I'm sure the Elders have something prepared so I'll let them take this. -Brother Baker

Hey y’all, what’s going on?

The reason for the title is a fun time we had this last Sunday at church. After sacrament meeting we were on our way to go to Gospel Principles, when we find out that there was no one to teach it today, since our ward mission leader didn’t come that day and he didn’t assign a sub. So my comp and I BS’ed our way through a lesson there and it went pretty good.  Then we went on to Elders quorum where we had Brother Baker as the teacher for the day. He goes up to teach and the whole time he was up there he was asking the class about things and scriptures he should give to his friend to tell them about the church. Then after about 20 minutes of this he writes all the answers down, packs up his stuff and says, "Well I don’t want to take all of the Elders time, I’m sure they have something they have prepared to share with us so I’ll let them take this."  Then we had another impromptu lesson. Ha ha if there is one skill I will develop on my mission it will be the ability to pull a gospel lesson out of my butt on the fly.

Ha ha, so this week was over all a pretty good week, we had a couple people that we got to visit and help answer their questions about the scriptures and other gospel related things. We got to have the classic asking of how many wives we have; to which we responded none, and how we will only have one. 

This weekend though we get to have a re-baptism of a member named Nicole that just recently started coming to church. Apparently during hurricane Katrina her records for baptism were lost and so we have to re-baptize her to get that record back in the church's books. It is super exciting though and she is very happy and will to do it. It actually has been a big blessing for her family that this happened because it has given her brother Fernando the opportunity and jump start he needed to change his life a bit, and start coming back to church, so that he could baptize her.  This weekend between conferences he will be baptizing his sister back into the church.

Love y’all and hope you have a fantastic week!

Necesitas el hospital

Howdy everyone what’s going on?

Things are still going pretty well down here in Louisiana. It’s starting to get pretty hot though so here comes the yellow shirts that everyone told me about. 

But anyways this week has been a little bit of an interesting one, we were able to teach a couple of our investigators, but for the most of the week we did a whole lot of tracting; which always makes it so you run into a couple interesting characters.

The first one was a Mexican named Alfredo. He was one of those classic crazy people that believe everything that they have ever seen online is the truth. He started telling us that every church in the world was all controlled by the devil because they are suppressing some of the truth that he knows. Examples: he told us that people in Israel have found Noah’s arc on top of a mountain, that those same people have found the arc of the covenant right underneath Calvary hill and the way they found it was there was a Jewish doctor that went to the site and an angel appeared to him and opened up the ground and showed it to him as well as showed him a pool of blood that was on top of it that the angel told him to go test in a laboratory. Supposedly this liquid was Christ’s blood since it only had half of the normal amount of chromosomes that humans do. He told us we can find that all of this is true if we look it up on youtube. haha people are crazy.

Then the second one is the reason for the title of the email, so if you don’t like kinda gross stories you shouldn’t read this one. What happens is we are walking past this guy to a appointment when he calls us over and asks to use our phones. We walk over and we see a huge hole in the side of his calf, and the skin all around it was discolored and looked like it was dying. We thought we met someone with leprosy for a second. We are all like, "dude what is up with your leg?" and he told us that it was a spider bite. Then we told him he should go to the hospital and he told us that he has but they didn’t give him enough drugs and that he wasn’t going back again. He was literally insane. Man that must have been one monster spider.

Sorry for the weird email this time around, it has been a kinda strange week.

I hope y’all have an awesome week, and always remember that you should never pet a spider... that is just messed up.

Love y’all!

Classic Louisiana

New Area: La Place

Como Estan mis amigos?

This last week has been pretty fun, I got to see a lot of old people that I used to teach, since during my first transfer in Metairie we covered La Place; but now I’m serving down here. It is super fun, we have had some crazy people that we have run into while tracting, some crazy conversations in the apartment, and had a run in with our vehicle coordinator. All in all its been quite the adventure so far.

A cool experience this week was one that we had while tracting. We were out tracting and ran into 4 Cubans that were outside talking, they kinda yelled us over and started asking us about why there is so many religions out there and a whole bunch of other interesting questions. We start trying to answer their questions but one of them keeps interrupting and asking more questions that he wasn’t expecting us to have an answer for.  He seemed to have had experiences asking other churches these same questions and it stumping them.  He kept asking and ranting for about 20 min until my new comp, elder B, jumped in and asked if we could talk now since he had talked for such a long time. We then proceeded to almost answer all the questions he had brought up and it seemed to shock him a bit, but before we could finish he jumped back in asking us more questions.  This happened multiple times until he realized that we actually had answers to his questions and so he said he would come to our church this next Sunday and see if it meets up to what he thinks it should be; ie: people being friendly and talking to him.  It was actually pretty cool to see that questions that had stumped other churches and their teachings, were all able to be very simply answered by two teenage Mormon boys.  It was a testimony to the fact that we have the fullness of the gospel in the latter days and that the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints truly is the true church of Christ in the world today. 

Love you all!

New Companion:  Elder Bertanneau

Service project at the horse farm.

Putting together a filing cabinet before dinner.