Ties and hike

Elder Jones week 42

Sounds like you guys are having some fun in Indiana. I laughed when I read about the babies and the "your mama" jokes. It sounds like the rest of the family is doing well and keeping busy. 

It's been a pretty good week for us.  We've still been working with the same investigators. None of them have accepted the invitation to be baptized. So we've been spending a lot of time looking for more people to teach. Our problem is often that a lot of people will listen to us it's just they aren't really terribly interested. So it's hard figuring out where to spend our time.

Other than that the ward is still doing great. It's an awesome ward. We go to visit the Clementes a lot still. They're preparing to be sealed in the temple soon. Their names are Maria and Jose. They're awesome. Maria has her temple recommend now and Jose just did his interview to receive the Melchizedek priesthood. So we're excited for them. We went one time and he wanted to learn how to tie a tie. So we helped him with that last time. The first time he tied it really short so Maria just calls it "Jose style" when they tie a tie really short. 

In elder's quorum this week they were planning a meal for Mother's Day. They started talking about carne asada and everyone just went off.  So everyone had a 40 minute heated conversation about carne asada.  Then there was a little 15 minute lesson at the end.  I love this ward.

We went on a hike this morning which was really nice. There's some nice hiking spots in our area up in the hills. So that was a lot of fun.

Anyway we've had a good week. I hope you guys have another great week!

Love elder Jones

Baby and ball

Elder Tyler Jones week 41

Wow, it sounds like you guys have been pretty busy. That's crazy to hear that allie's a driver now.  I'm sorry Mom's babies are still being crazy.  Sounds like you are working through some changes in your Gospel Principles class.  We usually teach gospel principles as well since our ward mission leader can't make it a lot of times and the sister missionaries are both pretty new.  It usually goes well for us we get good turnout usually and everyone likes to participate.

It's been a good week for us. We're still working with our investigators. With Easter week this week, some nice opportunities were opened up for us. So it was a pretty good week for finding and teaching since everyone's a bit more open during Easter week. 

We saw a lot of Christians parading in the streets all week long. There are a lot of different Christian churches in the area that we work. So that was pretty neat to see. 

Since a lot of our more promising investigators are the spouses of members it makes a few things a lot easier. The members are really helpful in getting us in when they're home and helping us with teaching them since they really want them to progress as well.

Transfers are tomorrow. We're both staying here which is awesome. There aren't too many changes so it should be about the same which is good. 

We had dinner with a Samoan family this week. They stopped us and asked us if we had dinner that night and we didn't so they just had us come have dinner with them. That was pretty awesome. They gave us Mexican food because they said they don't like Samoan food very much but it was still really good. 

One of the families were working with has an adorable baby that just turned 1. I'm going to attach a few pictures of him. His name is Santiago. He always has the cutest facial expressions.

Anyway it's been a good week for us here. I hope you all have another great week!

Elder Tyler Jones week 40

Sounds like you all are having a good time in Indiana. I'm glad you guys had a good spring break

 

It's been another good week.

We had another opportunity to go to the temple this week. We went this last Saturday. The Bojórquez family drove us. We got to do a session in Spanish which was cool. The Oakland temple is beautiful but I believe it's going to be closing soon for some major remodeling. It'll be rededicated when it reopens in a couple years. So we might not get to go much more in my mission.

We've been working more with all the people I talked about last week. They're still doing well. They're still progressing and doing well. Members of the relief society started visiting the wives of our investigators that aren't active.  Hopefully activating them will help their husbands as well.  The ward here is super awesome.  They're really helpful and there are great members.

We've been focusing a lot more on finding people to teach in the mission.  So we've spent a lot more time looking for people to teach.  While we were out contacting this week a lady waved us over from her car she said she felt strongly that she needed to talk to us.  That went really well and she was really interested.  We referred her to other elders though because she doesn't live in our area. S o hopefully all goes well with that.

There's a recent convert couple that I talked to you about before. The Clementes. They're an older couple that are super funny. They're going to be getting sealed soon. So we're really excited for that. We go see them pretty regularly. 

Anyway, it's been a great week!

Elder Tyler Jones Week 39

That's awesome to hear about dads Job! I'm glad you guys are doing well and having a good spring break. Sounds like things are going well in Indiana.

It's been a pretty good week. Most of our investigators are the
husbands of members. So we've been working a lot with that.

Douglas is perfect, he agrees with everything in the gospel. He wants to get baptized and all that. We're just trying to get him married. He wants to get married. His girlfriend is an active member. We just need to work that all out with the bishop. So we're trying to get him in to see the bishop. Hopefully all goes well with that.

We have another investigator named Virgilio, we met him when he called to us on the street from his cab. His wife is a member and he's taken the lessons before in El Salvador. His wife's records aren't in the ward yet. They moved from El Salvador but never came to church here.
They've got a 6 year old son as well. We're still working on trying to get them to come to church.

David is the husband of an active member in the ward. He wants to get baptized he just needs to overcome some word of wisdom problems so we're working with him on that.

A lady asked us to come visit her and her family some day this week at church. She and her husband come to church every week. We came to visit them and we just talked for a bit. Their kids have been sealed in the temple and they have a few grandkids. They have one grandkid that lives with him who's about 11 months old named Santiago. He's the utest baby ever. Apparently the husband isn't a member though. He comes to church every week, we don't fully know why he hasn't gotten baptized yet but his wife really really wants him to get baptized so they can be sealed.

We've gone over a few times. He works in landscaping so he has a
beautiful garden he likes to show us and he's from El Salvador so he wants to teach us how to make good pupusas. He seems like he's
starting to like us more and more and he's been interacting more and more when we teach so I'm hopeful with all that.

Our last P day one of the Tongan members took us and the Tongan elders downhill mountain biking. They were some pretty big hills and it was a lot of fun. He works  at a bike shop so he let us borrow some really nice bikes to do it. Each bike was worth about $2,000. So it was rough terrain but it felt smooth going down. So we could get going pretty fast.

We also had dinner with the Bojórquez family this week. Whenever they have missionaries over they have them eat habaneros and take a video of it. They started keeping a record of how many habernos the missionaries ate and the record for most habaneros eaten at a time was 10. I wanted to beat the record so I ate 13. I think the Bojórquez family was impressed so that was good. It just felt awful in my stomach for the next day or so. So I'm not sure it was worth it. But that's alright.

General Conference was awesome. I really liked Elder Oaks' talk. But I thought it was all really awesome. Our building is the stake center so we were having it shown there.  They were showing conference in 3 different rooms at the stake center. One room was English, one was Spanish and one was Tongan. The Tongans made everyone lunch in between the Sunday sessions. So that was really nice of them.

It's been a great week, I hope you have a great spring break!