9/7/2020

Hey Friends and family! Happy Labor Day! I hope you are all doing súper good and having fun. This week has been pretty interesting. Our mission president gave us permission to be able to eat in members houses again which is super awesome. It's been so long I feel since we have. We just have to let our district leader know that we are doing it so he can keep track of who has been. It's been super fun because now we can get some better food. I mean like home cooked food and not mostly fast food. On Sunday we all ate at the Rockwell’s and they made us a really good Mexican soup and then we had empanadas. We ate until we were so stuffed and it was soo good. We also earlier in the week ate tostadas and those are super delicious. I feel sometimes like I can handle eating more food than I could before my mission haha. I just love eating. This Last Sunday we started up Church again and that was really cool. Our branch is pretty small at the moment so there wasn’t a ton of people there. Elder Lymke and I blessed the sacrament for everyone and the other elders passed the sacrament. Our branch president is so nice. He told me and Elder Hoffman, which we are both the senior companions of our companionships, to come and grab a random grocery bag that he had. He gave us both 2 containers of protein shake mix. I got cookies and cream and pina colada. He loves getting us stuff and helping us out. Also this week we FINALLY GOT OUR STUDY DESKS!!!. It’s so nice having a study desk and being able to set down your stuff and not have to study out in the kitchen or on the ground. I decorated pretty good with all my study things. When the moving elders dropped off our study desks they also gave me a hard copy of missionary manual. I have been waiting for that manual forever it feels like haha. It came out when I just barely got out of the CCM. So this week has been pretty good, it kinda felt like a mini Christmas haha. We did some more service for Sister Packer this week. We helped water her plants in her yard and did some de-vining. I also showed our district how to play Big Buddah this week which is a super fun game I learned from scouts. I got to call home on Friday and do “Come Follow Me” with my family which was really cool. We talked about Helaman chapters 12 through 16. One of my favorite parts of “Come Follow Me” was that Samuel the Lamanite had faith in Heavenly Father to go back and preach unto the people again even though they hated him and would even try to kill him. He had faith and was filled with the power of God. He was protected from all the rocks and arrows that were thrown at him. I know that if we have faith like Samuel the Lamanite did, we can personally be ready for all the fiery darts and rocks that come our way in life. Finding and teaching the gospel has been really good as well as challenging this week. We found a new person named Armando and he is pretty interested. He has 2 copies of the Book of Mormon and I guess he has talked to missionaries in the past. He was a referral for a request of a missionary visit. When we called him, we just talked for out 30 minutes and got to know him pretty well. He lives in New Braunfels not too far from us. We set up lessons for the next week and he told us he really wants to learn and stuff so we are super excited. We have been struggling finding people as well. A lot of the people we are teaching haven’t been answering us or are so busy that we aren’t able to meet with them. It can be hard at times but I know that if we have faith we can find those who are ready and can get through any challenge that comes our way. 

 

That's about it for me this week. I hope you all have super amazing week and keep being awesome!!!!

 

-Elder Portlock