It's Hot, I'm Always Tired, and I Love it

Early in the week someone asked me how I'm liking the Makakilo Ward so far and I responded with the above title. It's a pretty accurate sum up of this week.

We had a pretty fun Pday last Monday, we hiked to Kaena Point then after met up with the Kapolei, Kalaeloa, and Palehua elders to have a nerf war. Turned out to be really fun!

Some of the highlights of this week were our lessons, we taught a Samoan lady named Mona the plan of salvation while eating at a McDonald's, she was a little skeptical of it but loved the concept of family history and temple work so we will see what we can do about that. We taught the law of tithing to Sebastian and he thought it was awesome and said it totally made sense (honestly this guy is straight golden). My favorite lesson of the week was with the Newhouse family. All day leading up to the lesson we were texting members to see who would be able to come and no one answered, finally about 30 minutes before the lesson Sister Kaumaitotoya said she felt like she needed to go. We had dinner with the family and Sister Kaumaitotoya started talking to Ilisha (the mother of the family), turns out Ilisha is an online college professor who teaches through Louisiana State, the same college that Sister K (I can only type out her name so many times) is starting up online courses for soon. The coincidence was pretty nuts but I think everyone in the room knew that it wasn't a coincidence. One of our main focuses with the Newhouses has been to try to find them some friends in the ward and that was just too perfect, miracles can be simple and impactful. After the dinner we had a super solid lesson about listening to the prompting of the spirit and they revommitted to reading the Book of Mormon daily, I know that as long as they keep that commitment they will be baptized very soon, all we can do is pray and guide though.

With the good also comes the bad though Haha, we had a not so solid lesson with Mexican woman named MariElayna which was pretty comedic. She told us that she had a dream the night before that two well dressed young men had come to her covered in light and offered to help her. We thought that was pretty dope but apparently she severely misinterpreted the dream and was convinced that it meant she was supposed to teach us about God hahaha. We tried to have a conversation with her but she was a stubborn one, kinda hard to teach someone who believes in God but doesn't believe in scripture/doesn't believe in anything you preach out of scripture. Oh well, win some and lose some, we'll try her again in the distant future.

Aside from that we did a lot of service this week, chapel cleaning, weed wacking, rock moving, more weed wacking. It was a good time. That combined with all the hill biking we have had to do has pretty much wiped me out completely. I'm getting too old for this kind of stuff.

But yeah that's thus weeks summary, the ward is awesome, the work is good, my companion keeps me in line, and the church is still true (I know, crazy right?). Love you all and hope your week is awesome! Aloha!

Elder Smith
Hawai'i Honolulu Mission

Servin'