Hello West Coast!
This week was pretty busy with a lot of lessons, service, and dinners.
So to start off with the lessons that we had this past week. We actually had a lot of lessons with members. Since our mission president has challenged us to teach 20 lessons a week, we're trying to get them anyway we can, whether that be through active members, less active members, investigators, or potential investigators.
I think in my last letter I mentioned one of the inactive families we have been trying to reach since I got here. They may have come to church and a total of one or two times, but that's it. We had also been trying to drop by and visit with them, but every time we tried they weren't home. One day Elder Bodda needed a haircut so we went to a barber that happened to be right by their house. As we drove past, we saw that they were actually home! We dropped by and set up an appointment to go and teach them the lessons.
We went back that following Thursday and we were greeted with Jimmy John's subs. They're pretty good. I had a roast beef. After the wonderful lunch, we taught them the restoration of the Gospel. It was a very spiritual lesson and it was awesome to see that they still had a strong testimony and knowledge of the gospel. They answered questions and added their own insight to the lesson. It really brought out the spirit. After the lesson we talked for little while and we found out that the reason they haven't been coming to our ward is because they've actually been going to church with their family in Virginia. At the end of the lesson we told them we would call them so we can set up another appointment and we invited them to come to our ward. Unfortunately they weren't able to make it that Sunday so we're hoping for next Sunday.
The rest of the lessons that we had were with our dinner appointments and we were able to teach portions of the lessons. It was really cool to see the members light up with the spirit and be excited to share what they know of the gospel with us during the lessons.
Other part of this busy week was a lot of service opportunities. Two Sundays ago one of the sisters from the ward came up to me (Sister S). She told us that she needed help remodeling her basement because she had an interview with social services coming up. She was trying to get her Grand-babies back. Her basement had flooded so she needed help. We asked what needed to be done and she said a little bit of cleaning, dry-walling, tiling and putting molding around the edges of the walls. Since nobody from the ward could go help her clean, we said that we would. We got there and found that we had a lot more to do than we expected. There were printers, breadmakers, fax machines, TV's, sound systems, speakers, DVD players, VHS machines, and many other electronic devices. She had all collected all of this because she would go to thrift stores and buy all of these electronic things to send home to Africa. The problem was that she didn't have enough money to actually send the stuff, so she just kept buying and buying and buying but not sending any of it. It ended up to be a lot more cleaning than we had expected in the first place. It took us about a day and a half to finish cleaning it all out.
While cleaning though, we found several health hazards that were serious enough that no one should be living in the house. We found a lot of black mold, bedbugs and the last thing we found was a dead rat! It smelled a little off the first day we were there, but we just figured it was the musty smell from the flood. Little did we know under one of the beds that was there there was a dead rat making the the whole house smell really bad.
The next day or the Elders Quorum went over and did the drywall and a little bit of the molding, but they couldn't do any of the tiling because no one knew how.
Next, we had to go to another Sister's house to help her do yardwork which lasted the rest of the day. She's one of those people that when she gets you started on one thing, she comes up with more things to do so that way you don't leave. As soon as we would get one thing finished, she would say "Oh wait! I have this other thing that you can do for me!". Thus, we ended up staying another two or three hours.
Well I hope that you all have had a wonderful day and a wonderful week! My week is been pretty packed and very full of the spirit! I'm excited to try and meet the goal of 20 lessons. I'll let you all know how we do next week.
I love and miss up you all!
Love,
Elder Gold
