Dear Family and Friends,
Elder Stryker has this thing where he randomly picks me up and throws me onto the floor and wrestles me haha it’s pretty hilarious. He is a pretty big boy … 270 he says. Although I am proud to say that I have pinned him several times, most of the times he just lays on me and won’t let me breathe haha. I love Elder Stryker. On one of such occasions, he picked broke my name tag! It’s OK, I have one of the most beat up tags in the mission. It’s pretty famous (much like my shirts and my shoes… dang). It was already starting to crack along the top, and it’s so sun-faded that all you see is my name and a faint “Jesucristo” haha but thanks to a lot of superglue I fixed my tag for now at least to last me for two more weeks. And I also superglued it to my finger in the process. But that’s not important!
Right now we are at the library waiting for President Crawford to come and pick up Elder Stryker. His visa to Argentina went through and he is going to fly out today. I am really going to miss him. It was fun training him for 10 weeks and he is going to do great. He grew a lot out here. Now it’s just Elder Tatom and I …
Let’s see … what happened this week. We have been doing a lot of work with less actives and recent converts. I think that is important because they are people who have already entered into the covenant of baptism. We have met some families who are really great and weren’t coming to church essentially because they were waiting for someone to invite them! We just met the Guevara family not too long ago and they are coming to church next Sunday. And they feed us every Monday night which is awesome!
Also, there is this family – the Garza family. They are so legit! They actually have a really nice house! The mom is really active and has a teenage son and daughter who are active as well. They have a younger son and daughter (who’s name is Karime and she is so freakin’ cute!!) The dad served a mission and was really strong in the gospel. He was in the high council or something and I guess something crazy happened with that because one day almost a year ago he just slapped his temple recommend on the Bishop’s desk and said he’s never coming back.
They seriously seem like a family straight out of Spain. It might have to do with the fact that they are a lot more fair – skinned than normal mexican families, but just the way they are reminds me of certain things. Especially Hermano Garza.. he may be going through a hard time with the church but he is so funny and he really likes having us around. Well they have been having us over for dinner every week and we were discussing Ether 12:27 which talks about weaknesses and humility and he said, “elders, how can I expect to keep going if God keeps humbling me over and over again.” I think I said something to the effect of, Christ was the only perfect person and he had to descend to the depths of humility. How could we expect it to be any different for us. I don’t know what happened but even though before he wouldn’t read or pray with us, he started to. And yesterday he came back to church! Everyone in the ward was so happy to see him and he seemed right at home, sitting on the same bench as his family. It was awesome.
Well, we just said goodbye to Elder Stryker as I was writing this email. It’s going to be pretty weird having things back to normal. I’m pretty sure that next Monday will be my last email because the Monday before I go home is a holiday I think and I’ll probably be too busy to email anything on Tuesday honestly haha. Well, goodbye for now. The church is true!
Love,
Elder Viitanen
