A-wo-wa!

Email home #6, sent March 3 / new photos in Facebook photo album

The email title is "Aurora" in baby talk. I might name my child Aurora just so I can say that all the time.
So none of the investigators came to church yesterday. The family from India that committed to coming but their daughters got sick like last Thursday/Friday. We were bummed but we're still praying that they'll get well soon.

There are 2 other investigators we've been trying to visit for the past 3 weeks now. We ask them for their phone numbers but they won't give it to us...they say they'll just call us but, as usual, they never do. So Sister Hoynacki and I thought it'd be better to drop them and stop trying to visit them. So we gave them one last visit. We saw one in his garage fixing his bike and (wait for it) he actually invited us back to visit next week (what!). Yeah. I learned about perseverance. I also learned that I sometimes get too lazy to persevere.

There was a sister in our ward that we met the very first week we were here. She was offered an amazing job in Utah so she's moving down to Provo near BYU! Sister H and I helped her move and pack and clean and basically everything else. I told her and her husband that I'll find them at BYU after my mission. It's happening.

One of our ward missionaries gave us 4 referrals. We've contacted 3 of them and 2 of them invited us back! One of them is a nice Jewish woman whose brother joined the Church when he was 10 or 11. Her parents divorced when they were little so her brother went with her father who joined the church while she went with her mother. She remained Christian, like hard core Christian. She went to school and became a minister so she's very well-versed in the Bible. She ended up questioning a lot of Christian beliefs and now considers herself practicing Judaism.

She's so knowledgeable but she's just missing the entire core of Christianity! She has the intellectual and logical side down but she's missing the emotional and spiritual side of relying on the Atonement of Christ. Jesus Christ wasn't just a teacher or a prophet. He did so much more than that. He performed the greatest miracle of all: the Atonement!

We're visiting her next week with her neighbor (the ward missionary) that referred us to her. She told us before we left last week that she knows what our "end goal" is because her brother served a mission. She said that she won't be getting to that "end goal". But some people take a lot longer to accept the Gospel of Christ than others. We think that even if she rejects our missionary discussions, at least she'll have a Mormon friend! She actually lives on a street with several Mormon neighbors so she's in good hands. After all, "by their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20 and 3 Nephi 14:20).

Fun fact: I talked to a sister in our ward and she said apparently Aurora and Centennial fought over land or something so a chunk of Aurora actually used to be Centennial. Like, what? I knew states fought for land, but cities..?

That sister in the ward is from Mexico and her husband is Laotian. They have beautiful children. Half Asian and Beautiful. But she's been taking us to crossfit every Monday, Wed, and Friday mornings at 6AM. Crossfit is slowly killing me. My body. It's dying. I might want to get a shirt from the organization (Zion Fitness) just to show that I actually did that. Sometimes I don't even believe I do crossfit.

Also, shout out to Wei Mei An who finally sent me a letter. Keep up the fei chang hao work!

P.S. We email in the local library. A little boy right next to me didn't want to get on the elevator with his (I'm assuming) grandma. It was kinda creepy listening to his cries fade away.