June 15 2014

Wow this week has been so crazy!!!!! So much downs and craziness!!!  To start off on Tuesday we had 8 people set up appointments and all of them said they would come the night before. Then at the end of the day we ended teaching a total of 2 lessons.....  One of the guys is supposed to be baptized this Saturday... That is not going to happen now. Because since Tuesday we haven't been able to get a hold of him and we think he has blocked our number.... really sad but it happens. Later that night we got home and got a call from our golden guy that came up to us talking about English class. He was calling us to tell us he can’t meet with us anymore because he is gay and he would not change. Kind of depressing. We had a good feeling about him but I guess now is the time.

Some other pretty sweet things happened this week.  I was going to the bathroom the other day and it was very peaceful if I do say so myself. Haha, as I was pulling the toilet paper out something started to wiggle out of my hand.... it was a little unexpected and I may or may not have squealed like a little girl ha, but as I looked down I noticed there was a nice friendly gecko on the toilet paper!!! haha he ran up the wall and just chilled for a little bit, it was quite a surprise and I thought it was pretty funny! After words I tried to catch him and I was running through the bathroom trying to catch this lizard but sadly he ran into a hole and got away! Luckily nobody came in and saw me crawling around on the floor:  haha 

This week we had a crazy lesson with an investigator!!!  Everything started off good and the lesson went good, we taught him the second lesson on the plan of salvation and it was going really good until as we were about to finish up our pei ke (the member in our lesson) said to the investigator, you smoke right? The investigator says “ya”. Then our peike says oh we have this thing called the word of wisdom! My companion and I are both like oh great.  Luckily we were able to do it smoothly and talk to him about it as he is freaking out because he has tried to quit smoking before wasn’t able to, and so we are promising blessings and telling him why and just explaining things but before we had a chance to finish our peike asks if he has a girlfriend?  The investigator  says yes and our peike says "oh well we also have this thing called the law of Chasity" that is where we cut him off and told him we will tell him about it later. It was really interesting!!! Luckily he still accepted a baptismal goal and came to church this week so fingers crossed! He is super cool! :)

Last thing I want to share is something that made my day and opened my eyes a little bit! This week we had to go up to the hospital to get some papers for sister Blickenstaff.  After, we went to a 7/11 that is connected to the hospital to fax them to her. As we were standing in line to pay I saw this little kid that was missing his arm, I started to feel kind of sad for this kid and I was thinking how he probably just barely lost his arm and how sad that was for him. They paid and as they were walking past us the kid (with his arm full of snacks and goodies) looked up at me and gave me the biggest smile I have ever seen and starred at me as he walked passed, then he dropped his drink. He picked it up his drink and looked back at me with a big smile again and ran and caught up to his mom! It made me realize that event though we might have some challenges and might be going through some struggles there are always good in our life we just have to find it and be happy like that little boy did! A smile can turn someone’s whole day completely around for the better!!! 

Love you guys so much and hope you have a good week! This week I want you to try to make someone else life like paradise! I promise it will make your week a lot better!

Love Elder Roberts! :)

June 8 2014

This week has been pretty sweet and pretty rough!! ha It rained almost every day, we would start off our day by getting soaking wet from the rain and then usually ending it soaking wet from sweat because the sun came out and it would get super humid!! Yesterday we were riding to church and it was raining but it was so humid it felt like we were riding through a mister! It was the weirdest thing ever!!! haha On Wednesday we had just left our house and it started to sprinkle and we decided we didn’t need to put on our rain gear and it would be fun.... haha well within the next 20 seconds you would have thought we had just got out of the swimming pool!!! haha it was so fun and felt really good actually! The roads were covered in water and in some spots the water came up to the bottom of are peddle. So as we would peddle our foot would go into the water! Everyone that we talked to asked where our rain gear was and the people here don’t like rain at all so when it rains they are really grumpy! We still tried to talk to them but I don’t think  if it was to effective because all of our tracks were soaking wet and so we couldn’t give them anything or even write down there number, but hopefully were able to cheer up their day a little bit! I mean a couple of white kids, soaked, singing me a song in the rain would cheer me up a little bit :) haha super fun day! 

Because of the rain we got fanged ALOT.... which kind of sucked!! Because nobody likes the rain nobody will go out in it!! The people here think the rain is acid rain and will make them go bald!!!  They are super funny but they will sometimes call you and say they can’t come and if you ask why they act like you are stupid and say "because it’s raining outside!!!"

