Tornado and court summons

19 May 2014

 

Aloha! Hola!...Hi!

 

This week...has been really interesting! Where do I begin...

 

There was a tornado that touched down in Ashburn, near where I and my companion live. That night had been raining buckets and the next morning, we saw, on our phone, an emergency warning for a tornado from 3:40 to 4:00 a.m. We had slept right through it, we were still in Leesburg, we still had everything, so life's good!

 

Next, we got summons to court...They were hanging in a bag on our doorknob one evening when we got home, and we took them in, took out the papers from the bag, and read them. They were a garnishment summons, for $107,460, for one Cesar Perez who used lived in our apartment before we did....Did I give you a heart attack? :) We were scared, called our zone leaders: "What do we do?" They told us to call the mission president (who's a lawyer), so we did, and he told us to call the sheriff and tell him we had nothing to do with it, we have no idea who this guy is, we are innocent. So we did and she (the sheriff is a she) said, "OK, you can throw the summons away." Yup, that was worth writing home. :)

 

Also, yesterday we had a conference with Elder Ballard! He told us, in essence, to keep doing what we were doing. During that conference, though, I was impressed to share this with ya'll, so I am: Our mission president noticed that members have a hard time getting their non-member friends to meet with the missionaries. He discovered the missing link. When you're talking to people not of our faith and they bring up a gospel subject, like temples or priesthood or cualquier cosa (whatever), tell them a little bit to get them interested, and then say "It's interesting that you bring that up because in about a week, the missionaries are coming over to teach about that (temples, priesthood, cualquier cosa). It would mean a lot to me if you would come join us." When they say yes, go home, phone the missionaries and say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so, and I just set up an appointment for you next week (date and time, evenings or in the middle of the week work best). The person is so-and-so, and you're going to be teaching about (temples, priesthood, cualquier cosa)." You can say it nicer, if you like, but that's the gist of what needs to be said. 

 

We have two new investigators, Dilia and Rosa Paz. We've been teaching them every night for the last half of the week, and they don't want to get baptized right now. Dilia says she wants to wait for 3 years and Rosa wants to go to church first and know for herself that it's true. The rest of our investigators aren't really progressing. The biggest problem is that Hispanics usually work or sleep on Sundays, so they don't really want to come to church at 9 in the morning. Yup. Life's great. 

 

Gotta get, but I love you all!