We picked up four investigators this past week, two of which were Kelly and Manny. The other two came to the Spanish branch yesterday, thank goodness! It's Irma and her oldest son, Miguel. We took them on a "on-the-fly" church tour Saturday night after eating some delicious homemade tostadas. Irma is like 99% Catholic. She has a few member friends, and they were absolutely thrilled and mostly shocked that she actually came to the Mormon church yesterday! You see, Irma has been thinking about life a lot lately and has a bunch of doubts and concerns. She's literally in the process of being prepared! She's considering divorce and so forth, which hopefully doesn't happen. Either way, she connected with E Ramirez soo well and we've been able to help her understand the need she has for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately my Spanish is still ground level, so I don't get to participate a whole lot, but the main thing is that she is feeling the Spirit fill an empty hole in her heart right now. It's awesome! I hope and pray that she will continue to roll with that momentum. Miguel is a good sport. He has an LDS girlfriend that lives in St. George. He's pretty open to the gospel now as well, which is great.
Hmm well other than that, we had a cool experience on Friday night. (This isn't your typical "Friday night" experience by the way.) So we were walking away from Patricia's after setting an appointment and to be completely honest we heard some dairy cows mooing like crazy so we thought "hey let's go check it out." haha well on our way E Ramirez said "Oh shoot! We need to go see Irma tonight!" thank goodness the Lord put that into his mind because otherwise we would have been looking at cows all night. Well as we were walking across town to Irma's we walked in front of the Senior Citizen center. Right as we passed it, the fire alarm went off. I checked my watch...7:44pm sharp. We paused and hesitated. You see, us humans have this interesting instinct to ignore fire alarms because they're almost always fake. Well we thought "hmm maybe we should just check it out." So we peeked into the front window and saw a couple old ladies with walkers covering their ears and squinting real hard. The alarm was loud! Then a door opened nearby and a nurse came out with two other older ladies. We asked if they needed help and she said yeah and that there was in fact smoke inside the building somewhere and that they needed to evacuate all the old people. So I stayed outside with the old ladies and kept them company while E Ramirez went in to help evacuate everyone. The poor old ladies were awfully cold, so luckily I had a towel in my backpack (for a visual aid for a lesson we had earlier) that I wrapped around one lady's feet right as E Ramirez came out with a big blanket. Anyway by now the whole neighborhood was getting involved and helping evacuate all the old people and gathering blankets for them. The fire chief and some other guy showed up in a few minutes, and 12 minutes after the alarm went off, at 7:56pm, two crew trucks showed up. I'll admit it was super inspiring to see them show up and head inside with their turnouts...my respect went out to you Dad and all those fire fighters out there! Well everyone was completely fine and they suspected it was some sort of electrical problem in the attic. But either way I was glad I could help in whatever way I could, even if was simply keeping an old lady's feet warm. It just goes to show, whosoever shall be chief among you, let him be your servant. That's paraphrased of course. Neat experience!
Well this week we got to go to Chelsea's baptism on Saturday. I helped her move in and move out a month later to Mt. Pleasant when I was with E Stephens. Well she got baptized! Elder Gomez and Wade taught her. Hooray! She was happy to see me there. Yesterday at her confirmation we got enlisted to sing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in Sacrament haha. Not bad! Then we had a recent convert fireside last night and a few of us missionaries sang a medley of hymns 6 and 100. Not bad either! It was a fun experience, and we had a pretty good weekend.
Well we got transfer calls yesterday morning. President called! Hi President! He said that we're both staying here in Ephraim, and that I will serve as District Leader! Cool! Another good learning opportunity for sure. The "Snow" district is pretty small...four companionships. Should be fun! E Gomez is going to die out in Price, training a new missionary who will be my little brother! I'm super excited for him. He goes home in two transfers. Elder Linville is still in Buena Vista 2, and now he's a relief society president haha so that's awesome. But yeah transfers have an exciting ring this time around with lots of cool changes, so that's awesome. Either way, the work will move forward! E Ramirez and I...Halloween part 2! I spent Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas with him last year, so let's see if we can do it again! haha I love you guys and hope the best for this week!
Love,
Elder Payne!
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