Herro! :D
Wow! Sounds like the parade was a good time had by all, as usual. :D Hope everyone had fun. (I used to be one of those guys screwing around on MarioKart until 4 in the morning back in the day. It was great! :D ) Good to know you guys made it there and back safely, with nothing more than the usual problems. ;P (Also good to know I'm still being remembered through the Mario Theme. :D I still say you should play that Minor Fight Song I wrote a year and a half ago, at least once! It'll be fun! :D Maybe you can do it on Mr. J's last year before he retires. ;P ).
Tagalog's kinda warped my brain... ;P Now when I see names like "Nanaimo," I pronounce it "Na-na-EE-mo", instead of the way it's supposed to be pronounced.
We finally managed to contact the Sarmiento family last Friday. We had thought their concern might be what you thought, too-- someone convinced them that the church was a bad idea-- but it turns out that it's more of a financial concern. Though they may have some genuine interest in the gospel, especially Mark, they're the kind of family whose concern is more focused on how they're going to eat every day than how they're going to obtain eternal happiness... Tatay doesn't have an actual job. He works as a volunteer policeman for the local barangay, without pay. I don't know why. So the others are struggling to make ends meet each day. Lately, they've started doing so in some slightly less-than-honorable ways, and felt guilty about it, and, as a result, stopped going to church and started hiding from us. They didn't come to church last Sunday either. I'm not quite sure what to do about it yet...
This week the ward's been putting on a "One-Week Mission" event for the youth, where all the youth go out for a few hours a day and pretend to be missionaries, sharing the gospel. I think it's pretty cool. Yesterday they invited us to come in and teach the youth a few skills lessons on how to share the gospel, how to extend commitments, how to build relationships of trust with people, etc. It was kinda fun, and a good opportunity for me to get to know the youth in our ward better. And next week we get to go around and try to contact all the people they talked to and see how many are interested. It'll be fun.
I've sorta made it my goal lately to try and get to know everyone in the ward before I transfer, so that, first of all, there won't be quite so many unfamiliar faces every Sunday at church, and second, so that we can better enlist their help in our work. The members of this ward are all really nice, like in all my other wards so far.
It's been kinda stormy lately. We seem to be entering the tag-ulan... Fortunately, there haven't been any more unfortunate "getting stranded at members' houses" experiences, due mostly to the fact that now whenever it's started raining hard, we've made sure to catch the first jeep back to Kabihasnan, close to our apartment, and just working in that general area so we don't wind up caught in huge, insurpassable floods.
Our most sure baptism for next month is Sis. Jobelle, who I might've mentioned before in my emails. She's only 17, but is really smart and very ready for baptism. She's started reading through the Book of Mormon, and got through 1 Nephi in about a week and a half. And she remembers everything she reads, in perfect detail. She marks the snot out of her scriptures as she reads, thoroughly studying them. We went to teach her about tithing yesterday, and she was like, "Oh, yeah, I already read about that in this Gospel Principles book they gave me at church," then explained it in great detail and agreed to follow it. Makes our job easier. We'd tried to extend a baptismal date to her before, but she wasn't sure yet, saying that she wasn't sure if her dad would allow it. We thought there might be another underlying concern behind that before.. Then we asked her about her desire to be baptized last week, and she told us, "I told you before, I want to, I've just been afraid to ask my dad so far." o.o Oh. So she asked him, and he said she was free to do whatever she wanted. She'll be baptized on the 11th of June.
Anyway, that's about it for now. I'm gonna go onto the BYU website right after this and finally type out those essays, and then probably send out the application. Wish me luck.
Thanks for your love and support. Until next week, ingatz!
Love,
Elder David Jones
Wow! Sounds like the parade was a good time had by all, as usual. :D Hope everyone had fun. (I used to be one of those guys screwing around on MarioKart until 4 in the morning back in the day. It was great! :D ) Good to know you guys made it there and back safely, with nothing more than the usual problems. ;P (Also good to know I'm still being remembered through the Mario Theme. :D I still say you should play that Minor Fight Song I wrote a year and a half ago, at least once! It'll be fun! :D Maybe you can do it on Mr. J's last year before he retires. ;P ).
Tagalog's kinda warped my brain... ;P Now when I see names like "Nanaimo," I pronounce it "Na-na-EE-mo", instead of the way it's supposed to be pronounced.
We finally managed to contact the Sarmiento family last Friday. We had thought their concern might be what you thought, too-- someone convinced them that the church was a bad idea-- but it turns out that it's more of a financial concern. Though they may have some genuine interest in the gospel, especially Mark, they're the kind of family whose concern is more focused on how they're going to eat every day than how they're going to obtain eternal happiness... Tatay doesn't have an actual job. He works as a volunteer policeman for the local barangay, without pay. I don't know why. So the others are struggling to make ends meet each day. Lately, they've started doing so in some slightly less-than-honorable ways, and felt guilty about it, and, as a result, stopped going to church and started hiding from us. They didn't come to church last Sunday either. I'm not quite sure what to do about it yet...
This week the ward's been putting on a "One-Week Mission" event for the youth, where all the youth go out for a few hours a day and pretend to be missionaries, sharing the gospel. I think it's pretty cool. Yesterday they invited us to come in and teach the youth a few skills lessons on how to share the gospel, how to extend commitments, how to build relationships of trust with people, etc. It was kinda fun, and a good opportunity for me to get to know the youth in our ward better. And next week we get to go around and try to contact all the people they talked to and see how many are interested. It'll be fun.
I've sorta made it my goal lately to try and get to know everyone in the ward before I transfer, so that, first of all, there won't be quite so many unfamiliar faces every Sunday at church, and second, so that we can better enlist their help in our work. The members of this ward are all really nice, like in all my other wards so far.
It's been kinda stormy lately. We seem to be entering the tag-ulan... Fortunately, there haven't been any more unfortunate "getting stranded at members' houses" experiences, due mostly to the fact that now whenever it's started raining hard, we've made sure to catch the first jeep back to Kabihasnan, close to our apartment, and just working in that general area so we don't wind up caught in huge, insurpassable floods.
Our most sure baptism for next month is Sis. Jobelle, who I might've mentioned before in my emails. She's only 17, but is really smart and very ready for baptism. She's started reading through the Book of Mormon, and got through 1 Nephi in about a week and a half. And she remembers everything she reads, in perfect detail. She marks the snot out of her scriptures as she reads, thoroughly studying them. We went to teach her about tithing yesterday, and she was like, "Oh, yeah, I already read about that in this Gospel Principles book they gave me at church," then explained it in great detail and agreed to follow it. Makes our job easier. We'd tried to extend a baptismal date to her before, but she wasn't sure yet, saying that she wasn't sure if her dad would allow it. We thought there might be another underlying concern behind that before.. Then we asked her about her desire to be baptized last week, and she told us, "I told you before, I want to, I've just been afraid to ask my dad so far." o.o Oh. So she asked him, and he said she was free to do whatever she wanted. She'll be baptized on the 11th of June.
Anyway, that's about it for now. I'm gonna go onto the BYU website right after this and finally type out those essays, and then probably send out the application. Wish me luck.
Thanks for your love and support. Until next week, ingatz!
Love,
Elder David Jones
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