Dear Mom,
That's good news to hear about my camera! I was so afraid that I was going to have to get a new camera or something. I guess it must be my charger... I bought a wall adapter for the USB port for the cord on my camera. Maybe there's something wrong with that. I don't know. I'll definitely be taking more pictures too. I guess if there's nothing wrong with it, you can send it back to me. Maybe it just misses home.. Haha. I have a couple pictures of New York City that I need to take. And yes, I did shave my legs. I wanted to see what it felt like. And I had time on P-Day.
Eddy de Leon is such cool kid. He's not shy at all. Whenever we have a lesson with them, he always wants to say both the opening and closing prayer and he wants to read every scripture we share with them. We have to tell him to let his family participate too. Haha. It's not very common that you run into people like that. Too bad he's not 16.. We would take him out with us to go teach all the time. I think he'll make a good missionary. He's a really good kid. I heard a story that a couple months ago, he was drinking some iced tea. He had forgotten about that commandment, haha. Completely innocent. It was one of those drinks at the store called something random, but it doesn't say anything about tea until you read the ingredients. The missionaries told him that it had tea in it. He stopped drinking it immediately and went to go ask the Bishop if he needed to talk to him. The Bishop told him he was okay, just to not buy that drink again. What a good kid!
I recognize almost everyone on that list. I don't recognize Helen De Lar, Claudia Vergara, and Katherine Pasley. You can accept those other ones. Let me look through some of my old planners to see if I can find those other three names. Then sound very Hispanic, so I'm sure that I've met them sooner or later. I'll check first just to make sure. But thanks!
It's kind of cold here right now. Last week it started warming up pretty well. I thought we were starting to hit spring, but not quite yet. We had rain yesterday, and it melted pretty much the rest of the snow. No more annoying snow that we have to plow through, yay!
I'll have to ask Sister Castro to teach us how to make tacos. They usually use shredded beef. It's always about the sauce and the cheese. They use some type of Mexican cream cheese and a spicy sauce. They just buy the cheese and I'm pretty sure that the sauce is very simple. Simple recipe, but very good! I'll let you know. I'll ask about Tres Leches cake too.
We had a crazy lesson last Thursday with some investigators that have been meeting with the missionaries for a while now. When investigators have been meeting with missionaries for a while and aren't progressing very well, we call them eternigators. Like they've been investigators for eternity.. It's a missionary term. Anyway, these two people are a little older and have some crazy ideas. It's hard to explain some of the ideas that these two people have so I won't try to explain them, but they believe in reincarnation, and how Adam and Eve weren't the only two first people on Earth. Other things too that are just really hard to prove scripturally. We found one scripture in all the scriptures that talks somewhat about reincarnation. It just basically says that we die once. Hebrews 9:27 if you want to look it up. They're just really hard to teach, because every time we teach them, they bring up something else, or bring up something again that's hard to correct. We want to just say that they're wrong and then move on, but we have to figure out how to do it in a nice way. That's the hard part. We'll, this last Thursday, we started to tell them that some of these ideas were wrong and we know that through modern revelation and the Book of Mormon. The lady was taking everything okay. She agrees with most of the stuff that we teach. She likes it all and tells us every time that we're the best church that she has found, but we still lack some things. The guy all of a sudden told us that we were wrong. It kind of threw me back a little. Then he proceeded to tell us that he heard from a guy that our guy accepts homosexuality. I was thinking, weird, usually we're chastised for not accepting it. I told him politely, no we don't actually accept it. If a member tries to practice it they're actually excommunicated. He insisted, "No, this guy told me that you accept it. You accept it." My companion then proceeded to tell him that homosexuality is an abomination in the sight of God and that again, no, we don't accept it. Then I told him that we're representatives of our Church. We know our Church and the doctrine of our Church. We don't accept homosexuality. That guy just was telling you a lie about our church because he doesn't like us. This investigator then told us that this guy was a member of our church but then he left the church. He wife got a little frustrated with him. She knew better than that. She told him that obviously since he left the church he didn't like the church. He told her to stop contradicting him. He stopped talking soon after. It was a pretty intense lesson. I think it's funny how they think we're still lacking stuff. They don't know hardly anything about the church obviously. They say that they consider the Book of Mormon to be sacred, but then again, they consider any book that talks about God is sacred. Tough people. We have plans just to read in the Book of Mormon with them. There's not much else we can teach them that would help them.
So a couple days ago, we helped the sister missionaries move into a new apartment. The sisters missionaries were working in Jersey City in Spanish. President Jeppson is splitting their area and they are now both training new sisters. One of them has been out on her mission for just over four months now. That's pretty soon for training in Spanish. We talked to the new sisters. One of them, Sister Elise Milward, is from Boise, Idaho, the Meridian area. I asked her, and yes, she knows Stephanie Beuerman! She said that she went to school with her. Cool.
Sorry I wrote so late this week. We were really busy yesterday, so we couldn't make it to the library to email. I'll try and be better at letting you know if I won't be able to email the next Monday. It seems like lately, holidays on Monday have been more and more common.
Q of the W:
1. I have been catching up on scrapbooks lately. I saw a picture of your 7th birthday party at Chuck E Cheese. All your friends at the party I believe our on missions now. Pretty cool! Except I wasn't sure about Brandon Halverson. Do you know if he is on a mission?
About Brandon Halverson. When I was in the YSA Ward, I remember he came back from Marines basic training one time. I don't really know whatever happened to him. I'm pretty sure he's staying active in the Church. I don't know how much desire he had to serve a mission though.. I always remember he was pretty cool. Never too rebellious or anything. His older brother Justin Halverson served in Germany. I remember that. I also remember he didn't have any baptisms.. Sad. But I think he's doing okay. I hope he still decides to serve a mission.
2. What have you noticed is the one main thing people have a hard time believing in about our church?
It's not really about accepting much. Pretty much everything is hard for them to accept. The hardest thing for them to do is to drop the Catholicism trap. What I've heard, is that in Catholicism, if you go to church twice a year, you're considered what we would called active. Catholicism is the easiest religion to live. It's the easy way. "Enter ye in at the strait gate; for strait is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it; but wide is the gate, and broad the way which leads to death, and many there be that travel therein" -3 Nephi 27:33.
3. Do you know how many people are in your ward? Approximately? Bigger or smaller than our ward?
I would say about 100. I don't know for sure. It's still smaller than our ward. About how big is our ward anyway?
Love you mom! Talk to you soon!
-Justin
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