HI mom,
This week we had RAIN!!!! I forgot my card adapter, so I'll send pictures next week, but it rained so much that all the streets flooded and our over flow river (called the wash) was overflowing!! We saw some cars that were literally buried in water up to the doors, and some times not just when parked on the road. And we got to walk through those puddles.
We also talked to everyone on the street and found a cool kid from Mexico (like just-got-off-the-bus-from Mexico) talked to him (in perfect fluent Spanish (like better then I normally have) thank you Gift of Tongues) who believes that God has prophets all over the world, not just in Jerusalem, so we gave him a Book of Mormon, told him that it's those prophets that God had here in America and he committed to read it and give us a call with his information (because he's so new he doesn't know himself yet).
We also found THE MOST GOLDEN INVESTIGATOR!!!!!!!! We found him technical on new years eve, but we taught him on Thursday for the first time and we only had like 15 minutes, so we taught that God is our Heavenly Father quickly and reset for Saturday (oh, and the appointment an hour earlier). At the end of the lesson, he gave the most humble prayer. Fast forward to Saturday (we called him on Friday and he'd read for the lesson), we teach him the full lesson one (the Restoration) and he understands and agrees with every thing!! I mean ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING! This is a miracle. Latinos have a problem with the apostasy for the most part. Either they don't believe it happened or they believe that everyone has authority just for teaching about Christ. This man (his name is hermano C* by the way) HELPED us teach it by pulling up scripture references from the Bible (nothing exact, more like examples) to demonstrate that it was happening even before the apostles died and they were always correcting false doctrine. It was supper cool. We set a date for the 31st of January and he'll be getting baptized that day. He has a little problem with commitment, but he's the purest of pure gold.
That's really about all that happened here.
Elder Mike Blanding
Called to Serve my King.
Oh, ya, Forgot. We also saw a naked man whipping his butt (by that I mean from the waist down he was naked) in the middle of the street and almost got Pepper sprayed by a crazy man eating chicken. He threatened to do it yesterday if we kept talking to him (all we'd done is offer a card and ask him how his day was) and then Elder Jager and I spent the next ten minutes standing on the same corner as him waiting for our ride to show up and debating whether or not we should talk to him and get sprayed. We didn't get sprayed :( :) but we did say good-bye to the man as we walked away. (We're a little upset about the fact that it was only an almost sprayed story. I've had a lot of those. Almost Tased, sprayed, hit by a car (that wasn't almost) now all I'm missing almost shot).