Missionary Monday - Week 12 in DC

I'll try and include plenty so it's not a lame email.  It's been a good 3 days. Friday we helped Keyli and Kellin go to a Western Union to get money that someone sent them from Guatemala or something. There's a bunch of Western Unions around DC but we went to like 3 that were either closed or couldn't do it, but we finally found one, it was a lot of walking but she was super thankful. We came back and cleaned the apartment real fast cause we had cleaning checks again. The elderly couple that did the check was the same as last time, they told the same stories and didn't remember us so that was fun.

Saturday it snowed! It was awesome. We also had scheduled a visit with Elvira but she called and said it was too cold for us to come and that we should come another time. Which is bogus so we'll have to stop by without an appointment set up. So since she canceled on that we decided to go visit Maria and Julio (The illegal McDonald's straw border crossing lady). The last time we met with her about a month ago she said she could only meet on Saturday mornings but wouldn't give us a specific day so we hadn't had a free Saturday morning in a while, until now. That was the usual, them going off about how much catholic faith they had. She totally knows the Book of Mormon is true but she won't do anything about it, she says it's true but the Bible is all she needs. We gave her all the answers we could but ultimately she won't even give it a shot. Julio gave us some sodas and we left, that was a shame. Then we came home had lunch and studies, we had a lesson with Alex scheduled for 4 so we were planning for that and then at like 2:30 he called and asked when and where we could meet, he ended up wanting to meet at 3:15 so we went to that. It ended up being a 2.5 hour lesson. We really only taught for the last 30 minutes. We were about to start teaching after we had caught up for a few minutes then he said he wanted to explain the backstory with his wife so that we could understand better. That ended up being a 2 hour story, he is awesome, I knew his situation with his wife was bad but holy cow. But he's doing great and has really found peace in all of it through the gospel. He wanted to learn a little bit more about baptism and he decided on December 23rd. Oh! He also posted a scripture from the book of Mormon on Facebook which was super cool cause it was in Moroni and we haven't had him read anything from there so he found it on his own. His pastor aunt and uncle were pretty confused in the comments, that was interesting.

Sunday there was like no one at church. Over half the ward is in some stake Spanish choir and they were invited to sing at another ward so they peaced out. Elder Stolk and I had to pass the sacrament to a total of probably 20 people... But it was good, the talks were solid and so was priesthood. Gospel principles was about the gathering of the tribes of Israel so that was fun to try and explain to Alex. Especially since I've never really studied that topic specifically. So I learned a lot as well. Other than church not much happened. We found like ten deer walking home from a night of contacting formers and I got as close as I could for a picture, some of them took off, some of them stuck around for the picture. (Take notes Jackson and Dad)

Tonight we should be getting a transfer call, if I had to guess I'd say Elder Stolk will be going somewhere else and I will be sending out a DC week 13 email next week. But I really don't know, we will see. We have our district activity today, it'll be similar to the last one except instead of carving stuff they want to make the mall out of gram crackers and icing, that'll be as disappointing as you can imagine, we'll see though. Anyways I think that's all I got for this week.

Elder Beck

(He LOVES Mike and Ike's)

For pictures all I got is the deer and mike n ones that I found at 5 below, they had more flavors than I have ever seen, I only went with those 3 though