Week 4 - Good Experiences

Hey everyone, sitting at a McDonald's at the moment typing this, so hopefully it'll go well (despite autocorrect wanting to change everything I say). This week was a lot better than the last one.

Last P-Day, we went and visited the new World Trade Center and the 9/11 memorial (yes I took pictures), which was an experience to get through as their security is almost more stringent than airport security.

The less active we were going to teach that night (Isaac) delayed our appointment by an hour, meaning we had an open hour to do anything we felt like, and thus we went tracting. We went to an area called The Projects, which is a very sketchy set of apartment complexes, picked a random number between 1-10 for what floor we'd go to, and then tried to find an unlocked building. First building was locked, but the next building we tried wasn't, so we went to the 5th floor and started going door to door. Only one guy opened his door, said he wasn't interested, and the rest didn't even come to the door. We were at the second to last door, knocked, and a lady opened the door. We told her that we were the missionaries, and she immediately invited us in. We were a little nervous, as she didn't look like the friendliest type of person, but then we heard more voices. Turns out, we'd just randomly tracted into Hermana Dunn & Laititi's lesson! Apparently Janice (the lady) had just been saying that she didn't think God knew who she was and that she wasn't really interested in going to church or believing in it, and right when she said that, we knocked on her door. She was pretty much crying all over the place, was very happy, and everyone felt the Spirit a ton (apparently I bore a very powerful testimony, I don't remember), and then the lesson really helped as well. It was the Mormon message entitled "Mountains We Must Climb" by President Eyring, which I had actually heard twice earlier that day and hadn't really paid attention to it. It talked about how we all face trials, and as long as we rely on the Lord that we can overcome them and be better for them, which is exactly what I needed to hear at that time.

The next day was new missionary training up in Scarsdale, so we took the train up (after Elder Wang lost me in Grand Central) and I got to see everyone from the MTC! I've really missed them more than I had realized, and it was great to be able to talk with them! Elder Reid got bitten or something and the left side of his face was swollen and painful (he was on antibiotics though), and it was already much better by the end of the meeting. President Morgan taught us a lot, including safety, answering the right questions (very interesting topic), and a lot of other things. Lunch from Sister Morgan was great, did some more training with the APs, and then piled 18 people into a van to get to the train station. Got to ride back with Elder Reid and his companion, caught up with him, compared pictures, and so forth.

Taught quite a few people this week and have had several dinners (none so far this week though, only one we have is Thanksgiving). Went and visited a member from upstate in the hospital several times (Joan), and had an opportunity to give her a blessing as well as bring the sacrament to her on Sunday. Have a new investigator named Tao (friend of one of the families we ate dinner with, came to church), she's Chinese so we may pass her on to the Chinatown missionaries, or just have Elder Wang teach her.

It's been very windy, and raining for the past two days. Supposed to clear up and get really cold tomorrow. Went to breakfast at the Denning's yesterday, not sure how but I ate 16+ blueberry pancakes (I literally lost count, I have no idea how I ate that much), and helped prepare Rie some more for baptism. Input a TON of inactive look-ups into the IPad yesterday, like 5-6 hours worth and still didn't finish. Planning on going to the museum of natural history today, which'll be cool.

Hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Elder Ralph Smith