Viva La Vida - Coldplay (Man I miss listening to my Coldplay)

So yeah, like the title says... I miss some of my worldly music. But hey that's no big deal. I have some great uplifting church music now to listen to. 

And some pictures of my speaker in the dark that somehow looks kinda cool. 

But let's get to the good stuff from this past week. Which there was a lot of things that went down. Not bad things, just good things.

So first things first, I got bit by like a spider or something so I had this nice red spot on my arm for a few days. It didn't really hurt at all, it was just more annoying than anything else. 

Entonces, there was this book of workouts at Elder Atkin and Elder Lorenzo's house that was left by some Hermanas that lived there before, and it is pretty hilarious. Some of the workouts are pretty funny because they are all themed after like a superhero or something. I'll send a few as pictures.

So last monday after my emails, we went to this event that was put on for including people with special needs, and there was quite a lot of people that showed up. We were there to just help out wherever they needed it. Pretty cool event too. They had music playing, did giveaways, and some special acts that were put on by people in the community.

We also helped one of the more "recent" converts, Hermana Hafner, (who was baptized a long time ago and fell away, then was rebaptized earlier this year) to paint her house. We just painted like half of her main room a light mint color to see how it looks, so we are going to go back there again sometime to finish it up. She said that she was teaching us a valuable skill to learn, painting walls. She is an awesome lady who has a lot of experiences. 

We taught the Velasquez part-member family last week and we invited Aracelli and her hija, Sofia, to be baptized, which they accepted. But they didn't want to commit to set a date for baptism, so we are still continuing to push them to try and get a date set. But they are an awesome family and they wanted me to say a prayer in English for them since I can't really speak Español too well yet. They didn't understand what I said, but I knew that the Spirit was there with us. Really cool experience. 

And then we had Zone Conference! It lasted for two days, friday (viernes) and saturday (sábado).  The first day was in Nueva Rosita and President and Sister Cahoon were here and it was a great theme of what things we are doing in our way, and how we should be doing them in the Lord's way. We also watched a video about the #LightTheWorld initiative and found out that the zone's Acuña, Piedras Negras, and Nueva Rosita are going to all be together on December 8th in a big plaza with the video playing and all of us missionaries from those zones will be contacting the people there and sharing the video. It will no doubt be awesome! And then the second day was at our church in Sabinas and we cleaned the whole church and then played volleyball and some small relay-race games (like putting an oreo on your forehead and trying to get it in your mouth) with the missionaries from our zone, Nueva Rosita. We also all had our interviews with President Cahoon throughout that day. So it was a good day. 

El Día de Muertos was on the 2nd too, but we didn't get to see really anything going on with that day though. Although the flower shop right next to our house was insanely busy that day and they had a ton of flower boquets waiting to be sold. But on viernes we did get to see one of the altares at the Centro Cultural. I'll send a picture with that as well.

Anyways, back to viernes. After the zone conference, we all went back to our areas and the Assistant to the President, Elder Smith, joined me and my comp in a trio for that day. Elder Smith goes home in about 2 weeks, like the day before Thanksgiving, and it was awesome getting to work with him and seeing how he does things. We started talking to this really hard stuck Christian woman, who I thought we were just going to offer some service and then be on our way, about the Book of Mormon. And the way that Elder Smith talked about the Book of Mormon, I could just feel of the love he has for the book and for the people here. We were able to actually go inside with this woman and have a really awesome lesson about the Book of Mormon, even though I didn't have too much input to it. We went back to her again on Saturday, but she didn't want us to teach her anymore. That is something that I have learned about that a lot of people here in Mexico are like. They have been Catholic or Christian or Jehovah's Witness their whole lives, and they say they are going to stay that way forever. So a lot of times it's hard to teach someone about this Restored Church on the earth today when they aren't willing to change themselves. But it's a part of the mission here. 

There was another experience to that Elder Garcia and I had. We were going to one of our appointments to have a lesson with them, but they weren't home. And then across this street, this older lady and her husband were calling us over to talk to with them. She wanted to talk with us because she was ill and was having a hard time walking around. So we sat down on her porch and had a really good lesson with her about the Plan of Salvation and left her with a Book of Mormon for her and her husband to read. We could see the pain that she had and the hope that she wanted for a better life. It was quite the tender experience and we are returning to meet with them again this week as well. 

But we have recently met with the Ward Mission Leader and with the Branch President to start working with the members more and we want to start holding Family Home Evenings with them and the investigators. And also inviting them to come to lessons with us as well. We also have a few old investigators from before we got here that we are going to visit and some recent converts as well. But we are definitely trying to work a lot more with the members. The members of a ward play a big impact on new converts to keep them coming to church and staying active. 

Anyways, I think will be everything for the past week. Really long letter, so sorry about that. But it was a good week. Keep going strong. I know this church true. Stay active, Live Healthy, Walmart.

Love you all,

Elder Turner