Monday, May 6, 2013

Newfound sense of Fatherhood.... Take 2

Hahah welllllllll we did have changes this last Sunday and I went toooooooooooooooooooo     CUCUTA haha. I'm still here in my area but good ol Santillan left me. Also I know you are all waiting, we do get to talk this Sunday for an hour, I will call you guys Saturday to ahhhhhh set up the appointment:) Well turns out that I am training again. Honestly we have 224 missionaries now here in the mission and when I got here there were only 152. There have been newbies like CRAZY soooo I'm gonna be a Daddy otra vez haha. I'm actually really excited and just kind of ready to kick butt. I feel so refreshed and ready to start out new. Honestly when I got here from Tunja I was just really quite depressed, but the change with Santillan went surprisingly well and just made me so much more excited to be a missionary. Like it just threw cold water on my face and said "YOU’RE A MISSIONARY!!! YOU’RE ON A DIFFERENT CONTINENT!! YOU’RE SPEAKING SPANISH!! JUST ENJOY IT!! So I am tryin to get back in the good ol groove of just enjoyin stuff that comes my way even if its tough and makes me wanna cry sometimes or is just like a physical weight is just pushing down on you to try to make you go back to sleep when it's 6:30 but the Lords blessings are always better than the consequences of not being obedient. I honestly am loving it right now and I'm just super jacked up to talk to you guys again!! I remember the last time that I got to talk to you I had just started to train elder Escobar and now when we see each other again I will just have started to train my newbie. I have no idea who he is yet cause he's getting here tomorrow afternoon cause Cucuta is freaking lejos haha. I just have one wish about him, that this is his mission and he's not here temporarily.  I just don't want another temporal. 
Alright dad well sometimes I like lookin like a russian mobster alright, those guys are always such studs and plus it's a tactic so that I don’t get snaked on alright! I totally know that gelled hair looks waaaaayyyyy better than a super buzzcut on my oddly shaped head lol. But this is just more convenient, and gel NO MATTER WHAT I DO, gives me zits lol. Also that pic with the colombiano hat was at a service project we did to help a guy in the bishopric build his house. They build houses so differently here haha we just shoveled dirt and filled it the foundation of the house with dirt so it was all level and they can pour cement there. So that was the goofy picture. Also mom you wanted me to talk about Cucuta and it is basically a city of about 700,000 people and its all surrounded by mountains. It's quite hilly but my area has almost no hills, but you can see other areas with lots of hills. It has been raining a ton here and every time it rains the streets flood instantly and are just like mini rivers. In the aguacero I told you about, me and Elder Boyd were walking on the sidewalk and a taxi sped by and just drenched us with water, it was honestly like a scene out of a movie haha. Also here there are no gas stations and cars and trucks that you see in the states, there's a truck like Eric Luckmans black one and it is just ginormous on the road lol. This is because Venezuelan gas is just so cheep everyone just hops the border buys tons of gas and then camps out on the highways to sell it and it seems to me like they make pretty darn good money. 
Alright so I don't have any super crazy stories this week but I just want to say that I had one of the coolest experiences on my mission. Well we found an old investigator when we asked a recent convert if she knew anyone. She showed us where it was and we went and contacted the lady, who we found laying on her bed with the bottom part of her leg cut off at the knee.  Her name is Judit. She was really happy to see us. We noticed that her wheelchair was in super bad condition and she could hardly even push herself around just cause its all broken. She has a 9 year old kid who is just starting school because he was in foster care for a year or 2 when this lady  was sick in the hospital with diabetes. So you guys know...just super humble circumstances. Circumstances that if I compare them to what I have always known, just make me want to cry. So we had a few lessons and then asked the bishop if he could help us find a new wheelchair. He is super awesome and just had an almost new one in his house. So we had a lesson with her in the morning and invited her to be baptized.  She accepted and I could feel the spirit was there. Then we asked if she would be home in the afternoon. She was a bit confused but said she would be. Then we went to lunch at the bishops house, cleaned up the better wheelchair, and headed to Judit's house. I greeted her pleasantly and told her we had something for her.  The bishop rolled the seat in and she just broke down in sobs, so grateful for a used wheelchair. It humbled me so much because at first I felt like I was on extreme home makeover haha. But then I saw just how grateful she was and it was only a used wheelchair! I could just feel Christ’s love so strong in the tiny room,  it was amazing. Honestly it hit me so hard to see a woman so grateful for so little. Watch out for a baptismal picture of her and her son:) 
Well change of subject I do kind of have a funny story about the hermanas in my district. So it was raining super hard Saturday and their area is basically one big hill. So the rain was so bad that the canal at the bottom of the hill turned into a river like an actual fast running river. The hermanas were going home and realized they couldn’t cross, saw a man get swept into the river, then decided to camp out under a bridge of all places. I honestly did not ask them why they were under the bridge but that sounds kind of a dumb place to be in an aguacero. Anyways they called us like 50 times but our phone was in the house (we have a rule that its supposed to stay in the house), they called the zone leaders 50 times who finally answered and went to rescue them but couldn’t get there because of the rain. So they climbed back up the hill and stayed with a member until the rain let up and they could get back to the house. Elder Boyd tells me that they were pretty hysterical and thought they were gonna die lol. Well I asked them and they told me the exact same story that I just told you guys lol. It kinda makes me laugh, poor sisters camped out under a  bridge!!!!!
Well I am SUPER PUMPED TO TALK TO MA PA AND MY PROM QUEEN SISTER;) LOVE YOU GUYS AND SEE YOU SUNDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Elder Crook  


No comments:

Post a Comment