Haha, well I´m sure glad you guys had a good week
this week. All that food you ate sounded real good, but I can wait another year
no big deal. I can´t believe Shaylen is driving to Eugene flying to Utah, and
coming back completely alone! Where did my little sister go? I remember the
last time I was in the car with her I got out and had to change my britches
because of the panic attack she had given me;) Haha be safe Shay:) I also can´t
believe that it is decision time!! It never crossed my mind that she would already
be decided on a college and I will still be here. Lets just go to Swocc
together. How do you feel about that
toots? Thinking back now it´s not a bad idea, after being away from home for
such a long time. I think I would have
embraced it. But when I was in high school it would just make me so mad whenever dad would talk about swocc, but you
know I always knew better than him;) Haha I remember also he made me mad when
we were at Pacific and told me I shouldn´t base my decision off of the students
that took us on a tour and did a Q and A with us. I don´t know if you guys
remember that but the student said more swear words than normal ones lol. So
good luck toots, I´ll be praying for you from here. And CONGRATS for being such
a stud and getting to talk in stake conference, and I like the attitude of a 10
to 15 minute talk. You rock Shay!!
Well so I´m very surprised that no
one teased me about forgetting when Thanksgiving was. So on Thursday we were
going to do a baptismal interview and walked through a mall to get there. To my
surprise the Dallas Cowboys were playing on the big screen, I thought ¨wow I
totally forgot about Thursday night football, man thats awesome.¨ Then I told
one of the other gringo missionaries and he said ¨well that’s cause Thanksgiving
is today.¨ I was dumbfounded and we started to call all of the other gringo
missionaries and they all confirmed that yup it was last Thursday lol, and that
I had been misinformed by E´ Hicken. He
even told me that he had forgotten too. So whatever day Thanksgiving was, I
didn´t miss it much lol. BUT we have from the 23rd to the 26th to talk....I
feel like we should do it on the 24th, that would be real nice, maybe at night
but I´m gonna do some thorough investigating to find out what internet is the
best and when and how late they are open. I will not let what happened last
time happen this time, it´s going to be just a nice peaceful hour of chatting:)
so tell me what you guys think and next week I will be checking my skype
account.
Well this week we had a sweet lesson
with some people from a Christian church. We had already talked to the family a
few times before and had given them the restoration lesson. But this time they
brought their friend who is supposedly a missionary for her church. So she had
already read a little bit of the Book of Mormon and when we arrived she just
started to yell at us and say that the Book of Mormon is false and a whole
bunch of other good stuff. Her main argument was that Moroni, a man, could not
be resurrected and show himself to Joseph Smith. So we politely asked if we
could share a short message and she said yes and stopped yelling. So it was so
cool because we didn´t do anything different than what we normally do. Except
for share our testimonies super hard and testify of our authority. We started
and she didn´t think that there was an apostasy because Jesus left behind the
Holy Ghost, so we read like 5 scriptures in the new and old testament that
clarify that there would be an apostasy. Then we did our normal thing and ended
good and she seemed pretty taken aback. Then she pulled out the same thing she
started with the Moroni thing and it was awesome because the week before we had
just done the gospel principles class of the second coming and the first resurrection.
So I remembered exactly where the scripture was in Matthew 27:52 I think it is the
one that says after the resurrection of Christ others will also be resurrected and manifest themselves to
others. It was so cool because she just got really quiet and had nothing left
to throw at us. It was the first time on my mission where I have answered all
of the questions with the Bible and taught someone from another church who has
quite a bit of biblical knowledge something new. And it was all thanks to the
spirit and the mantle of authority that is given to us as missionaries, that
makes all the difference. I walked out of that lesson feeling really good about
how the spirit was able to work through me in such a way. It was a cool
experience
Well I survived the cambios and it
will be my first area where I´ll be here for 6 months. Usually after 4 changes
one leaves their area but E´Albrecht, ma boy has already hit his 6 month mark
in Yopal and he is staying one more change there lol. So I´m really happy to be
staying here for Christmas. It´s going to be the best Christmas of my life I
think because we have a marriage scheduled the 27th and the baptisms the 28th.
So we didn´t really have to do anything as far as the cambios went today
because there were only 3 and we just made one of the district leaders take
them to the bus terminal lol. But tomorrow we´ll have to go pick up a few
Elders in the morning coming from Cucuta.
Well I want to tell you something
really cool we did this week. So we have a goal in our mission to find 10 new
investigators weekly. We had a
leadership conference all about it last month so this WHOLE month I have trying
to excite everyone here to achieve the goal so we can be the first ones in
Bogota to do it. Apparently it´s pretty hard to find a lot of new people here
in the big city but it´s possible. SO this week the last week of the change
when everyone is usually slacking off waiting to be changed we did it!!! We
averaged 10.25 new investigators in every area and I was super happy I called
everyone and congratulated them all. It
was really cool. We in our area found 16 so we sure weren´t slacking
either lol but it was also another cool experience.
Well to finish, you all know I´m a
teaser right, Shay especially. Well I kinda tease E´hicken a lot and sometimes he
gets mad. So I throttled it down a little bit because I know that it annoys him
a bit. But at district meeting he just kept messing around with me, tickling
and poking and squeezing lol. He even threw a wet paper towel at me when I was
in the bathroom lol. So I told him in a joking but serious manner that there
was a storm coming.....so just when things were getting settled down I wet
willied him in both ears:) hahaha he got super mad and punched me HARD. He gave
me a dead leg and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the time. All I said after
was well well well you can dish it out but you can´t take it huh. Haha he
didn´t even say one word while I was laughing my head off. He actually didn´t
talk to me the whole rest of the week until Sunday and I asked him if things
were all good. He just said it was an overreaction and we went back to being
best friends lol. I bet we just sound like a bunch of little girls right:) haha
we probably are. So today they didn´t get changed and he is starting his 4th
change as well in his area and we spent all day today in the house because my
comp just wanted to sleep all day. SO we made the best of it and made us some
giant tacos with his comp while mine slept. He´s a good kid, I don´t know who
else would come over and waste a p-day in the house with me, so as dad said
he´ll proabably be a great friend for the rest of my life. As for me well I
think I´m getting to be a better person:) this morning I was more mad then I
have been in a long time that we were just going to have to stay in the house.
But fortunately the choice words I had for my compy stayed in my brain and I
went and said a prayer and then started to work out my anger lol doing push ups
and curls and sit ups until they came over lol. Now I´m fine and know that the
most important thing is that we do good work together:) You know my way of
thinking though, WORK HARD, PLAY HARD, SLEEP HARD:) haha love you guys a ton DE
VERDAD
-Elder Crook
