Big Eats!

Well I`m back! I really enjoyed each and everyone of your letters today. I treasure everything you all say! wow! I think shay wrote more than dad;) just kidding dad your letter was fine on length, just giving you a good time. Thanks to grandma and grandpa Geddes for the letter as well. It`s just great that you are serving the Lord in your mission! Love you guys to death and just to let you know my package got here....I had to pay a little money because it was overweight;) thats a good sign lol, there must be LOTS of sweets and treats;) I haven`t got it yet but I will this Wednesday. Thanks a million!!! Also the pictures you sent of the Pedersen girls kind of astonished me. The first 2 were of Brooklyn but I thought for sure it was Mckenna, then I looked at her last one and thought ¨who is that girl with Mckena?¨ Well I guess they have grown a bit. Tell them all hi for me and tell Ryan to give me his scouts honor that my mission plaque is on the wall;) So this week was pretty good! My comp got sick for a day, and we tried to go to work but I guess he just had a bad headache with lots of sinus pressure. So we stayed in the house most of the day Thursday, so I just sat in the house and went crazy. He slept the whole day and I studied a bit and cleaned and just sat in the house. Pretty boring but we were working just fine on Friday. 

So we had to fast this past Saturday and Sunday and just GUESS who we had lunch with:) the same family that gave us the giant patacones the last time. So the story starts Saturday night when the hermanas call us to ask who we had lunch with, we told them the familia flores and then they said ¨but thats who WE have lunch with, thats what the list says.¨ It was true but the hermano flores had been talking to us since last week about how we were gonna come over for lunch and how awesome it was gonna be. So I remembering how much the hermanas had helped us with the lunches when we got here, graciously told them to go to the lunch that we had confirmed and that we would call someone else (yes we have plan B`s even for lunch;) so we got that all figured out and then I called hermano flores to tell him that the hermanas would be going to lunch with them. Haha he straight up told me that he did NOT want the hermanas coming over and that we needed to come over for lunch and that they could go somewhere else. He kept repeating it and repeating it! I was like WWOAAA hermano calm down it`s all good. We`ll make the change. So we did and BOY did it turn out good. I had the barbeque of all barbeques:) He gave me 3 ginormus steaks, 2 were pork steaks or how ever you say it but they were pure pig! the other one was beef. He kept telling me how I wasn`t full the last time we ate patacones because after I had eaten mine, the bishops wife offered me  half of hers and the then Hermano flores`s wife offered me  half of hers! so I pounded down 2 giant patacones. Well the hermano flores wasn`t going to let me win this time. He gave me the biggest steaks ever! They were considerably bigger than my companions lol. But I ate them all, haha I think I ate enough meat to last me a long winter hibernation period;) It was legit! I`ll send you the fotos. In conclusion I had no problems fasting.

SO we have another baptism this Saturday and it`s actually a really interesting story! So you might have recognized the pictures that I forwarded to you of the skinny bearded fellow. Well thats my trainer and father Elder Da Silva lol, he taught and baptized a lady named Merli here in the area that I`m in. Well turns out she has a boyfriend that has been investigating the church off and on since she got baptized (about 2 years ago) Well he`s getting baptized this Saturday, and they have marriage plans for the next week! It`s such an exciting time for us and just to see how he has changed. Honestly the first lesson he basically told us he had no motives to join the church and that he was catholic and that was that. His girlfriend Merli left in tears and we just kinda sat there not knowing what to do. But after a few weeks of getting to know him and mainly just listening to him, he opened up, and just like that made the decision to get baptized. It was honestly astonishing to me. I love this guy, his name is Sergio and I have seen how the gospel is changing his life. I love seeing people change for the better applying the gospel. Also it gave me a bigger testimony about the church online. He WOULD NOT read scriptures, but has a sick Iphone so one day I just said look, lets download lds scriptures on your phone, and BOOM he started reading. He has downloaded now every other app known to mankind that has to do with the church and sometimes shows us sweet videos and quotes and stuff. It has been really one of the best experiences on my mission being able to create such a good relationship with an investigator, as always for some reason it`s always a guy in his 20`s haha. Sergio, Camilo, and Nelson have really been the best investigators that I have had here. More on the baptism next week!!!! LOVE YOU ALLL

-Elder Crook