December 2, 2013

Dear Mom,

I'm glad I didn't get transferred too. My new companion is Elder Smith. He's cool. He's from West Jordan, Utah. He's been out about 9 months. We're pretty good friends already, so we're having a good time.

Got the CD's!! Thanks so much! I've been listening to them every day. I love the song "This is the Christ". It's amazing. I just remember every time before General Conference, they always have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing the Spoken Word and it brings a Spirit-filled reverence into the room. I wanted to make our study room like that right before studies. It works! It's amazing!

Elder Pike was assigned first to a mission in Mexico but he asked to get reassigned because he's allergic to beans. So they reassigned him to New Jersey Spanish-speaking. I found him on Facebook before the mission and we talked about seeing each other in the mission. He previously lived in Utah, but during his mission I think his family moved to Idaho, so maybe that's why he won't be in my flight.. Who else is in my flight group? Cool to hear about Brandon! So I could probably go to his homecoming then too!

I guess I'll start shipping stuff after Christmas. I don't want to start shipping stuff right now. Hopefully the crowds will die down a little right after Christmas.

For Thanksgiving, we had two dinners. The first we had was with a less-active member named Dennis Garcia. He's really nice and loves the Gospel. We can't really figure out why he doesn't come to church often. He doesn't have a car and can't drive, so we think that maybe he doesn't like asking for rides. When he does miss church and we ask him why, it's always something different. And they're not dumb excuses either so it's difficult to really figure out how to get him to church. But he had Thanksgiving day off of work, so he invited us over. Another member named Javier has a friend that we've started to teach a little bit. We invited him over as well to Dennis' house to eat and to watch the movie the Testaments. The friend ended up having to work that day, but we watched the Testaments anyway. After that, we went to another less-active family named the Pelaez family. They're cousins of an active family in the ward so we had dinner with both the families. This is the family we asked about Thanksgiving and decided to do something for us. Super nice of them. At Dennis' house we had rice, beans, and chicken. At the Pelaez family we had chicken, stuffing, tamales, and sweet potatoes. No turkey this year!

I'm excited for that new car!

Q of the W:

1. Does New Brunswick decorate their streets or parks for Christmas?

I did see decorations in the downtown part of New Brunswick, but I haven't seen anything in the parks in other parts of New Brunswick. Something kind of interesting about the Christmas season out here. Nothing says anything about Christmas. It's always 'Happy holidays' and other things like that. All the decorations and stuff never says anything about Christmas or Christ. There's a large Jewish and Muslim population out here so they have to be careful about advertisement.

2. Do you know what you will be doing or where you will be yet for Christmas Day?

I don't know exactly. I heard that the New Brunswick ward will have some sort of party. From what I heard, it's going to be on Christmas day. I don't know about that, that's kind of weird to me, but we'll see what happens.

3. Is it okay that we go to Chili's for dinner after we pick you up from the airport? If you remember we went there the day before you left and we talked about going there again right when you came home. Just an idea. We all really want to take you somewhere public with your missionary tag. If you think about it - we have never seen you with your missionary tag on... If you would rather go straight home we totally understand. Whatever you want....

That would be cool. I'll have to think about it though. I haven't really thought about it yet. I'll let you know.

We finally met a certain less-active sister this last week. She told us to come by Saturday morning, but then the day of, she cancelled the appointment. She told us to come by Monday morning. She also said that she felt bad for cancelling so she would bring a box of donuts and hot chocolate from her work: Dunkin' Donuts. Monday morning she was sleeping. She works the graveyard shift every day. She basically has a nocturnal schedule. She called us later on that day and apologized several times for having fallen asleep before we got there. She told us to come by the next day. So we stopped by the next day and she was there with a bunch of Dunkin' donuts hot chocolate and donuts. She gets them for free because she takes the donuts that they want to throw out. They're still good donuts, but it's just that they don't want to sell donuts that have been sitting out for a certain number of hours. So she took a bunch and gave them to us! It was awesome. Haha. She was telling us how much she wants to come back to church and how she feels so bad for not reading and doing things like that for such a long time. She told us that she wants us to continue coming by. She also made it very clear that if we, or any other missionaries, ever want donuts, all we have to do is call her and she'll bring us as many donuts that we can eat. Less-actives for some reason usually always love the missionaries. I haven't called her back yet, but I'm thinking about it this week... We also do need to visit her to help her grow in the Gospel.

We had a crazy experience this week with a Catholic man. Elder Smith really had to use the bathroom. I talked him into just waiting until we got to our next appointment with some investigators. It turns out that they weren't there! The next convenience store was a little while away so he just decided to knock on the neighbor's door to ask them if he could use their restroom. So we knocked. They said okay and I started to talk to them a little bit. This guy started talking to me about what we did and how he thinks it's cool and he respects what we do. I asked them about their religion. They said they were Catholic but that they don't really go to church at all. (Those are what typical Catholics are like around here.) So we kept talking and we talked more about Christ and His Apostles. For some reason, this guy didn't completely understand about repentance. He was talking about how even the Apostles were sinners and that there's no point in repenting because we'll always keep making mistakes. I agreed and said that the only perfect person was Jesus Christ and we have to trust in him. He shook his head and said that Jesus wasn't perfect. He said that the only perfect person was God. I was a little confused about his idea because Catholics believe that Jesus is the same thing as God the Father. I told him that the Bible teaches that He was indeed perfect. He said that it doesn't. I asked him if he's read the Bible completely. He said that he had and that it doesn't teach that He was perfect. I invited him to read it again and Elder Smith invited him to ask his pastor if Christ was sinless. We ended up leaving shortly after that because it was hopeless to try to convince a non-believing, non-practicing, self-proclaimed traditional Catholic that his beliefs don't agree with his church nor the Bible. It was sad to see how hard-hearted he was. He was also the father of maybe five kids. I felt bad that those kids have to grow up with that kind of confusion in their home. After we had left, Elder Smith and I were talking about that experience we had with him. We were laughing pretty hard about it. Then we realized that it's actually not too far-fetched idea for him to disbelieve in the divinity of Christ. Last week I talked a little bit about how pretty much everyone else has very little understanding of the Atonement. Catholics and other Christians don't know hardly anything about the Atonement. To us, not understanding basically the Atonement will hinder our understanding in pretty much every other phase of the Gospel. We can't have faith without the Atonement. We can't repent without the Atonement. If we can't repent, we can't become better so there is no point in getting baptized. If we can't repent we can't have the Holy Ghost with us. The Plan of Salvation as a whole would not make sense and could not work without the Atonement. We better understand our purpose in life because we have an understanding of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. This man doesn't understand what the purpose of Christ was here on earth. No wonder he doesn't believe in Him; he doesn't even know what it would mean to believe in the Savior. That makes me wonder why other religions believe in Jesus Christ if they don't hardly have an idea of the most important part of the life of Jesus Christ - His Atonement. We've realized the mistake we made talking to him... we didn't mention the Atonement to him. Maybe one day he'll have another opportunity to learn about the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

Also, another funny story. We started fasting on Saturday and we had two unexpected dinners. Couldn't say no so we just decided to fast next week. That defines missionary work, trying to do something you want and not being able to do it, so you have to do it at another time when it's not at all convenient.

Marco is not going to get baptized this weekend, but they have decided that he will for sure get baptized the 21 of December.

Anyway, that's the cool stuff for the week!

Love you mom!

-Justin