Elder Gold Goes To DC North: Fire and Flood precede the Second Coming...(6/16/2014)

Hey everyone!

I apologize for not writing last week! That Monday, we were having a missionary party and it went on forever. By the time it ended, I had no time to write and then I just didn't have a spare moment the rest of the week.

Last week was crazy though!! Ha! I swear it was the second coming over here! :) First of all, last Monday, we were in our apartment getting ready to go out and start working when I smelled something like a BBQ outside in the front of our apartment complex. I looked out the front window and I see smoke, but no grill. Then as I was looking out the window, I hear a guy yell "Fire!!". So I ran into our roommates room and told them about it. We all finished getting dressed and went down to the parking garage.

When we got down there, it was filling with smoke quickly. We looked around the corner and the entire garbage chute area for the apartment was on fire!!! A guy tried to grab the fire extinguishers to put it out, but he went through three of them and it still didn't go out. Now keep in mind that 20-30 minutes has elapsed, and the Fire Department still hadn't shown up yet. Finally they show up and and they told us to leave and go out front, which we did. Then all we could do is wait until they told us we were good to go back in.

Then! On top of that, later that week, we had a downpour of rain for like a good 20 minutes straight! There is this big canal this that goes down part of the main road, and that completely filled up and was heavily flooding the streets! We had an appointment we had to go to, so we had to drive through it all! I was dumb and didn't even think to take pictures of it. While we were driving though it, there were cars everywhere that had stalled because of how high the water was! Even our car almost stalled, but The Lord blessed us to make it through safely.

It was absolutely crazy how much water there was! By the time we were done with our lesson, the rain had died down and the water went away. So it was all good in the end :).

Speaking of lessons! That lesson we went to was for Stephon! We were teaching him about the commandments. He also got baptized this past Sunday!! We had a bit of a hiccup though when we were supposed to teach the last commandments to him. He had to reschedule the first appointment because of the weather. Then he dogged our rescheduled appointment. So we had planned to teach him the rest of the commandments on Friday so Saturday he could have his interview with the District Leader. Well we ended up teaching him and having his interview the same day. Oh! Also some of the Elders thought they saw him smoking while walking to the lesson/interview! So we had to go over the commandments and sneak in there the question of if he had a problem with smoking. He said he didn't, so we went ahead with it. And thus he got baptized! Ha!

We also had a lesson with a man named Abraham! He was a referral from the Spanish elders. He is a super spiritual guy and loves talking about Christ! He even loved the lesson on the Restoration! However, for some reason though he refuses to be baptized. He said he doesn't want to be baptized twice. He said "It's like I took a shower once already today, I don't want another one". We even re-explained the apostasy and basically told him that the baptism he had wasn't valid, (not in those words, but yeah), and he still said no. So we'll try to see what's really holding him back from from saying yes.

We also had the awesome chance to get our own family names prepared and take them to the temple to do their work. That was such an awesome experience! I loved being able to do the Confirmations! That was awesome! And being baptized was a blast! Ha! I love doing them! They will be doing it again before I go home, which I'm really grateful and happy for :)

Well that has been pretty much my past week or two! I love you all and I hope everyone is having fun and staying safe! Have a great week!

Love.

Elder Gold