Monday, November 26, 2012

The holidays are flying by. It feels like Halloween was yesterday. Thanksgiving was better than Halloween. It is a holiday that they let you celebrate on your mission unlike Halloween. No one in the ward I am in now invited us to do anything for Thanksgiving, so we drove down to Decatur and celebrated it with my old ward. It was a very good Thanksgiving dinner. The Mallory's cooked a feast. We had all the Thanksgiving specialties, and some things I'd rather not try again. Chitlings, they are disgusting, never eat them. Haha. I got to see Glovia again and got to say goodbye to her. I am going to miss her so much.   I am going to miss the Mallory's. Especially brother Mallory and his southern accent. He can't pronounce anything right. Christmas is "Krimas" street is "skreet" straight is "skraight". Gosh I love that man.
Graffiti in a tunnel...not too shabby!

Elders at the last Zone Conference

Elder Romero and Sister Mallory

Elder Romero and Brother Mallory

Elder Romero and Glovia, a convert from Decatur


     The work in Dunwoody is alright. The difference in openness to our message due to geographical location and financial situations is becoming more and more apparent to me. People here are very wealthy. It seems like the more wealthy neighborhoods won't listen to our message at all. They open the door, give a sigh, and shut the door. It is very different from the poorer areas. The poorer areas the people at least listen to you. We have been doing most of our tracting in the poorer areas of Dunwoody. There aren't many, so we have pretty much covered all of it already. However, the Lord has blessed us for our efforts.
      We have two investigators with baptismal dates. Their names are Joe, and Junior. They are neighbors and good friends. We found them both within the last week. Joe is the father of one of our former investigators. He is a Jehovah's Witness but doesn't know too much about the religion. He is a very kind man and you can tell he really cares about Elder Grassley and I. He had many good questions. Questions that other religions just couldn't give him answers to. He loved the story about the restoration and Book of Mormon. Junior is a Vietnam vet. Very kind and funny country boy. Junior loves to talk. He loves to share stories with us and we love listening. He is a very kind man, as he would say, "Junior tries to be good to everyone."
      We were teaching Junior before we were teaching Joe. We talked to Junior about the restoration and the history of the Church. A couple days later we met with Joe and started teaching him. In the lesson with Joe we were explaining how Satan tries to mislead and confuse. While God's path is clear and simple. As we were talking about this Junior busts through the door furious. He was coming to tell Joe to never meet with us. He didn't know that we were meeting with Joe at that very moment. Junior looks at us very angrily and says, "You didn't tell me that you had multiple wives. I am not doing that. I don't want anything to do with you guys anymore." After he said that I turned to Joe and said, "See how Satan misleads?" Luckily we were there to straighten things out and calm Junior down. After teaching them and explaining things to them we invited them to both be baptized together on December 16. They both have a problem smoking so they said that they are going to help each other quit so they can get baptized and they are going to go to Church together. It was an amazing lesson that I could really see the hand of God in.

      Elder Grassley is great. He reminds me a lot of my good friend Ian Kelley. Haha. For those of you that know Ian that may seem really weird... But they are very similar. He has been having quite a few health problems though. He has diabetes and has been having really bad headaches since the MTC. We are going to the doctor today to hopefully figure everything out. Him and I get along great. We were into a lot of the same T.V. shows back home. He has been filling me in on what has been going on since I have been gone. We have a very similar sense of humor too. He is a great kid. I am trying my hardest to train him the best I can. I think I am doing a pretty good job. It is weird being in the position I am in when I feel like I was in his shoes yesterday... Sometimes I don't feel strong enough. I still struggle with things just as he does. Being a trainer I have been trying hard to stay strong for him.

      Well that is about all I have to say for today. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I love you all so much. I miss you all so much.

-Elder Ryan Romero.

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