Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

 ¿¿QUÉ ONDA??

I hope everyone had a great week and Father's Day. I know I did!!!

GOOD:

- This week we got a Facebook service referral for a lady named Crystal Marsh. Her and her family (husband and 6 children) just moved here from Virginia and needed help with their yard! We helped them on Friday (and let me tell ya, they NEEDED THE HELP) and then we met the family. The kids are ages 11, 9, 7, 7, 3 and 9 months and they are all super nice! We were about to leave when they asked about our church! Pretty dope. We came back on Saturday and taught the whole family!! They were incredible and loved our little lesson! We totally thought they were gonna pull up to church but this week they didn't. We will definitely have to go investigate this week and find out what happened. The cool thing is, I have been praying to find a family all transfer! I feel so blessed to have found this family who is so open and so excited about the gospel. I guess Megan couldn't find them in Virginia so they had to move to McAllen for me to help them. :)

- The absolute highlight of my week was having a game night with our recent converts!! This might seem like a weird thing for missionaries to do, but... they invited their friends and we were able to meet them in a normal and natural way. We bonded with the Murads and their friends over some intense games of Throw Throw Burrito and Monopoly: Cheater's Edition. Although I would've loved to destroy them in a game of Nertz, we didn't have time to teach them an entire new game. This was seriously such a fun and creative way to go about missionary work.

- We are getting new mission presidents in a few weeks and so this week the whole mission worked on a video to introduce them to us and the great TMM! We made a video as the zone at the beautiful McAllen temple. We also were instructed to make a "3-5 second video to uniquely introduce ourselves" ...mine is attached so you will have to let me know what you think. We also had our final interviews with President Ocampo and he is super cool, I will definitely miss him and his family!!

BETTER:

- We are still teaching our new friend Gus who is the smiliest, nicest guy you will ever meet. Gus is so enthusiastic about learning and this week he expressed a desire to be baptized! We are working with him to try and adjust his work schedule so he can have the chance to make it to church! If the Country Omelette will let him have Sundays off, then he is so prepared to enter into a covenant with God!

- I GOT TO GO ON EXCHANGES W ELDER MAYFIELD AND IT WAS A BLAST. Man, I love that guy! Elder Mayfield trained Elder Steen and also went to Layton High so we had lots of stories to share and a lot in common. We had so much fun together and the day just flewwww by. We crashed an inactive members birthday party, enjoyed being on the bikes (especially Elder Mayfield who sang a variety of songs including cruisin' for a bruisin'), taught some of our friends and had a fire lesson with the entire Marsh family. I learned from Elder Mayfield that you can choose to enjoy your mission by just having fun. This exchange was such a breath of fresh air and something I definitely needed.

- Coolest experience!! I have been visiting an inactive family named the Villanueva's since the first few weeks of my mission. They are super cool people and I feel I have really developed a good relationship with them. At the beginning of this week they invited us over for dinner on Friday AND said "hey, our neighbor is going to join us and she wants to learn about the church." (!!!!!) We went to the dinner appointment and met Andrea. Andrea is maybe in her mid-20's, can speak English, Spanish and Japanese and she has a little girl who is 11 months old. She is super nice and interested in finding a church that believes in line with her belief window. We taught her the resto and it was a fire lesson! We are excited to teach her again this week and keep involving the Villanueva Family in the teaching process.

BEST:

For today's spiritual thought... I want you to read the quote I type at the bottom of all of my letters. Jack Stringham is just a legend and I will never stop loving his little quote. Commit yourselves to live 1 of those 4 things a little bit better this week and remember that small efforts lead to big results! Love you guys!

"Work Hard, Keep the Commandments, Have a Positive Attitude and Show Gratitude"

- Elder Stringham