Little Caesar's

     What an interesting week. This week we didn't do as much work. Yet, we still had some of the biggest spiritual highlights of my mission so far, as well as some really fun times. 

      I'll start with the fun times. This started as a not great day: Elder Titus was sick and so we stayed home the entire day. Titus got up at 2:30pm was up until 5:30 and then slept again until 8pm. Then we played games for the rest of the night. As in way later than we were allowed to be awake, but it was so much fun. We played a lot of games this week, especially Skull King. Skull King is so much fun and it doesn't hurt that I can win a lot of the time. Another of the most fun things I've done in my mission happened at Little Caeser's. 

      So Little Caeser's has this machine where you put in a quarter and it gives you a bouncy ball and if the ball is the right color, then you win free crazy bread. So, we pooled together all of our quarters and tried to win free crazy bread. We ended up spending $11.25 on this machine and walked away with no free crazy bread, but 45 bouncy balls. It was worth it. We took them all home and created absolute madness in the apt. Bouncy balls galore, I realized that being in a house with nobody but 4 20-year-olds is strange. My family was also in town passing through, so they brought me In-N-Out and I got to talk to them for about 5 minutes, so that was neat. 

      Now we go to the spiritual side of the week. We taught somebody this week who didn't know who we are as missionaries. She's the first person I've met in Utah who wasn't very familiar with the church. We went over and taught her the first lesson - the restoration of the church. It was so awesome, the spirit was so strong and you could see on her face how strongly she was feeling the spirit. The spirit is just awesome.

     We also had a baptism this week. Kalo, age 9, got baptized. It was really cool to see him get baptized, but I also learned how difficult baptisms are to prepare. It was a hassle for sure. Kalo's a great kid though, he's really funny and he retained a surprising amount of what we taught him, meaning more than just the concepts, he remembered a lot of the details as well.

     Then, yesterday, I wrote to my mission president saying that when we go out and about I don't believe that we'll find people to teach (we're supposed to find 5 new people each week, but my experience so far has been that its not what happens). I keep getting told have more faith, have more this, have more that, but it just hasn't seemed to work out. My mission president responded saying that no one said finding people was easy, to keep at it, and to involve the Lord. Then today me and Elder Titus knocked on only one door because we had appointments. Our notes showed that this door had met with missionaries before, but that they weren't interested. We knocked anyways and they let us in and started talking about the same thing as always, the weather (yes, I know Dallas is humid). Then we mentioned that they met with missionaries before and the older daughter interrupted us saying that it was for her baptism, then the younger daughter said, I want to get baptized I just don't know who to talk to. Wow! That never happens. We didn't even do anything, we simply mentioned that they had missionaries over before. It goes to show that the Lord does prepare people to be ready for us when we try to help them come closer to their Savior, Jesus Christ. So after that, I had to write my mission president and essentially say, you were right, my bad, president I'll keep at it.

      Straight chillin, Elder Blacker