Still Floating (from October 1, 2012)

Hey there family

 

  So this past week was a ton better then the past few mostly because we had some investigators to church and have a new lady with a baptismal date. Her name is Debra Owens and she is in the hood hood crooked ghetto, like someone got shot in the face there this past week hood. She is a way sweet lady who is more or less just raised in that atmospere and is black and so she fits right in with everything else.

 

that's cool that you now have a new car I guess that will make things interesting when I get home...... 4th car !!!

 

I really really want a Tornado to blow through this town that would be sweet.

 

So I heard a joke down in the south side it goes like this ..... What's the most confusing holiday in the ghetto?  Father's Day, because no one knows who their father is hahahaha.. This is an issue that I would like to address. Society these days, or perhaps the hood of Peoria is just a swirling pot of sin and needs some serious fixing, that's where Elder Sauer and I come in. We denouce wickedness fearlessly and do it with the Book of Mormon.  We stand as beacons of truth or at times we stand as wanna FBI agents who can pull up to a street and have every brotha go back inside hahaha it's a thing of beauty, but I'll tell ya what there ain't no way that you're going to get me to go down there in the night time with all the commotion that goes on down there. I hope that I'm on the Lord's side because he may need to block some bullets for me.

 

I want to talk about faith.... faith is something that i wish to get more of as the brethern will be addressing the world as to what needs to be done in order to get our heads on straight and how faith is going to be to only thing that stays constant in a changing world that's decided to play dead posom in the middle of the road..

 

There is a program the church is doing and it's called the Mormon next door. It's a presentation about the church to be presented and other churches upon their request as to what the mormons really believe and practice. SO we had pastor Bob of the united methodist church( that's where we do service on saturday morning) ask us to prepare a 7 minute presentation about the church and then have 40 minutes to answer questions from the congregation. So after having that offer we already knew that we needed to implement the church presentation on the beliefs and recruited the help of the 1st councilor in the stake presidency, and the stake's public affairs specialists. So what it was was this. A information presentation of the 2 religious affiliations of the current presidential canidates. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the United Christian Church. Each church was to get 7 minutes each of presentation on beliefs and practices and then 40 minutes open discussion. We ended up going to a different room then the one that was planned because there must have been 100 people wanting to hear what we have to say, and so we got started 10 minutes late since the room that we were in wasn't big enough. It went well. Pastor Bob was mostly accurate on his information and some of the questions came like " why do you focus big on family history?" " how do you know if the person sittin next to you is worthy to be there in the temple?" "why would you send missionaries to already christian people?" So President Mackay took most of the questions because the stake is supposed to be in charge of situations like this but one and only one question got directed towards me.and it was " Why do you wear suits, and will you contiue being a minister of the gospel after your time is up?"  I was sweating it way bad but I just told them that " we wear these clothes to easily recognize ourselves as reprentatives of the church and of the faith, and that after the mission I will and almost all returned missionaries will go into a professional field with the community." and that was my moment of fame in the Methodist church.... so bad did I want to talk about some other subjects but I'm glad that President mackay took us for backup and that hopefully when we do service there next time we will get some more teaching oppurtunities and some referrals.

 

Life is good and I can't wait to listen to conference.... All of you should take hand written notes of what the spirit teaches you  and then study those after the conference is over

 

13 months out.... Elder Gonzalez   Peoria Ililnois