A Service Surprise!

Elder A and Jason at the temple

Hola familia!! Que tal??

Wow crazy that another week has come and gone.  It seems like whenever I turn the corner p-day is here again.  This past week was great! To answer your question about our service project on Saturday… yes we saw Elder A**’s brother.  We were in line getting our t-shirts and volunteer badges when his brother came up from behind and surprised him. Ha-ha. He was shocked and didn’t really know what to do… it was hilarious. He was "trunkie" for the rest of the time there because of it.  The service was good, it was for some band performances and we were in charge of checking people’s stamps to allow them into the event.  We sat in the sun for 5 hours checking stamps and my face got fried which I don't mind because it was some much needed sun! ha ha It was fun and we got to see some of the performances which were pretty good.  It just made me super “trunkie” for college football.  Also, that night nurse Adams took us five missionaries to Buffalo Wild Wings!! My favorite!  I ate WAY too many wings.  It was fantastic! Not to mention the tender mercies of the college football games playing on the TV while we ate. Ha ha   So... Saturday was awesome.

Ja and Elder C

As for the rest of the week we had some good success with some of the investigators we have. D** and M** are doing awesome! They are reading in the B of M and M** even came to church yesterday without us having to tell her! Okay maybe it was because of the "Sabbath Day" throw-down lesson we did on Thursday that made her come.  We were just happy she did!  It’s pretty hard teaching D** and S** who are both 16 years old. We have to work around their high school routine which is hard especially since they both have bap dates for the beginning of December. We were able to teach them a couple of times this week and they have made some great progress.

On Thursday, Elder A** and I gave a 30 min training on accountability during our zone meeting.  I was pretty nervous to do it!   I felt they chose the most unaccountable missionary to do it. (jk) But after many days of working on our lesson and practicing it turned out really well and we gave a bomb training!  I think I taught myself more on how to be more accountable for myself and my investigators from the training than teaching others which I’m pretty happy about.

This week we didn’t really have a whole lot of success finding any new people to teach sadly. However, we did find one named Y** and she truly was a miracle find! On Friday, we had been walking around Long Beach all morning and we had zero success. My back was killing me and we were both not too happy about what was going on so we just stopped and sat on a curb to rest. After about 10 minutes, we just decided to pray to see if maybe God had someone in mind for us. After praying honestly I still had no idea what to do, but we just stood up and decided to walk a mile or so up the road. Once we got there we had an impression to go by P** (who is a potential investigator). She has shown no signs of wanting to talk to us so it didn’t really make sense to knock on her door, but we did anyways. Lo and behold we found her daughter Y**!  She is super cool and was really grateful for the message we shared. She loves to talk about God and said we could come by some more to talk next week!  Pretty cool.  We had all our less active families except for one come to church and one investigator so it was a good Sunday!

Fun at the Halloween branch party!

As for me this week, it was a tough language week.  I feel like everybody stepped up there Spanish and kicked it up a few notches. Everybody was speaking faster and with words I had never heard of before and it was just dominating me during lessons, etc.  It took a huge toll on my confidence and abilities to communicate which I have been battling with. I’m hoping that I can improve and catch up. I just need to have more faith I guess and just trust in God. Even when things get rough the best thing to do is never give up!

Well that’s it for me. I hope you all have a great week!

Love you and miss you thanks again!!

Mucho cariño! Elder Woffinden

Elder A and Ja buying food at Target

This picture was taken by a sister in the Long Beach 10th ward.  She also gave them $50 to help pay for groceries. Both boys were out of money in their missionary debit card so it was truly a blessing.  We are thankful to the CA members for taking care of our missionary sons.