This week started off with basketball on the army base. It was a lot of fun and I was surprised they let a Canadian like me on. We played some fun games, but eventually I knocked knees with another Elder and my leg felt really bad, in lots of pain. That was frustrating because I had about half an hour of play time and an hour and a half of sitting there recovering. That recovery, however, did not finish there. My knee has been hurting all week since. I like to look on it positively though. It really does make things interesting.
We also went over to the home of a family in the ward and had a sweet visit there. An acquaintance of the Mother was there, and was interested in watching some Mormon Message videos, so we did. As a group we watched a whole bunch of Mormon Messages and talked about them. She loves the videos and I think she's really warming up to learning about the church.
On Thursday we had Zone Training Meeting. We met as a zone and discussed things that the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders had learned in the Mission Leadership Council. That included some good discussions about how we can strengthen the members in our wards and how we can teach better. We got a new teaching tool and I wish I took a picture of it, but it covers in detail (but still very simple) the apostasy, dispensations and prophets leading up to the restoration. This same lesson used to be done on a small whiteboard, but it's now printed onto the whiteboard so we don't need to draw it all out, but we can write scriptures and things on it as we want.
A very interesting part of the week was when we went to visit people with a member of our ward. He's an awesome member from Nicaragua. He went with us to visit some people that Bishop wanted us to find. We went out to the boonies where Google or iPhone maps didn't go. We were being followed by loud dogs, driving through small flooded roadways, and up this hill, and so on. We were approaching the hill and we saw a car pointing towards us, but reversing up the hill and we were really confused but we drove towards it in hopes of it being the one we're looking for. While we were following it, the brother in his accent said, "We are coming for you!" We cracked up so hard on this adventure with him. Eventually they parked at the top, and we followed all the way, and finally according to the instructions of a neighboring member, we found the house. The brother in our ward asked the woman standing there if this was the home of the man we were looking for, and she answered, "no." Then on our way back on this narrow road, we saw another vehicle coming so we backed up and asked him the same question and he said that is in fact where the man lives, who we were looking for.
Although my leg was in pain, it got a lot better each day so on Friday we played basketball again but with an investigator and his friends. It was a really fun game and we were going hard at it. I learned a few new tricks to improve my shot and that's a good thing, because I really didn't know a whole lot about shooting but now I've improved a ton. It was 3 on 3 and we went for about an hour then before we left, we said that because we're missionaries we'd like to have a prayer before we left. One of the friends said a very humble prayer and he said he doesn't really know what he's doing,but it was great anyways.
The next morning, we went way out of town and helped a member and his extended family to make changes to his hay shed. It was interesting because a bunch of us were on a ladder trying to lift u a really heavy piece of lumber and set it down in place at the roof level. If it fell it would've have maybe knocked us off our hit someone, which wouldn't be good, but the one who was directing us really knew what he was doing and we said a prayer at the start of the project in which the brother asked for us to be safe while doing it. Later that night we returned for dinner and it was s[spaghetti. That was amazing.
On Sunday we had no investigators, but Sunday itself wasn't a complete disaster, especially in the evening. First we went to visit some of our friends at their Pentecostal church, their evening service. It was and wasn't what I expected. They had a band playing and they're very good. It was pretty loud compared to what I'm used to in Sacrament Meeting, but that's to be expected since they are tow completely different types of churches. It was good to listen to, and then a man was reciting scriptures from the book of Acts. We didn't stay for very long, because we needed to get on to our schedule, but we ended up having a short successful visit with an investigator who had been on vacation for a while, whom I am glad to see now that he is home. We then went to visit a family and we read about Alma's conversion. That was the end of our blessed week.
Love, Elder Rodgers
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