Another good week in Universal City,
Thanksgiving was great. We ate with the Steven's family, and
they fed us quite nicely. Elder Loveridge ate 7 pieces of pie. I ate only 2 and
a half. I was extremely full for the rest of the day.
Those of you who surf the internet have likely seen the
"He is the Gift" initiative that the church has taken on. If you
haven't seen the video, I encourage to visit christmas.mormon.org right now. This
video helps us to remember what the true meaning of Christmas is, and why we
celebrate it. Of course Christmas isn't His real birthday, but it allows us to
come together and remember the Gift He truly is to us. And after you've seen
it, take the time to share it with someone, or post it to whatever social media
site is popular nowadays. As missionaries we're doing our best to guide people
to this initiative. Christmas is the best time to be a missionary, honestly.
It's a great time to be a member missionary as well.
One of the paths that we take to visit the city
"Schertz" takes us through a dried up creek. We've seem to run into a
lot of dead deer in our adventures down in Schertz. I was tempted to take a
picture of one of them and send it home, but I supposed that wouldn't be a good
sight for the eyes. The one time I almost ran over one of them startled me
immensely. I've seen more deer roadkill in Texas than back at home, and that's
something that has surprised me a little bit.
We found a family. The mother's mom was a less active member
who had moved, but when we went to go visit her, instead we found this family.
They have very open minds. The first visit we had the opportunity to help the
father set up this huge work out machine, which we saw completed when we
visited them again. While they have great potential, I'm apprehensive that they
might lose their momentum and stop investigating. But with the Christmas season
and the member who was willing to come with us to the first lesson with them,
they should be able to continue to learn. I'm crossing my everything for them.
Tony and Staniel are their names. Staniel seems quite a bit more open minded
than Tony, but they are both easy to talk to and get along with, and they have
four wonderful children. During our lesson with them, the youngest made off
with our pamphlet and gave it to his parents. Then later he tried to make off
with another one.
Next week I'll find out if I'm staying or going. While I've
loved the people of Universal City, I'm anxious to go to an area that I can us
my Spanish in. I've talked to a total of four or five different contacts who
speak Spanish, and none of them have been too interested. Over and over in my
journal I note how blessed I am to be able to use both languages in preaching
the gospel, but I wouldn't mine using a tad bit more Spanish. Who knows what
will happen? Elder Loveridge guesses that we will stay together for another
transfer, which is likely. It's also possible that he might leave and I will
stay. But whatever happens, I know I'll be where I need to be. Maybe I'll see
some growth in the Universal City ward.
We missed Richard, Ramon, and Gloria this week. Richard told
us that he read a few pages of the Book of Mormon at the beginning, which is a
good sign. We'll go to visit tonight, hopefully we can invite his family to
join us. Ramon has been faithfully coming to church every week since I've been
here. I wonder what she needs in order to have the desire to be baptized.
Wonderful lady, and she even knows the Book of Mormon is true. I suppose it'll
just take a bunch of prayer and time. After all, it is he choice to make, not
ours.
The Lord protects his missionaries. Yesterday on our way to
an appointment, I looked down at my pocket and noticed my pen was missing. This
distressed me for just long enough that when Elder Loveridge stopped for some
reason I ran into from the side. Luckily I was going very slow. None of us were
hurt, but I couldn't help but laugh after it was over. When we returned home
that evening, I found my pen was on my desk. Looks like I had never put it in
my pocket. I was happy because I lose pens quite rapidly, and the fine tip pens
I use are expensive.
Could you tell more of your experiences with the people of the
Universal City ward- are they native Texans , or do they come from other
places, are the ward members young or older, converts to the Church or members
all their lives?
Some of them are native Texans, most of them are military families
that are currently making a stop, or have made their final stop in Universal
City. Some of the members speak Spanish, but all of them can speak English.
There's a good mix of older and younger members, so I couldn't say exactly if
their is more or less of either group. A good amount of converts, but their is
only one recent convert family that was baptized within the last year. We'll
have to see if we can change that.
How has the Spirit guided you this past week?
Every once and a while Elder Loveridge and I get
into disagreements and have a little bit of contention. The
Spirit guides me the most when he first leads me to forgive myself and second
to apologize to my companions. The Spirit also lead us to meet a man as we were
returning to our apartment. Due to the fact that we can't ride our bikes in the
dark, we were walking. We met the guy who immediately stopped us and asked us
if we could pray for him. He said he knew Mormons and some other
things, and told us about his difficulty finding a job. We had a prayer
with him right there and I could feel calm afterwards. We gave him our
information and we hope he'll give us a call. If not we know we were at the
right place at the right time. There's nothing quite as satisfying as that.
My parents asked for a picture of me and my bike. I didn't take it
before we left the apartment, so y'all might have to wait until next week. I
named it "Noahs Ark". It's carried me through many a rainstorm even
in the five months I've had it.
Enjoy the season,
-Elder Hall
Texas San Antonio Mission
Elder Loveridge's family sent us some Christmas goodies. Two
advent calendars filled with chocolate and two stockings that look ready to
serve missions.
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