November 1, 2010

Hola mamá!

Hope you all had a great Halloween! I spent mine on a bus up to Concepción because we had consejo with President Swenson today. Last night we stayed in Boca Sur with Elder Hall (my son) and his companion Elder Martinez. Some little kids came and knocked the door and said that they would egg our door if we didn't give them some treats (they actually do the tricks here, haha) so we made Elder Hall hand over some of the snickers that his family had sent him. All for a good cause, of course. Nobody wants to get a little boy with rats crawling out of his eyeballs (the mask he was wearing) mad. No sir.

Alrighty, so I've got the wierdest experience of all to tell you this week. So a few days ago we were in the house of one our investigators named Luis - we we're talking about the importance of knowing if the Book of Mormon is true or not, when a pastoress showed up from one of the evangelical churches his mom apparently goes to (Luis is 29). They told Luis to come into the other room for a minute, and he said that he couldn't because he was with us. But they insisted and said that they were going to share a scripture. He asked us if we wanted to acompany him, and we said sure, why not. What could a scripture from the Bible hurt, right? So we go into the next room, and the husband of the pastoress opens the Bible to some scripture in Romans and then starts going on about how there are no righteous people on the earth and that we are all useless. Then he ran out of things to say but didn't stop talking, if that makes sense. So he filled the gap with some phrases like ''God loves you, he helps you, come to God, he is love, glory to Him'' and then he picked up his train of thought again but it was on a completely different set of tracks, haha. In other words, the sermon was pretty incoherent and really didn't...edify would be the word I guess. So he went on for about 15 minutes and then out of nowhere he said, ''And now we're going to pray!'' They all got on their knees. Elder Heiser and I just kind of looked at each other and then slowly knelt down, haha. The guy started praying really loud, nothing too wierd. Then Luis's mom just threw herself on the ground and started crying and yelling at the floor. That's when I leaned over to Elder Heiser and said, ''Dude, if they start jumping I'm getting the heck out of here.'' He started to laugh a little, so he hid his face behind a wall. Then the pastoress, who was kneeling against a chair, started to cry uncontrollably and out of nowhere started screaming in gibberish. I looked at Elder Heiser and whispered, ''This is going to be good!'' Hahaha. Anyway, then she crawled over to Luis's mom and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up and put her hand on her chest. All the while saying stuff like, ''Sshylykamy! Shmeeelookally!'' It sounded like a mix of Hebrew and German with a little of Blowyournoseanese haha. In my head I thought, ''This would be a perfect opportunity to apply what I learned from Steve Carrell in Bruce Almighty: NNNNNNNNEEEEWWWWSSSS!!! LAWEGIhewañfoiejwañflekawjf AEWIFEIFJEIJFIEJJJFOOOOOO!!!! OOOOOOOOOOODocacapoopoo! MMMMMMNnnnnnMMMM!!'' You know, just to participate, haha. When that happened Elder Heiser and I just stood up and walked out of the room and waited until it was over. It was like a devil trance, because afterwards they went back to being completely normal people. If only they had read 1 Corinthians 14 before...haha. That was a pretty fun experience that I don't think I'll be forgetting anytime soon.

This last weekend Elder Amado, of the area presidency, came to our stake conference. On Saturday President Swenson called us to see if we could come open the chapel for them (they had an interview) and we got to talk with him and Elder Amado for a little while - he's a great man and a very inspirational speaker. We had an investigator show up that we had met that same day (Saturday) to the next day's session. Her name is Sissi. Anyway, she loved the conference and when we visited her after church she asked about baptism, so we're positive that she'll be getting baptized very soon here. It's just an amazing find, because we were in a huge hurry and we had the impression to talk with her and she just happened to be a golden investigator.

What do I want for Christmas? Hmmmm...ties! I always love getting ties. I would also enjoy more peanut butter, haha, mine is gone now. More CDs of the Tabernacle Choir would be amazing. I only have two on my iPod and I'm pretty sure I've listened to each of them at least 50 times each. That's about all I can think of for right now :)

Well, we need to travel back to Los Angeles. So I'll get some pictures attached and get them sent off. I love and miss you all very much!

Love,
Trevor