Staying in Beaverton

2011 March 7
Dear Mom,
You've got pretty dang good timing on your letter writing I have to say haha you got it off just an hour before I could get on here :-).

Last Monday was pretty legit. We took a little trip to a place called Sky-High, which is exactly like that "Jump on It" place that we went to that one time with Grace... remember? Anyways, there were a boat load of trampolines, a dodge ball court, and also a foam pit that you could do ridiculous flips and dives into from a tramp. The thing that made the day was that I set the goal to learn how to do a back flip because for my whole life, I've been WAY too scared to actually do one. Fortunately, I worked up the nerve, and was able to do one after practicing doing them into the foam pit :-) Booyeah. Other than that on Monday, there wasn't anything too terribly exciting that happened.

Tuesday, we went to an appointment in the morning with a guy named Alejandro that I thought for sure was going to send us to the horn, but he turns out to be a super sweet guy! It's kinda weird though... he reminds me of a Hispanic version of myself.... He wears board shorts, hoodies, plays guitar, and loves reggae. Not like frijolero reggaeton, but actual Bob Marley reggae! I was pretty stoked on him, and he ate up the restoration. He was super pumped to read the book of Mormon that we left him, so we'll see what happens this week when we have another appointment with him.
Aside from that on Tuesday, we were late to district meeting because of that lesson with Alejandro, but oh well haha. The one sad thing from the day is that it was elder Nielsen's last district meeting before he goes home (today). It kinda freaks me out because elder Rangel will be going home in six weeks... when he goes home, I'll barely have five months left! Yikes! The time is definitely flying

Wednesday, wasn't anything too exciting aside from elder Jimenez' last district meeting and going to a place called Ochoa's in Hillsboro. If you want good Mexican food, you gotta go there. They're almost comparable with the Red Iguana it's nuts! I had their tacos dorados, and they're almost as good as the tacos Don Ramon I had at the Red Iguana.
The other excitement from Wednesday came that night after our correlation meeting. We went to visit the friend of a group member whose name is Casto. He's a guy in his late 40's who is an absolute stud. He wasn't too stoked the first time we went by with his member friend, but this time we caught him at home and just sat at the table and talked to him. He's going through a rough time right now because he got a DUI about a month ago, and they're contemplating deporting him, so his whole life is kinda up in the air as far as...well.... everything. It wouldn't be such a huge huge deal except that he's very well established here. He speaks English, works as a licensed contractor, owns a house, cars, all that good stuff. Basically, he's freaking out because all that is kinda flashing before his eyes and he might have to go back to Mexico where he was almost killed several times. I feel like the Lord is definitely giving him a wakeup call, and it's good on the spiritual side of things. As we talked about all this stuff he's going through, he said "that's a nice watch. do you like watches?" Turns out he's a collector and went to jewelry school for several years because he likes to... I would term it "dabble." He plays guitar, he is restoring a sweet old car, he collects antiques, nice watches, loves BMW's (and has one, but doesn't want to get shot in Mexico driving it), and is very well educated. Basically, he's just a dang gentleman. He caught some interest in what we had to teach him about, and he's now reading the book of Mormon and hopefully going to start coming to church... mainly because he now has a friend already there, and I'm his friend :-)

Thursday,we planned our revolution. We've come to the conclusion that the members of the group are woefully equipped for sharing the gospel right now, so we're taking it upon ourselves (with the bishop's permission of course) to teach ALL of them about the gospel and have them studying "Preach my Gospel" on a weekly basis so that they can receive that true conversion... I'm pretty stoked on it because we're also helping the English members to realize what they can do to share the gospel as well.

Friday, we did some dry walling in the bathroom at the Sanchez', and by we, I mean I. It turned out pretty well though. I repaired a hole in the wall as well as cleaned up the seams of the board so they were all nice and filled in and prepped it for the sanding we were going to do the next day. One sweet thing was that after we finished with that, brother Sanchez who is a boss, took us out for lunch to this sweet place called Sushi Hana right by the Washington Square mall. Oh. My. Gosh. It was delicious! I'm pretty sure I ate WAY too much sushi, but it was super scrumptious. The Sanchez family goes so often that they've made friends there, so instead of just pulling stuff off the little train, they have someone right there that hooked us up with whatever we wanted the whole time. YUM!

Some other cool stuff that happened that day were two lessons that we had. We first got a call from a media referral investigator who wanted a copy of the book of Mormon, so we jaunted over to his place and talked to him for a little bit. His name is Rafael, and he's awesome. He's from Peru, and is super intelligent. He has bachelor degrees (I'm not sure what in) in Peru as well as here in the states, and is an extremely intelligent individual. He originally visited temple square and was really intrigued and got in contact with the missionaries there, but then moved here, so he's pretty golden... we might be handing him off to the singles ward though because he's late 20's and speaks fairly decent English... D'oh! I don't know.. maybe we'll baptize him first though :-P

After that we had a lesson with a lady named Darlin (yeah like if a Mexican were to say darling), and it went well. She didn't answer the door when we knocked, but it was really funny because one of the people who lives in her apartment came home just as we were leaving and said, "are you looking for Darlin?" We said yes, and so she opened the door and made her come talk to us haha. She looked super embarrassed, but let us in and we taught her about the restoration. She liked it and accepted to read the book of Mormon, so we'll see what happens haha.

Saturday we ( I ) had fun doing some more dry walling at the Sanchez. We ( I ) sanded down the drywall so everything was nice and smooth, except there was one problem... where the hole in the wall was, it was still a little wet! So, to fix it, we had to steal a hair dryer and dry it out that way to get it sanded down haha. Once it was all smoothed out, we ( I ) used a couple cans of texture spray to get the walls nice and textured up. Man, can I tell you that if you don't do it the hopper-fed compressed air way, make sure you have some good ventilation because after just ten or fifteen minutes of spraying that stuff I was as high as a kite! haha. the important thing is that we have it all textured now, so we can prime and paint it this week so it'll look beautiful. Thanks for teaching me how to do that Dad. :-)

The other excitement from that day was that we taught a guy named Gerardo who is also a pretty smart guy. He got kinda dumbed down about what we were teaching him because he attended the Catholic church, so we had to re-teach him the restoration and reiterate the importance of the book of Mormon.

Speaking of the Catholic church, I know I'm not supposed to talk bad about other religions, but man, they suck! You know Mario, the golden investigator who had a date to get baptized yesterday? Yeah, he went to catholic church last week, and he totally lost the light we had brought to him. Instead of being locked and loaded on baptism and the restoration (knowing that all other churches are lacking something) he told us that all churches are good and it doesn't matter where you are because it's the same God, blah blah blah. I about wrung his neck! We read the last two paragraphs of the intro to the book of Mormon with him and he total tarded out and couldn't understand that he needed to read, meditate, and pray to know that the book was true, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that the church was restored through him. I really feel like the Catholic church needs to go away. Anyways, enough ranting.

We got transfer calls, and I'll let you all know, that I am staying in Beaverton with elder Van Hook for another transfer :-) I'm pretty stoked on it actually. It's gonna give us time to work with some of our sweet gators and get the members locked and loaded more than anything.

Sunday, Rafael came to church and we got double dinnered! Bleh! That was about the excitement for the week though. I've gotta bail, but I love you guys a lot and I hope you're all doing really well. Tell Katie Jo congrats on her singing and that I can't wait to hear her voice!

I love you all very much. Read your scriptures every day and pray to know what you read is true... then be brave enough to open your mouth. The Lord will help you do the rest.
Love always,
Elder Kurt Mooney