7/28/14

This week was Elder Adams' 18 month mark so he set fire to a pair of old pants (missionaries have a weird tradition where they burn a tie at 6 months, a shirt at 12, pants at 18, and a suit at the end of the mission - I don't participate in these wicked traditions but it was fun to watch). We video taped him lighting the pants on fire in the desert so we'll have lots of memories of this historic event. He also picked up the pants after they cooled off and they had turned into a puddle of plastic melted to a bunch of rocks (it kind of looks like Texas). Then he brought it home and pinned it to the apartment wall and labeled it "The Remains of Elder Adams' 18 month mark". It is now on display in our hallway for future missionaries to discover.

It got up to 116 degrees in the shade at one point this week. The summer has been brutal - but the ward has been very good to us. Our Stake President lives in our ward and we stopped by one day and discovered that they have a soft serve ice cream machine in their house! I have a feeling we will be visiting them more frequently now...

Yesterday we got a break from the heat. It started raining for about 10 minutes and we got a ton of lightning! I've never seen such cool thunder storms before my mission. A lot of people saw us walking and offered us rides but Elder Adams kept insisting that he wanted to walk in the rain. I didn't blame him - it felt so good to get rained on even if it really doesn't compare to home.

As you may have noticed, I mentioned we were walking. That is because earlier this week I finally wore all of the way through my bike tire. It started to fall apart and then on Friday night it finally exploded! It sounded like a gun shot. It was a little frustrating because I had to patch up a new record of 5 flat tires in 1 week leading up to the event. So when it finally exploded I felt like I had finally lost the battle. There was no choice but to walk. I'm planning on buying new tires today so I'll probably just have to use the debit card to do that.

We saw some success this week from a part member family. We started teaching Erin, Michael Green's girlfriend. Michael Green is a less active member who I've been working with since my first week here. He is probably one of the weirdest people that I ever met, but he is very friendly so we keep going back. This week he asked us to give his girlfriend a priesthood blessing which led to us teaching her the first two lessons. We realized that Michael really does have a testimony of The Gospel even though he may not be keeping the commandments. His girlfriend actually turned out to be very interested in our message and I have a lot of hopes for her. She said she is going to make a commandments jar for Michael that requires him to put money in each time he breaks a commandment. She'll probably put it next to the profanity jar she made for him. Unfortunately he is missing the concept of it since he's been prepaying ahead of time for the words he intends to use. Hopefully he won't apply the same principle to the commandments jar.

Elder Kyle Jensen