Meeting President Hall and his family

This week started out with one of those moments when you think "I never would have thought I would be doing this as a missionary..."  Let me explain:  We were in a suped-up charger, driving to an island, holding all kinds of BBQ on our lap, and talking about protein powder and pre-work-out to a little hispter and his apostate brother (who has a pony tail down to the middle of his back, a dirty moustache, and more tattoos than all of the THSM missionaries combined)!  Translation: we were getting a ride home from a member kid and his less active brother after we were at his birthday BBQ.  I love having moments like this...

This week I started reading The Power of the Everyday Missionary.  It’s part of the stake mission plan here so all the missionaries have permission to read it.  It’s awesome!  The whole book is pretty much just about how to be a member missionary in normal life.  It’s all super easy stuff that everyone can do and it’s full of stories and personal experiences so its not super boring.  I recommend it to everyone who has some extra time to read a little!

So baptizing Adriana is going to be super hard!  Before, her parents wouldn't let her because the lessons took away from her time to do home work.  But now that summer school is over... The only problem, any time we start talking about church in front of her parents they leave because they know that baptism will come up. The dad is so rad and I talked about soccer with him for such a long time, but right when church came up he left.  So we are just going to love them super hard and just have a lot of faith! 

We met President Hall and his family!  They are so cool!  They made a little bio movie and y'all can watch it on www.facebook.com/thethsm.  And they made that facebook page so you can follow it as they post pictures and stuff.  He will be a fun Mission President.  President Ashton was like apostle status, but President Hall is more like the cool Bishop or Stake President status.  And because he loves to run and do sports, he said that he and his wife will randomly go around and work out with missionaries in the mornings.  So to all those that don't do anything, they will get a good wake up call, haha!  Too bad I will probably only see him 2 times before I go home: my interview next week and my departing interview.  But when he teaches us, he seems like he has done this whole Mission President thing before.  He knows exactly what missionaries need and he knows the little tricks to motivate and teach missionaries.

Sergio: everything was going super good for his baptism and then he texted us Saturday night... Turns out he just feels like is all going super fast and wants some more time.  No big deal, we will just keep working with him.  But he also said he wants some space… well, if he gets too much space, then Satan has room to move right in, so we got to find the perfect balance.  Keep him in your prayers!!

The Reyes family: they are moving along slow and steady but making progress.  We had a couple really solid lessons with them this week about the restoration and the Book of Mormon.  They felt the spirit super strong so hopefully they will keep moving forward.  The hardest part will just be getting them to church.  They always say they will come but never do, so we will have to figure some things out.  Hopefully, if we just get them some good friends at church it will all work out...

And the rest of the week was filled in with a few service projects, dealing with tourist traffic for the 4th of July, and trying to find some new people.  The 4th was just a normal day, we were too busy to watch any fireworks. But we saw them on the drive back to the island.  I recently noticed that we are having some good work off the island, but it gets hard when we don't have the miles to go there all the time.  So we have been trying to get more work here on the island.  We end up just finding cool English people, teaching them on the street, and then passing them off to the English Elders.  But this week things are going to change! We are going to find some golden families that speak Spanish!  So just you wait to here about it next week.

Love Elder Lund

PS:  I ate a pig’s foot fried in whipped egg whites...