Rice can grow in the sink...

The Steelers won, eh? Huh, I´m surprised that the Cardinals even got in. There´s a couple of Elders in the zone from Arizona, so they were a little miffed with that one.

This week was a bit rough, Friday especially. After that day, I´m concerned about pastors and people from other churches who don´t want to understand the message. We taught a fairly large family that day, and the dad happened to be a pastor of some local church. Fortunately, he wasn´t the kind of pastor who wanted to do Bible bashing that would impede the message. Unfortunately, he was the kind that liked to show how much knowledge he had and would launch off into various off-topic stories in the middle of the lesson, which impeded the message all the same, and despite all our efforts, he kept on talking.

We also taught a couple of references that we got from a less-active guy. His name´s R., and we´re teaching him and his wife, (who´s not a member) and helping him to get back into church. When we taught there on Thursday, his wife had two friends over, two girls of about 15 and 20. They showed interest in the message and wanted a Book of Mormon. When we returned on Friday, they both had many questions and doubts, but the older one told us "I think that I´ll have to read and pray about it for myself before I decide", which is exactly what we wanted to hear. The younger one, however, told us that she had read and gotten an answer, although not a positive one. Apparently she read, and then asked her mom about it, for which she received the answer that she should stop reading the book. After that, she opened the Bible and found a scripture in Jeremiah that she said is her answer. I don´t remember exactly what it said, but it was something like "All of them and their prophets are adulterers, and they serve the God of Baal". She then told us that we obviously serve the God of Baal, and that she didn´t want to hear anymore, Sheesh! It was definitely the first time that somebody has told me that in my life. So thus ended our teaching experience there.

On a highly better note, Ros. decided to get baptized this week! She´s been going to church every week, but still felt that something was missing for her to be baptized. We couldn´t quite figure our what it was for a while, but after praying and studying for a bit, we felt that it was probably just the fact that she was feeling scared, as she already received an answer about the Book of Mormon. On Tuesday, I asked her if she had asked God about her baptism date. She said she hadn´t, and said she would. When we came back, she said that she had prayed and now felt ready to be baptized, so this week it´ll happen.

We were really happy and grateful for that opportunity. We wanted to help with her husband as well, but he didn´t like the Word of Wisdom discussion too much,and told us that he preferred not to participate from then on. In any case, we were grateful for the blessing of being able to teach Ros.That´s about it from this end.

President might be coming to visit this week, so we spent some extra time with some neglected house cleaning. Our kitchen sink is really messed up and doesn´t drain right, so Elder R. messed with it today. When he opened up the pipe, he found that the reason was because of bunch of rice that somebody had poured down the drain (I think it was me) had gotten stuck and had started to sprout and grow. Heh,it was the first time that I had seen rice growing in any form, much less in the kitchen sink. It was pretty cool. I had forgotten that sinks here don´t have a garbage disposal...my bad judgment.

... sáll from me. ´till next time.

-Eldah Heperi