Saludos. First of all, it's been ridiculously hot the past few days. Saturday was probably the hottest day on my mission so far, I think they said it got up to 100. Today is hot at cloudy and muggy, which isn't good because we're planning to play baseball today for P-Day. We'll see how it goes. Also, I'm still getting over a cold right now. It started on Thursday night and Friday was the worst day, but I'm still feeling it a little bit today. Couldn't really do much on Friday because of it...I was riding my bike and I couldn't breathe because my chest was so tight. But it's getting better.
There have been a lot of people moving in recently, probably because of the new school year. The University of Colorado dental, pharmaceutical, etc. schools are right here in Aurora, so that provides the needed "younger" demographic. The new move-ins mean opportunities with us to meet with them, have a lesson, and give them a Book of Mormon to eventually give to a friend that they meet. We had two lessons this week with the Sanchez family, who seem really interested. Unfortunately we're realizing that the mom speaks less English than we thought...we saw her talking to a neighbor who brought over some clothes for her kid. The neighbor was saying, "Here are some clothes for your kid" and she said, "Oh, está bien, gracias." She couldn't/(wouldn't?) even say simple phrases in English. So I'm afriad we'll probably end up turning her over to the Spanish ward, but her kids speak better English than Spanish, so we hope we can keep them. We told them we'd try to get them a ride for church yesterday, but then that morning we couldn't get a hold of them (based on what the machine said on the phone, it sounded like they ran out of minutes or something) and we didn't want to make someone go all the way up there if we weren't sure they were actually coming. So we'll follow up with them this week and see what's up. We taught a really awesome Plan of Salvation lesson to them...well, meaning Elder Sosa taught really awesome and I did ok because it was in Spanish, haha. We also saw Leslie and taught watched "Finding Faith in Christ" with him. He said he liked it, but he's still not sure about Christ's divinity (just a small problem haha). He always tells us things like, "Now I'm not saying I'm going to convert! I just want to learn more..." but we're not discouraged, because he also tells us things like who he's going to invite if he did end up being baptized. As for Robert, we finally saw him at church on Sunday and set up an appointment with him for this Wednesday.
Speaking of church, something really awesome happened during Sunday school. There was a lady at church that we had never seen before with someone who said that she was a member of the ward (must be less active). They came to Gospel Principles and...actually, let me tell you about all the people in the class. Half of them are people that I see and work with regularly and are a big part of what I know as the Peoria ward. Bro. Boyer was teaching, the ward mission leader, who's a good guy but honestly not my favorite; Robert, our long-time 50-year old black investigator; Bro. Duran, ward missionary, old and very weird guy who pretends he hates you when he really doesnt. He's the one who is fellowshipping Robert and actually gave me a pretty nice watch last week; Sis. Stone, older (but looks younger) single lady, really really nice, ward missionary; Bro. Deneau, 2nd counselor in the bishopric, was a Catholic priest but converted 4 years ago, comes with us to a lot of lessons; the lady we didn't know; her less-active friend; and this other lady we didn't know, who was a member of another ward. So anyway, this member said she couldn't find the building she was supposed to go to, but she went to the ward at our building a long time ago and decided to come here. She said she didn't know why she was there, but it felt right. Anyway, I forgot what we were talking about, but she started talking about her conversion, involving a life or death situation while she was pregnant. Basically it came down to either the baby would die or she would die. But then she got a blessing from a bishop and they were both healed. Anyway, the non-member lady started crying and felt the Spirit really strong. The person telling the story also talked about she waited a really long time to convert and she said it was not worth it, which made Robert really think, I'm sure. We will now commence teaching the non-member lady, haha.
Even though I love the members of our ward and our correlation meetings every Wednesday night, I went on Wednesday and realized it was my 25th correlation meeting on Wednesday night, which is A LOT! And during the correlation meeting (which I really do love..we get off-topic sometimes, but it's fun), there was just a LITTLE too much talk about different guns and crap that I didn't care about at all. Then we were talking about some place full of crazy people, and one guy said "Oh is that where the liberals are?" and I just kept my mouth shut. It's a good experience though, not something I'm used to in Berkeley, haha. There was a hilarious topic of conversation during one of the dinners as well. The Crowells are amazing, really nice and hard-working older couple, but Sis. Crowell is the one who was talking during dinner many months ago about how she kept making bad comments about liberals at church and it turned out the person she was talking to was liberal. Anyway, they talked about a less-active member who needed help or something, and Bro. Crowell went to go help. They said there was a questionable/vulgar/shocking decoration in her apartment and I was getting ready for them to say it was pornography or something, but then they said it was a Haight-Ashbury street sign. HAHA.
Es todo. Bye,
Elder Bradford
