Hello all people

What up people! This week Elder Pilling finds $10, gets a loaf of homemade bread, finds a new investigator, and gets some snacks from Nancy. I love Nancy

This week it got cold!!! I guess I should say "cold" because it was like 14C which was cold for me! Yikes I'm weak and useless. But one day I wore a long sleeve all day and was chilled. Which has never happened. We picked a couple more avocados:) and I'm learning about oranges with Norm. He tells us a thousand times that a Valencia Orange is a juicing orange and a naval Orange is an eating orange. Which is true and btw the Valencia oranges are SOOOOO good!!! Very delicious. But apparently you can't buy them at the store...ugh

Ok ok ok ok I am so weird and I can't even think. I always try to think "what do people want to hear about?" But I never know lol so I will tell you about Norm some more. I've been working with Norm for 15 weeks now! He's 71 and has a bunch of degrees and talks a lot but I've become very good friends with him. He's taught me a lot about California and people and horse roping lol. And a lot of what he says relates to the gospel so we get to share truths with him often. He like our messages with him (he buys us lunch) but doesn't get that our message is truly different...yet! We are really pushing the message on him and we feel we are getting close!! We do service for him btw, the last time we helped put up a fence. It was awesome!

I also wanted to share about the member missionary work and how everyone can do it. Since it's not the easiest finding mission in the world, we rely a lot on members and their efforts.  We had 2 lessons with active members who invited non-members to join them to hear missionaries "practice" teach the discussions. Both people were not interested in the message until we were part way through the lesson. One of them is reading the book of Mormon now! It was a good experience for me because I know for a fact that these people would not have opened their door to us, they wouldn't have listened to our message but since they were invited by members, we had a meal together and got to know each other, we were able to slip our message into their lives. All it took was an invitation to have dinner and hear a message from the missionaries because they are practicing and trying to teach 20 discussions a week. Pretty sure that doesn't make sense but that's as good as it will get! 

I'm going to talk more about Nancy lol. I love Nancy, she is so funny and the sweetest person in the world! Except she doesn't really answer her phone so it's difficult to get in contact with her lol but she is the best!  She gave us a big box of the cheese fish things, I forget what they are called and also a box of Cheezits. She loves to help us and serve us and she has such a wonderful testimony of Jesus Christ! She's also hilarious which I've mentioned a lot lol. George, her husband is also great and fantastic! He loves to joke and we have a very good time together as well. 

What else? So much happens in a week that you can't even get a tenth down on the email here. I have been thinking a lot about charity and how important that attribute is in our lives. I'm going to share an experience, it was bad of me and very terrible. We were walking through a complex and I was looking through my bag and I looked up and saw a lady and thought to myself "she's ______  " and so I didn't talk to her...just think about that! What kind of charity is that because it's non at all!! It really opened my eyes that I need to work on that. We are all loved in the eyes of God and EVERYONE deserves the invite to hear about the church. I don't know if I should have shared that because it was really terrible!! But it has opened my eyes and actually helped me. We need to be more like Christ and charity is one I'm definitely in need of working on. Whoa crazy 

Any who now that I told a terrible thing I did we need to lighten the mood. We talked to a guy named Eric and asked if he's interested to learn more about our church. He said he would and we exchanged numbers and jazz and we texted him.  He didn't reply for like 3 days and then boom he texted, we set up an appointment and taught the longest lesson of my life. 1hr 40 mins of restoration!! Whoa. Any who he is a very cool guy and at the end of the lesson he said he would like to pray to see if this is what God will have him do. We are faithful he will learn more. It was very cool. We found him on a Saturday at 8:30pm when the "finding is pretty slow". Dedication and persistence pays off. 

I bought groceries for me and my comp with the $10 I found :) 

Love you all, I'm not going to re-read this so hopefully it doesn't kill you all lol

Love,

Elder Joseph generoo Pilling