Holy guacamole, the day actually came! I am now officially an old man--I've been on my mission for 18 months! Not that anything changes, though. It's just a number. But it's a reeeeeeeally funny number to throw around in front of sister missionaries. [Female missionaries serve a total of 18 months.]
Their eyes get hilariously big when I say that I've actually served longer than they ever will. Do I sound too much like Brian Johns now? I guess I take after my uncle a little bit. [That is a scary thought...] This week has been really good for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately, Eddy and Marlon aren't one of those reasons. We haven't even been able to have a lesson with them since she started at her new job. Hopefully this coming week will be different in that respect. But a lot of other great things happened. So I think I emailed last Monday about our new investigator, Michael. He's the one who refuses to follow the traditions of his Catholic family and wants to find the truth. Well, we went over for another lesson on Thursday, and he's been reading the Book of Mormon. That's awesome, and we're more confident than ever that he'll be baptized eventually. We still have a long way to go, though. We tried to teach the plan of salvation in answer to one of his questions, and got hung up on baptisms for the dead. He can't grasp the concept of someone, other than Jesus Christ, interceding on behalf of another person. We're going to have to go back to that point eventually. But there's no rush. Cristina, his wife, is not on date to be baptized this month any more, because she all of a sudden remembered she was baptized when she was 12! That was quite the surprise. But that's ok, because now we know where to go with her. I can just imagine that by the end of the transfer she's actively attending church and on her way to a temple recommend, and he's slowly but surely progressing toward baptism. We also had a lot of fun with public transportation this week, because they took the minivan away from us Monday morning for transfers (something about picking up the new missionaries from the MTC) and didn't get our car back until two days later. So we rode trains and busses and more trains for three days! I don't mind riding the train, but it put a drain on our productivity because travel time was usually between 3 and 4 times what it would have been with our car, and we have a big area! It actually took us an hour to get to one appointment, making us so late that we had to cancel the one after it. But on Wednesday afternoon we took a trip to Layton with our car coordinator and picked up our car from the body shop. It's great to be back to normal! Also, we got argued with by a lot of people while we were riding busses. One guy came up to us and started talking about how we have the hardest mission in the world, because everyone here in Utah is Mormon already. I really wanted to tell him he has no idea how wrong he is... This is the best mission ever! And we have no problems finding non-members in the Spanish program. The Salas family are still doing well, and they actually invited us to their daughter's birthday party this week. We showed up just for the first ten or fifteen minutes, since we didn't want to be those awkward teenagers at a party for an eleven year old. But we had a nice talk with them before heading out. And we helped them borrow a few chairs from the church building for the party, then went with them the next day to return them. The rest of the week was mostly taken up with working with members.
We got a new ward mission leader in the Mount Ensign 3rd Ward, so we had correlations with the old one and the new one. The new WML is named Jesus and he's been home from his mission for just a few years. He's super excited and so am I, after seeing how much energy he has for the work. We also met with Bishop Obeso to ask what else we could to for him, and he gave us a list of six people who are on the ward list but are not familiar to him. We were incredibly blessed when we went out to find all of them. All of the doors opened! After one afternoon knocking doors, we were able to confirm that five of the six had moved, since at each door someone else answered and said that they had moved in recently. And the sixth one was an apartment complex, so since we didn't have an apartment number, we just tracted the place out. It was only eleven doors, and by the time we knocked six of them we were able to get confirmation that the last person on the list had also moved. That's incredible progress for such a short time. So yesterday I was able to report back to Bishop that we had already gotten done with his list. I attended Mount Ensign on splits yesterday, since Elder Valladares had to go to branch council in Arbor. They had a member of the 70 there, so we decided we couldn't miss it. So all in all, I only have one negative comment about the week, and that is the air quality. I think I've written a little about inversion before. It's that phenomenon where the air pollution comes back with a vengeance because the mountains trap in inside the valley. Well, this week was the worst I've EVER seen. Both me and my companion have had a permanent headache because of it, up until the rain yesterday cleared the air. Today is much nicer. And it doesn't help at all that we live really close to the refineries, which are the source of a lot of the pollution. I'm glad it rained so we can have clean air again for a little while. Well, that's all! I'm glad this week was more exciting, since I hate sending two paragraph emails. Hopefully the coming week will be the same! I hope Cami feels better; that cut looks bad in the picture. And tell Brian and Mary I said hi! Love, Spencer Pix: 1- Sister Olivas was transferred away to Rose Park 2- The branch threw a party to celebrate my month-mark! Actually this was for Valentine's Day 3- Sunday best (plus a black tie for Uzair...) 4- My Easter-themed planner. This transfer is seven weeks long, so I did a little surgery on this planner to add an extra week to it. The wedges at the bottom are my mini mission record. Each one represents a transfer, and the colors show which area I was in.
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