Elder Nick Moffitt: Artesia week 3

Elder Ramirez, Elder Moffitt, Elder King

This Saturday we had the awesome privilege of going up to Roswell! I was called up to do a baptismal interview up there. As you can see if you look at the mission map, Roswell is not in our zone. However, the interview was in Spanish, so I was needed to go do it. And guess who was the teacher of the investigator? ELDER KING! That was super fun getting to see Elder King again. And he knew I was coming up, so he even wore the tie I gave him. Of course we had to get a 3 generation picture, with him, me and Elder Ramirez all in a row :)

If you noticed in my last picture, I was not wearing my nametag. I had put it on my suit jacket, but then when I took it off for the picture I forgot to change it onto my shirt. So don't get worried there.

Roswell, being much bigger than Artesia, had a Dairy Queen. At my suggestion that we get a blizzard for the drive home, Elder Ramirez without hesitation supported my proposal. You can never go wrong with Dairy Queen.

Our car windshield got super dirty on the ride up to Roswell, and we unfortunately ran out of windshield cleaner fluid, so before we left we went the ghetto way and sprayed it off with water bottles to ensure that we could actually see on the way back.

Roswell was a pretty cool looking place. Roswell is to aliens as Hereford is to cows. That ought to put it into perspective. We didn't want to look like tourists, so we just snapped a couple shots of the aliens from our car.

And here we are caught in another rain storm. According to everyone we talk to, it never rains here. But it has rained every week since we've gotten here. And it seems like we get caught in it every time too. And it was hailing as well. That was random. I have never seen hail in the middle of the summer before, so it was quite interesting.

Last p-day Elder Ramirez and I went to IHOP. It was delicious as expected. So to commemorate the experience we had to take a picture.

Then on Tuesday we had exchanges. This was my first time conducting exchanges as a district leader. I went to Carlsbad with Elder Thomas. We had a super fun time and set a personal record for me of how many people we stopped and talked to on the street. They have this really nice park that runs along the Pecos River, and there were a pretty decent amount of people there to talk to. As you may have guessed, that's the most water I have seen on my whole mission right there.

Thursday was one of the hottest days this last week. And as you know, it was bike day. We were enlisted to do some service as well. So we had to bike over in our "civilian clothes" to our service appointment, then got some good tans (Elder Ramirez is worried about starting to look black) unloading a moving truck.

Unfortunately, Monica dropped us this week. Sad day.

We had the hardest time getting into contact with Daniel this week. His work schedule out in the oil field picked up a lot, and we didn't even see him once. So we had to drop his baptismal date.

And now for Mark. We show up for our appointment last Monday night and he tells us that he has some news he needs to tell us. He had a very solemn look on his face as he said it. We sit down and say a prayer. Then he says "Well, I have been praying really hard about if the Book of Mormon is true..." Then he looks up at us, smiles, and says, "And I felt really good about it. It's true!" We had another great lesson with him later on in the week in which he told us how he was talking to his mom about us as well. We thought oh no. But it turns out his mom told him how they were all looking for a church and it sounds like they've found it. Wow. This Friday Mark headed out to his parent's place for the week and that's why he didn't make it to church. But he is super solid and we set a baptismal date with him for the 28th.

We also picked up another new investigator this week, Ryan. He was a media referral. We showed up at his house and after introducing ourselves, he just says, "I want to join. I want to be baptized." What?! How do you respond to that? That's the dream right there! The only problem is, we found out after our second lesson with him is that he is on probation until January, so that will prevent him from getting baptized right now. But still, he is an awesome guy.