And I am so excited for this week to get to hear General Conference (we're just going to the church for that).

Anyway, no news from Cesar this week. No news from Alexandria and Alizay. We started teaching 2 more investigators. Ignacio (who told us his nickname is "nacho." Nacho is short for Ignacio. Now Nacho Libre makes so much more sense to me. My mind was blown by that this week. And we also started teaching a lady names Rosenda. Time is short. And time is out. That's it for this week. I hope you all know I love you so much and pray for you every day too!