Mexican Coke?

So, let me start with the coolest news first, both John and Diana are planning on getting baptized this Saturday! So this week will involve a lot of prep work to get all of that done. John is also moving on Tuesday to Las Vegas so then I promise you all won't have to keep hearing about him. The crazy thing though is that Sister  Bowen is also from Vegas and he is going to be moving into her old YSA ward. 

This week we also visited John at the hospital and it was pretty much the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. He had some kind of nose surgery and when we arrived he was still pretty heavily sedated. The nurse told us and his other two friends who were there from the base that we had to try to get him to stay awake so that he could go home. It didn't work out too well... He would wake up, we would have a crazy conversation, and then he would fall back asleep. He kept asking us about where the grey table was that he put his important stuff in and whenever we told him that there wasn't any table he would get super mad at us. He also had us pray with him and asked me to tell him a story but he fell asleep in the middle of both. He told us about the friend that he took to the airport that morning, who was on his way to Afghanistan and every once in a while after someone would say something he would say "You have to say in the name of Jesus Christ amen!" Ha, the nurse also had us spoon feed him Jello and he kept falling asleep and then waking up and being super confused. When we taught John his second to last lesson yesterday we also had to show him what a baptism looks like by watching one on The District because there hasn't been one that he could go to so who knew, those videos are actually useful sometimes.  

This week we also had a lot of authentic Mexican food this week and even the authentic Mexican Coke. You know what's kind of a bummer though? I'm not really that crazy about it. As Sister Bowen said, "I'd rather have New Mexican food than Mexican food and Taco Bell than Taco Cabana." But... what can you do? I'm starting to be really grateful for seafood and fish though. 

We went to a suicide awareness/ prevention class this week. Now before you start freaking out, it was something one of our members was doing for a ward activity. It was a condensed version of the one that he teaches for the military. Man, that would be a rough job, to just teach suicide prevention all day every day. The class was good though and our member who taught it looks exactly like Matt Meese from Divine Comedy/ Studio C, so that was a little weird though.   

Other than that though it's just been a bit of the same old same old. We had to teach chastity twice this week... I'm convinced if you can successfully make it though a chastity lesson with a YSA investigator you can successfully manage any other conversation in life. Especially if after you talk about it one of the investigators says "Yeah... I don't believe in families. I think they're just kind of a waste of time." um... oh...  

Elder Guymon, or "Jacob" as he's now known, who I and half of the zone here served with in Albuquerque (seriously, everyone here has been to the west side) was wandering the mission this week so we all had to avoid him (we're not supposed to get together with old missionaries) and secretly look for him. Ha, ha poor Sister Bowen. Everyone we talked to was telling us "did you hear Elder Guymon is in town?!" and she was finally like "Who is this guy! Why is he so great!" And... I won a game of Monopoly last p-day, so you know, nothing new. 

Here since we usually go out to eat it can be hard to share a spiritual thought or a dinner message, so usually what we'll do is read a scripture or two and then talk about it. We like to play a game though where we share something and then we have the member share with us. When we played earlier this week a recently reactivated member told us about when he was a kid and his dad would open up to a random page and have him guess who was speaking. He talked about how he got to know the different prophets personalities and speaking styles. I thought that was a super cool idea. I mean, even though Mormon is abridging most of the book in The Book of Mormon, each prophet still has different "specialties" or things that they emphasis and there are lots of excerpts that are quotes from them. And the Bible is written by loads of different authors.  I know that a lot of times we read through the scriptures and don't really take into account that these are real people! And not only are they real, but they are different people. When we look at Nephi and compare him to Alma and compare them to Daniel, we see completely different personalities, even though all of them were prophets. Anyway, I thought that it was an awesome idea and a cool and new way to study the scriptures more. So, try out the test, have someone open to a random page and see how you do. I know that I want to practice more. 

Well, I hope you all are doing great and have an amazing week! 

Love, 

April