Elder Ian Rich: Dec 10: Chilies and nińos... oh and a baptism

Another quick week another quick email from E. Reech. I hope everybody had a good week. This is basically what my week consisted of.

Tuesday: The first half of Tuesday summed up was driving to Tempe for a zone conference and about 5 hours of pure fun sitting, listening and trying not to fall asleep. Quite a boring time, not a fan if I'm being honest. We met with Pedro again on Tuesday night. One of the first things he mentioned was that he had a direct answer to his prayer. He had been praying for a decision that he needed to make. He didn't know whether he should drive to Mexico and see his brother who was dying or to stay here in Arizona to find a job and continue listening to the missionaries. He said the next morning he received 2 phone calls from people trying to hire him. Super cool. I offered the opening prayer, and when I finished he was just sobbing in tears. He was like, "I'm sorry, I'm just so happy with my life right now." No doubt it was the spirit testifying the truthfulness of all things.

Wednesday: Today was an absolute blast, absolute insane day. I really have been focusing on my Spanish this past week. I get up every morning and listen to a conference talk and just start reading Spanish in the Book of Mormon, trying to memorize 30 words per day. All in all, I forget all those words by nighttime. Hahahaha. We taught Shantel again tonight. She has been investigating the church for about 3 years now. Her husband is pretty anti-Mormon and doesn't really like her taking the discussions but she is spiritually prepared. She has been taking lessons for 3 years now, so she knows a ton about our gospel. The only thing she really is missing is baptism, it's really her last step. We asked if we could kneel down and pray and ask God to see what her next step in her spiritual progression would be, and when we concluded she felt that it needed to be Baptism. She knew it, Elder Badstubner and I both knew it... the last step. We didn't invite her though, but we told her that it is the end goal and we're going to get her prepared for the day. We also met with my boy Tyler - A little bit about him, he is a recent graduate from high school and was referred to us by a woman in our ward who's daughter is dating him. The man is just a straight up beast, love the kid. In our previous lesson, we invited him to read Second Nephi chapter 31 when Jesus was baptized and set that perfect example for us to all follow him. He was super engaged and immediately wanted to share what he loved and felt when he read it. He was super interested in the topic or baptism, and straight up said he wanted to follow Jesus and be baptized. We got him on date for the 29th of December. Talk about the Lord preparing people.

Thursday: We had another lesson with Pedro, and we figured we'd send it and teach him about baptism, and we had a very spiritual lesson. Pedro currently has 2 sons serving missions. One of them is in Africa, and the other in India. Pedro went through a divorce some time ago, and his ex-wife got baptized and raised their sons in the church. Pedro told us that he wants to use the atonement of Jesus Christ before he gets baptized so he'll have a super spiritual experience. We have that end goal in mind. We stopped by Antonio's house again, and he was dressed in the Grinch Pajamas onesie. We were talking to him for a while and all the sudden his little 3-year-old walks over to me and punches me right in the groin, and my companion goes "Audios Elder Riches Ninos" It was super funny.

Friday: Went to 5 Guys for lunch, spiced it up a little. We prepared all our lessons for the day early in the morning and every single one of them bailed. So we spent the whole day finding. Mexicans love their Chilies. You can tell if they are Mexican because almost every house has chili plants in the front. We started doing this thing where we would eat the full seeds and all chili right when we knock on the door and when they opened up we would try and play it off. In one particular door approach we did, and the lady answered right when the spice just kicked in. Man, I swear they have the hottest peppers ever. We just try to play it off, but it is for real, the hardest thing because you just feel like you are going to throw up on the inside and die because your mouth is on absolute fire and you have no water, and we can't be like, "Your chilies are super hot, can we have some water!" hahahhaha. We are all about the full sends and memories. If you ain't full sendin you ain't livin.

Saturday: We did a service project for about 5 hours, refurbishing an old baseball park. Sanding, and staining old bleacher seats. Cutting and ripping out grass in the infield. For real was a workout. We taught Tyler again about the atonement, and after we invited him to pray and ask for forgiveness he goes. "I'm not promising anything, I just can't. I'm just going to because I have to. It's not a promise, I'm just going to." What a stud.

Sunday: Another 3-hour meeting at church ALL in Spanish, wasn't too bad. I understood a lot of it. Pedro showed up though which was awesome. He was a little teary-eyed the whole time.

Love you all, Don't forget to find opportunities to Light the World this week!

Elder Rich