August 25, 2013

Whats happenin yall!?!? I don't have a ton of time today because we're going to hit up the Big  D today, but I had just a couple cool stories to tell yall. So this last Teusday I was on exchanges with Elder Adams (who actually turns out to be Riley Coggin's roomate up at the Y haha, I've apparently walked into his room all the time just to get Riley's stuff so that he could basically live at our place and I've said Hi a couple times. I just remember seeing him watch Harry Potter on his computer haha.) But we were on exchanges out in Carrolton (another cash money city in north Dallas), and I found out that my beloved brother Adib Jacobo, that I baptized from out in the Cliff, had moved to their branch!!! And thats not all...I don't know if y'all remember it or not, but he was the one that was looking for a lady friend down here, and apparently a month ago he got married to a member who's already endowed!!!!! So we had a little reunion with him and his awesome new wife and talked about the good old days back in Oak Cliff, casting spirits out of his house, cleaning out a whole sleeve of Tortas for lunch, and then our competition to see who could eat more Jack In The Box tacos back when Elder Rodriguez and I were tearing it up as the dream team in Texas! Then we talked about the temple and I remembered that he was baptized on the 25 of August, and then they told me about how it was their plan to get Jacobo endowed on the 25 of this August, and after that, they're going to get sealed! I was about to cry it was so amazing. 

And another little jewel from this past week was when we started looking for a couple families to teach yesterday. It was really a normal Sunday where we left to find a couple part member families to teach, and some of them lived in an apartment complex, so we parked our car (Shelly, the infamous purple Fusion in the mission) and walked out to cross a big street...and we hadn't been out of our car for 30 seconds when we saw this huge Red Van careening down the street with the window rolled down as a family yelled "ELDERS!!!!!" Then as we saw that they didn't finish what they wanted to say (since they were coming down the road at 50+ mph), they flew across all 4 lanes to take a U-Turn at full speed....truly faster than I've ever seen before in my life. As they took this Italian Job-like U-turn, we were able to see their car just tatted up with BYU stickers, and then I just thought oh no...here comes the Utah part of the mission. It rememinded me of the fact that our branch area covers the area of a whole stake and how we're supposed to gather any Spanish speaker. While the Hermana's have the "ghetto" part of Plano that covers 2 wards, we have the better part with Ferrari and Maserati dealerships and we cover 6 English wards....so our area is loaded with your stereotypical Mormon members....but I guess welcome to the rich part of Dallas. I was just so used to being the only missionaries within 900 square miles in Greenville, and it made me miss the diversity of hearing "[EXPLETIVE] YOU!!!!!!!" everyday down in Oak Cliff. So the family pulled up at 600 mph, of course still in their
church clothes, and gave us every question in the book. It was just so stereotypical that I just couldn't help myself from laughing. They begged to give us a ride, and while we told him we were just going to walk to the complex, he asked for the number and everything whipping
out his cell phone and putting the adress and all the info we had in his GPS. I truly felt like a celebrity as they introduced us to their teenage daughter, told us what ward they were in, asked us how much time we had in the mission, talked a little about what they've done in
missionary work, and just about asked us if we miss Utah yet. So I would just like to say that my respect for any Utah missionary had grown a hundredfold for having to put up with that every day. I can't imagine it haha. So next time yall see that family van speeding down the freeway, the question is....Soccer Mom...or Mormon Dad to the missionaries rescue? Well I love yall and hope you enjoy this Spring Break!

Elder Justin Wilson