We had a GREAT week this week. I can't believe how quickly this transfer has gone by. This Saturday, we will get our transfer calls. I'm hoping to stay in Huntsville longer, but I kind of have a feeling I will get transferred already. We'll see on Saturday.
We were able to track down Porter, and he is all set to be baptized on January 25th! He is just great. His 2 year old son, Austin, has been sick all week so it was hard to get lessons with him but we managed to teach him what he needs to know before Saturday. Austin also got a blessing from the Elders. The Elders talked about how priesthood blessings are reliant upon the faith of the recipient, the worthiness of the person giving the blessing, and God's will. Porter testified to them that he had the faith that the blessing would help Austin. It was so cool to hear his testimony of the priesthood.
A funny story though, during one of our lessons with Porter, Austin came running out of the bedroom holding a huge butcher knife. He was seriously running straight towards me! Porter yelled at him to put it down but didn't even get up or anything! Dude! Of course Austin didn't listen because he's only 2 years old so I stood up and grabbed the knife out of his hand. I was so scared he was going to stab me. It was hilarious later on though.
On Friday I got to go to Bentonville again on exchanges with Sister Lavea, who has just been out for a month. She is Samoan and from Utah, but went to BYU Hawaii for a year. She is so sweet and really cares about her investigators. We had a lot of fun together. We went tracting at this apartment complex and the first door we got to I looked down and said "oh, they have some cute chalk drawings! Wait...is that a swastika?" We were dying laughing thinking about how we were two ethnic girls about to knock on some kind of white supremacist's door, but then we realized it was the Hindu symbol, not a swastika. Turns out the whole apartment complex was Indian people! It was so strange to try to explain our church to someone who doesn't even know about the Bible or Jesus Christ. It was a completely different approach. But we met some really cool, really open people and I can't wait to hear about whether they're teaching any of them now. We also met this young man named Ryan who was about our age. He told us that his only contact with the church was when he was in high school. The teacher told them to write a paper about the Bible, but to be defiant all the students were like, "what if we don't want to write about the Bible?! What if we want to write about some other religious text!" So the teacher agreed and Ryan randomly picked the Book of Mormon to write about. We gave him a Book of Mormon since he no longer had his from high school, and he seemed genuinely excited to be getting it. It was really cool. I hope things work out with him.
Sunday I got to go to my first Marshallese birthday party! In the Marshallese culture they are really big on 1st birthdays, so this was a huge deal for little Lulu. There were probably about 50 people crammed into this tiny apartment, all sitting on the floor and eating and laughing. It was a blast. We met a new investigator there named Janelle, who lives down the street from where the party was. They sang a happy birthday song to Lulu in Marshallese, I wish I could understand more of it. But I had no idea they could sing so well. It was all in perfect harmony. We had a really really good time there and the food was actually pretty familiar.
This week we'll be preparing for the baptism and for transfer calls! It's a crazy week we have coming up. I love being a missionary!
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