"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of reason, it was the age of folly..."
Okay so does everyone get the point? This week's had it's ups and downs with the week ending on a lot of downs. There was a really exciting experience that happened on Wednesday:
We had an appointment with Angelica and we're reading 2 Nephi 30 when we ask her how her smoking and other problems were. This was Day 6 of the 1 week stop smoking program and so far it seemed to work so we're hoping that she's still okay because honestly I was afraid that she was going to relapse. Her words were, and I quote:
"I'm done. I'm done with everything that's bad for me."
Elder Adona and I were shocked. Our mouths were hanging open. We were speechless. Happy, but speechless. We're still happy and speechless about the whole thing. Six days prior to that she wouldn't sign her "Declaration of Independence" (that's part of the stop smoking program. It's her commitment to God that she'll never smoke again) because she didn't want to make a commitment to God and then mess it up. I was pretty frustrated throughout the lesson primarily because she was extremely stubborn throughout the whole thing and almost everything went wrong. So anyway, the stop smoking lesson had a really rocky start and Elder Adona and I are chomping at the bit about her and then six days later from that she just gave all that up as if it were nothing. Mind you cigarettes aren't the only thing she's addicted to. In addition to that she also has no job and lives in a place where drugs and cigarettes are in abundance and everybody else in her family violates the Word of Wisdom without a second thought. For her to be around all that and not succumb is pretty amazing! She also told us that we had a pretty big impact on her mom because her mom is going to a therapist about quitting smoking. Then Angelica told us yesterday that she's planning on moving. We're not sure if she's serious or not. We're crossing our fingers that it's a joke but we're not counting on it. She's made so much progress that sometimes it still blows my mind. She's on probation though for another year and a half so she's not getting baptized anytime soon. At least she's doing everything else right.
We also have a baptism coming up! His name is Edward Bailon and he's the son of Zenaido, who was the first investigator who got baptized when I came into this area. Edward and his family are going through A LOT of struggles right now which is stressing us out. Satan's really working hard on not only this family, but on our area. You'd think that we would have more work but anyone who's neither Angelica nor a Bailon (Edward and his family) drops like flies off the face of the earth. It's rather disturbing.
I messed up the funeral potatoes but I made tater tot casserole and that turned out DELICIOUS! Right now I'm backing off of making recipes and am going with croissant sandwiches. Oh and bytheway, Elder Adona detected mushrooms growing out of the zone leader's bathroom. That was pretty funny. I'm having a lot of fun with the zone leaders.
Love,
Elder Boothe
P.S. So the zone leaders that we live with cover mostly the same area that we do, except they're Spanish speaking missionaries. Anyway we passed off this one referral to them and they told us that the person told them that "a man and his son came to my door and talked to me about the Book of Mormon". Everyone always gets on Elder Adona's case because he looks way younger (and many times we act younger than we look too except I look like I'm older) than he actually is. Most of the time people think he's about 12-15 years old but nobody before has ever mistaken him to be "my son". Man we were cracking up so hard when we heard that. Another funny thing about that is that he's older than me. He's 21 and I'm 20.
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