Not too much happened this week but the normal missionary stuff. Sunday was pretty sweet though we had 3 investigators come and 2 of them were just kind of random. One of them was someone we hadn't even met. He was one of the other Elders Investigators and then they found out he lives in our area so they gave him to us at church!! He is super cool. The other one we couldn’t get ahold of towards the end of the week so we thought he wasn’t going to come. Then he showed up and told us he had been in taipei for the last couple days!  He is probably getting baptized next week or the week after! Keep him in your prayers! :) Then we had the guy that came up to us like 2 weeks ago looking for the English class. He is doing really good but he is talking to his Christian friends and other ministers and they are telling him not to read the book of Mormon and that we are bad and stuff. So hopefully he can get a testimony quick!

That was pretty much our week! Just working hard and trying to have fun while doing it, which is working out pretty good! Elder Greenhalgh is awesome and I am learning so much from him, he is helping the work be super fun! This week I also had my first fresh mango, it was so good I actually had a couple hahah but I will try to send you pictures of one we ate last night!! :) So good! Hope you guys have a great week!!1 Love you lots! I’ll just enjoy myself here in paradise!!! :)

Love Elder Roberts!!!! 

June 1, 2014

This week has been super fun and crazy!! Ha we got the most lessons I have gotten my entire mission for a week! Elder Greenhalgh is super awesome and he reminds me a lot of Elder Gish! So he is pretty much just a stud all around! ha This week end we were contacting on the way home and we were messing around having fun but still working hard and we pulled up to this guy on a scooter at a light and I started talking to him and I told him I was from Africa.... haha he looked at me kind of confused and asked aren't people from there black? you don't have black skin then I said south Africa and he believed me haha then I said hey this is my friend he is from England, as I was pointing to Elder Greenhalgh and so he starts talking in an accent and the guy asked what part and he said London it was super funny the guy ended up adding and is going to meet with us! He is a super cool guy, his name was Eric!

On our way to email today we had a little accident ha we were going down this bridge and Elder Greenhalgh turned and looked back to see if there were any cars or scooters coming and he kind of went over a little bit and hit the edge of the bridge and ended up wiping out pretty bad! His arm got super torn up, he scratched his chin a little bit, he tore his shirt, pants and bike seat and his front break got kind of broke.... poor guy but it was kind of funny but really crazy! It looked like he hit his face hard from my point of view but I guess he didn't too bad, luckily!!! His arm and knuckles are all scraped up though it looks pretty gnarly!!! haha

This week we met this super cool guy.  We were standing out in front of the church and he came up to us on Tuesday night and was looking for the English class and so we told him it was Wednesday night and then started to talk to him and he ended up living in our area and set up a time to meet with us on Thursday. Thursday we sat down with him and had a sweet lesson with him, we shared Moroni 10:3-5 with him and at the end of the lesson he said when we read that he had a weird feeling and it was kind of scary.... at first he said it was a sad feeling so we started to ask questions about it and were trying to figure out if it was good or bad, he ended up saying it was a good feeling but it made him feel like he wanted to cry, so we told him that is the spirit. He set up another time to meet with us on Tuesday and kept saying thank you! Then later that night just after we finished planning our phone rings and it was him, he sounded kind of sad at first but then he asked if the Book of Mormon we gave him was his and if he could write in it and take note, after he told us when he was looking at our pictures of our families he could tell that we were all so happy and he wanted that and he felt super happy and good tonight when he met with us! He thanked us again and then we hung up!! It was super cool seeing the spirit work on someone so quickly and so strongly, hopefully we will be able to continue helping him and teaching him so he can be baptized!!!

One last thing, this week I was reading in Moses one and it was talking about how there is so much more to the gospel that we don't even know about, so I came up with this example :) The gospel is a lot like the ocean, a lot of people here stuff about it and some is bad and some is good for example all the storms and sharks and crazy stuff that can happen in the ocean or how beautiful it is and how fun it is to play in and all the stuff you can do in it! There are a lot of people that just hear about the storms and the boats sinking and the shark attacks and so they are afraid of it and never get to enjoy the ocean for what it is. There are also the people who go and play on the beach and swim and get to enjoy it and they learn to love it but then they hear about the sharks and they run away and never come back or they are just content with staying in the shallow water and enjoying that part but it isn’t until you really go in and explore (or study) that you really find out what is down there and how amazing everything is and how pretty it is. It could completely change your view on the ocean (or life) but even the people that know the very most about it still don’t know everything there is so much out there that has been unexplored! There is so much in the gospel that we don't know about but what we do have we need to study and learn and take it in and enjoy it so that it can be a blessing in our life! I know this church is true and that it can bless everyone, sometimes it is hard and times get rough but if we put our trust in the lord he will help us get through it a lot easier than we could by ourselves! Our trials are just to help us grow and be stronger, learn from them! 

Love you guys hope you all have a great week in the mountains!! JUST ANOTHER WEEK IN PARADISE!!! 

Love Elder Roberts :)