33 Birthday Song, investigators, broken toenail :)

  

Bryce bought Elder Garcia a cake and sang Happy Birthday to him.  Of course he had to use trick candles.  It wouldn't be Bryce otherwise!

It’s cool being a district leader! Not really much different from being a regular missionary, aside from giving capacitacions(lessons to the district) every district meeting, and passing the numbers of the district to the zone leaders. This week we are going to work, walk, eat, study, go to church, and teach... the norm. But hopefully with more results this week! It’s been two cycles in a row that I’ve gotten one of these calls (to be a leader). We’ll see how being a District Leader goes and I’m actually excited to give it a shot! The zone changed a ton and these changes were Locas! So yeah, crazy day. The responsibility keeps building and we’ll see where it goes from here! I’m excited for my capacitacion tomorrow! I’m going to use the bean boozled jelly beans as an example. My lesson is about finding people to teach and the Holy Ghost. I teach a lesson every Tuesday. I can assign the others to teach too part of the time If I want. 4. I'm using the jelly beans that taste bad but look like the ones that taste good. The point is you can’t tell the difference and I’m going to talk about how we can't know the difference between good contacts and investigators and the bad that don’t want anything from the beginning. You can’t tell until you try them and taste the good or bad. But the Holy Ghost can help us know before we teach them and who we should talk to and help us find the good ones.

Oh! I forgot to tell you I did my first baptismal interview this week! The sister missionaries have an 8 year old of a family that got baptized a few months ago and I interviewed him to be baptized on Saturday. He is going to be baptized by his Dad.

We have everything hooked up for it to stove to work, but we need to buy gas still. I’m still waiting for the reimbursement from the water heater soo....

I’m super tired from last week honestly. We worked our butts off! But we had a fun week and I’m excited for this week as well. Did you see the pics of my toe? Yeah I almost ripped half of the nail off. It doesn’t look as bad as it did in the photos. We were playing soccer today and I kicked the ball, and it hurt. I felt it was bleeding because it was sticking to my sock, and went to check my nail, and found it all crunched and crinkled. I thought it had just ripped, but then I looked closer, and it hadn’t ripped in the middle, but separated from underneath the nail and forced backwards. The picture is after we cleaned it and someone flattened it again. It hurt a ton! But after cutting it and disinfecting it feels a lot better. 

Journal excerpt from January 10, 2017

Such a cool spiritual experience we had today! We had zone conference today, ate and started visiting. We first visited an old lady named Josefina. A bunch of her kids and grandkids have been baptized and when we contacted her she straight up told us she wants to be baptized. We are doing everything we can to help her. We talked and ended up teaching all of lesson 3 but mostly focused on baptism. We hadn’t talked about what we would teach when we went. It just kind of came (THE SPIRIT). It went pretty well and we will be going back Thursday to teach more about the restoration. Then we went to look for an investigator named Pedro who we haven’t seen in over a week. He has a really hard time with the Word of Wisdom and we’ve been trying to help him but he hasn’t been home. He was out front but with his “wife” and he told us to go on back behind a few houses to the houses in which he lives with his Mom and Brother. We went back and sat outside and his mom came out and started talking to us. She told us she had a long day at work and was sick. We sat and talked to her a bit but not too long so she could get some rest. She didn’t go up so my companion asked if we could share a scripture with her. At that exact moment a scripture popped into my head, Alma 34:40 which basically says to be patient in all afflictions we will eventually have rest from these things. I asked her what she understood about it and she answered to have patience to have rest. Then I started to talk and bear my testimony to her about his scripture and I honestly can’t remember what I said to her. Not a single word. All I remember is that I had tears in my eyes as I bore my testimony with the spirit’s guidance to her and she began to cry as well. The spirit was so strong in that moment. I don’t think I’ve ever felt it like that in my entire mission. It was so powerful. I really felt guidance in that moment and I want to be ready and able and strive to be guided like that always to do well. Man the mission is great!!