11/18/2024 - Week 70 - Mega Exchanges

Transfer week is always a mess. So to add to the mess, we decided to have a massive double-trio exchange. Normally for exchanges, one companionship comes to the area of another companionship to do missionary work with a different person that day (one companion serves with the companion from a different companionship and usually they switch so you get to serve with both the missionaries that aren't your companion). They're a good time to just to break up the monotony of daily missionary work, but since I'm in a trio (three missionaries together instead of the normal 2), the Dayton missionaries are also a trio, and we have an extra car, we decided we would have 3 companionships just absolutely covering the entire area! It was pretty fun and I got to serve with Elder Donaldson who picked me up from the Mission Office to take me to my first area in the mission! We had some great lessons and changed the baptismal date for our friends Rodbim and Wayner and taught the massive family of 8 about the Restoration!

We also got transfer news during exchanges and we found out that I would be training and that Elder Kirkham got banished to Lima (not Peru, but Lima, Ohio which is the furthest area from anyone else in the mission)

The last day before transfers, we had one of our ward members take us out to a Pizza place here and we got to chat with him for a minute which was awesome because he's hilarious and was telling all sorts of stories about his mission, whats going on with his business, all sorts of stuff! (and the pizza was dang good too) We also got to have dinner with the Lopez Diaz family that we've gotten really close with, so it was sad that it was Elder Kirkham's last time, but we had some fantastic carne asada tacos!

Since I got the news I was training, I also learned that I was moving to the other apartment again (but staying in the same teaching area), so that means we're on transfer 5 here in Miami River and I moved apartments for the 5th time. Luckily, we were able to move all of my stuff to the apartment before I picked up my new son in the mission, so we had plenty of room for his stuff! 

When we got down to the mission home for transfers (where all the misionaries who have a new companions for the next set of 6 weeks go to switch all their stuff so they can live there) we found out that we got a missionary reassigned from Mexico that flew in at 10pm the night before and that Elder Kirkham would be "training" him, even though he had served for 4 or 5 months in Mexico.

My new companion is Elder Harmon and he's a pretty cool guy from Lehi, Utah and, luckily, his Spanish is pretty dang good for a new missionary that had no spanish experience before the mission, so hopefully he'll be able to learn really fast!

We've had a fairly uneventful last few days. Since I'm training a new missionary we have more time for studies throughout the day and it makes it difficult to actually get out a work for a considerable amount of time, but we're making due with what we've got. 

I also fixed the pipe to our bathroom sink in the middle of a role-play/teaching practice with my new comp, so call me Mario I guess.

We had our first member meal of the transfer with the Chun family and it was wild. We got there and just before we were gonna start eating, the Kirby vacuum/carpet cleaner guys showed up for a demonstration which took like 30-45 minutes and was by far the worst sales pitch I've ever seen (he confused the phrase "cleanliness is next to godliness" in the worst way possible and said "cleanliness before holiness" which made it so I had to leave the room so I wasn't laughing in his face). Luckily the parents don't speak a whole ton of English, but their kids are basically fluent so they heard it and were shocked at how badly it was going. The food was fantastic though in the end, when we could finally eat it.

One of our recently returned missionaries in the ward made a trip down to Guatemala where he served his mission to do some service/translating down there and told me he would get me my Mayan Nahual (basically the Mayan version of Chinese Zodiak) so now I have my Iq' Nahual and I'll send some pics of what that means. Send me an Email and tell me how accurate you think it is tho.

The big family we're teaching couldn't make it to church but we still had 4 of our friends come to church so I am not gonna complain about that at all!

Spiritual thought:

We had a lesson this week where we didn't know we had a lesson until the lady was actually there at the church. So at that point we were missing 2 things: 1) us at the church 2) another male to be there so we could go inside the church for the lesson. So what did we have to do? Act in faith. We called one of our members who had gotten into town at 1am that morning and he drove down and helped us out and we ended up having a great lesson! All of the good things that happened in that experience, the spirit that was felt, the testimonies, the scriptures used, they wouldn't have been able to help this nice lady without the actions of Faith on our part, the faith of our member to help us out, and our trust in one another. As we cultivate that relationship with our friends, family, church congregations/wards, and with the Holy Spirit, we will quickly realize a lot more blessings in our lives! Act in faith, however you need to today.

Mayan Nahual stuff/info:

Hasta lunes!

Parker

Training again

My sons