Email cuarenta y dos

May 29, 2017

This week was pretty awesome. We saw some tender mercies for sure, and made some good memories.

 So Monday after I finished emailing, the four of us missionaries were chilling inside the house when we hear this high pitched scream, followed by the unmistakable voice of Freddie Green yelling "It's a snake!" We ran outside and sure enough there was Freddie just a few feet away from a four foot long black snake with a white diamond pattern on its back. It was just sitting there in the grass looking at us. We didn't know what kind it was, but fearing it was poisonous, Elder Stiles-Culver grabbed a metal yard tool and chopped its head off French guillotine style and yelled "I'm killing that thing before it kills me!" The cool thing was that the body was still writhing all over the place, so I picked it up and played with it. 

Reader discretion is advised because if you are already grossed out, it gets way worse from here. Using scissors, I then cut all the way down its belly to the tail with the body still moving like crazy. We then cut open the stomach and found 3 dead birds! After gutting

everything out, the stomach, the intestines, the liver, and heart, etc, Elder Jorgensen and I worked on skinning it. After cutting the skin away from the muscle a little, I grabbed the skin, Elder Jorgensen grabbed the muscle, and we pulled away from each other. That did the trick, it was super cool actually. Elder Jorgensen then threw the meat on ice and aluminum foil, and I worked on cleaning the skin. Freddie didn't believe us when we told him what we had done with the snake, so Elder Jorgensen brought out the snake meat, and Freddie freaked out and started running away. Elder Jorgensen then chased him around the yard for a good minute with this thing in his hand. It was one of the funniest things I have seen on the mission for sure! I was dying from laughing.

 We then had our barbecue: hamburgers, hotdogs, and snake meat. The snake was actually super yummy. Elder Stiles-Culver is really good at cooking and he seasoned it. It was super tough meat, tasted a lot like turkey jerky. The hardest part about eating it were all the bones. There were so many. It was definitely a P day activity I will never forget.

That night we had dinner at the J's home. Brother and Sister J's house is in the city limits of Jonesboro, but falls in the Paragould Branch boundaries. The reason we came over is because Brother J is a Physics professor at ASU and one of his students, A, had talked to him extensively about the Gospel. While it just turns out that we met this same A a few weeks earlier when we went to his house to teach his college roommate. So Brother J invited him over for dinner with the missionaries, and we got to teach him again. It was super good missionary work by Brother J. A has a lot of doubts, he questions the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. His main issue is he doesn't believe he can trust what he feels as a spiritual confirmation from God. That lesson was way to too long. We were at their house for 3 hours. Brother and Sister J were so excited to share the Gospel with this guy that they went off on temple sealings to the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, and everything in between. Poor A, he just wanted a simple answer to a simple question. 

The Gospel is like a cake. It's super delicious, but hard take in if someone shoves it down your throat all at once. But everything turned out okay, A is still willing to meet with us. The J's are super nice people though, with only the best intentions, so I'm not too upset about it.

Tuesday for District Meeting I instructed on two topics. The first was finding in public places. Missionaries usually spend the dead hours of the day knocking doors, when people usually aren't home. So we need to get to where the people are! Not going to lie, this is a tough concept for me, talking to people in public places has always been tough for me.  You definitely get rejected a lot more. But I also know that I have been called to preach the Gospel among God's children. To do that, I have to go where they are. The second is working through members and inviting them to share the Gospel. This is so key. We are inviting families in the Ward to pray that God puts someone in their path who is prepared to receive the Gospel.

 On Thursday we headed down to Little Rock for exchanges with the Zone Leaders. I got to hang out with Elder Giles while we were there. It was good to see him again, he is doing really well! Elder Sweeten and I had fun on our exchanges, he goes home next in a couple weeks, so we had some deep conversations about the impact of the mission. 

On Saturday we went finding downtown. It was tough. There weren't as many people out as we thought there would be, it's super hard to stop people, I've found out. Usually my "go to" is "hey can I ask a quick question?" Which leads to a quick yes or no. But I know the more rejection I face, the stronger I can become as I rely on the Lord, so all is well.

 The Church is true, the Book is blue, C W Jr passed his baptismal interview!