Birthdays!

September 2, 2019

Wow, sorry for not writing the last 2 weeks! A lot has happened since then! I'm just going to go over the highlights of the last 3 weeks. So a couple weeks ago was my birthday! Yay! I'm finally 20. It was funny, at the store they had birthday cards for 50, 40, 30, 21, and 10. I chuckled. As a district (since it was P day) we all made birthday cakes but they each had to have at least 2 weird ingredients in it. Ours had molasses, gummy bears and coconut milk, the Hermanas had barbecue sauce and Apple cider vinegar, and the other Elders had Salsa and molasses in theirs. It was very interesting. I think mine was the only one I didn't almost throw up eating. That was fun, I had a good birthday. Thanks for all the birthday wishes!

These past couple weeks have been pretty good work wise. Freddy and his kids have been coming to church and they love it, and they can tell it brings the Spirit and they can feel peace when they come. It's especially good for them right now because they have been going through a ROUGH time. Man, it's crazy. When I told him I was being transferred it was super hard to see a 53 year old man cry. We hugged each other for a bit and then his kids hugged me too. I'm gonna miss that family. I love them so much and the gospel has blessed them so much as well. It's been hard to see him go through what he's been through, but I was glad to show God's love to him through it all. I know I will see him again someday. 

Oh yeah, by the way I am being transferred. I will be heading to Evansville Indiana tomorrow morning to be a Zone Leader with Elder Norwood, probably for my last 2 transfers. He's a great guy! I was his district leader in Brandenburg! I'm excited for It! I may even get a chance to speak Marshallese! @spencertimothy

Another cool/weird thing that happened this week: we were trying by members that are less active and we knocked on one lady's house and nobody answered. As we were leaving, a guy came out from a small store right next to the house and asked us what we were doing. We told him we were looking for a lady from our church but he said he had never heard of her. He said he needed to get back to work and we asked if we could help. He said we weren't dressed for the kind of work he was doing, so we offered to come back another time and he said, "you're gonna work for me okay? And you won't preach?" We said yep! The next day we receive a phone call from our bishop asking us how we got that lady's information because apparently she had asked to have no contact with the church and thought she had removed her records and she was going to be SUPER upset if her parents had sent us to her. So we explained the whole situation and then asked if our bishop thought we should go back. He said if we had made a commitment to go help him, he didn't see why not. So we went back on Saturday and it was a great experience! We helped him mow his ditch and move a hundred planks of oak wood into his shed! It was a lot of fun and he super appreciated the help! All of this was orchestrated by the spirit, no doubt in my mind. It was pretty cool to see how against us coming around they were and expecting to never see us again to them being super thankful and happy that we came by because it helped him get a lot of stuff done! The Lord works through small and simple means to bless His children.

There was a lot of other stuff that happened, such as being AP for a day, hermana Short's birthday party for district Lunch, we got our floors redone, we had zone conference, and I even touched a frozen rattlesnake! It was all super good! Anyways, that's all for now. Enjoy the pictures! Have a fantastic week! See ya from Indiana next week!

Love, Elder Ray

My new address is
8164 Lincoln Ave Apt. B Evansville IN 47715