Back to the Land of our First Inheritance

Elder Souza and I are working in our first area and strictly our area once again, making us feel like we're going home. Also, this last Tuesday, we received a call saying I was going to get on a bus to leave at 6AM the next morning to get on a flight to go back to Mexico City, where the MTC was, which was really weird. Turns out it had something to do with our visas, and when we got back to Juarez, we met up with a bunch of other Americans who also had to go back to Mexico City to do the same thing. The flight attendant asked us why we were dressed the way we were and what we did as missionaries, leading to about a 35 minute conversation with her, and we ended up giving her a Book of Mormon and getting her information for missionaries in her area to visit her sometime. True blue missionaries baby.

Once we got to Mexico City, we met up with a bunch of our friends from the MTC, and it was really fun to talk with them, especially since we thought we might not see any of them again for the rest of our lives. We arrived at about 1:30AM and slept in some tiny dorms on the grounds of the Mexico City Temple, and got up at 5:40 to catch a bus that didn't end up showing up until like an hour and a half before he wasd supposed to. Turns out he wasn't told what to do, just show up, meaning that he had just as much information as we did. We got to immigration and sat in there for another 5 hours, finally got fingerprinted, and then rushed off to the airport and to find and Uber that we couldn't find. Everything ended up working out fine, but it was pretty stressful trying to figure everything out and where to go when we weren't given any info at all besides our plane tickets and that someone would call us, and the fact that we hadn't been given any food in 24 hours either. But we ended up being able to try some of the infamous Mexico City street tacos de Pastor. Also at the airport we found some Shrek donuts in the Krispy Kreme they had there.

Also bought a hamburger this week and when I opened it to find out what ingredients were inside, I found a plastic Coke bottle cap. Might have been the secret ingredient, but I decided to just take it out and eat the burger with the normal ingredients.

Had a cool experience where we tried to contact an old investigator but he wasn't there. His grandson answered and was interested in what we had to say, and so we started talking with him inside. His grandma then came in and started participating too. Later two more grandkids, the investigator himself (the grandpa), two of his sons (one with his wife and 3 kids) also ended up coming in right as I was sharing the account of the first vision. The entire room was quiet as I was talking about it, and I felt like one of those old timey missionaries preaching to droves of people on the street with the 9 or so people that were in there listening to us.

Contacted a lady on the street that was in a rush. She accepted a date for us to pass by her house and talk a little bit about the church, but she said she was really in a rush and had to go, so we wished her well and parted ways. It was only after that I realized that the fresh roll of toilet paper she had in her hand might have had something to do with why she was in such a rush.

But it's been a long but short week! And it's all been good, even the boring parts. Boring parts just make the exciting parts that much more sweet.

The pictures this week:

Mexico City by night even though I couldn't get the exposure on my camera right

Elder Roberts (MTC comp) and I getting to catch up like old times

A surprise we left as the background on the phone the mission secretaries gave us (we found this gentleman in a magazine ad)

Getting to catch up with the Cancun dudes (once again, don't trust missionaries with pictures. The only one that wasn't blurry was taken when my eyes were closed)

Mexico City temple at 6 in the morning

Eating donut Shrek

Elder Souza and I walked to the boundary of our area and took pics

Found a church with the same font on their sign as ours

Found a scorpion in our house that Souza added to his spider collection

Taking the scripture that the gospel will be preached to every creature to heart

Helping out on of our members who is a baker make about 35 boxes of cookies

Missionaries still aren't immune from temptation

Read a Liahona article this week about how God uses average, imperfect people to do his extraordinary tasks, so if you feel imperfect or like you're not good enough, just know that you don't have to be perfect to do good in this world.

Love you guys, and be a little extra grateful this Thanksgiving!

-Elder P