Lots of awesome sights in Las Vegas, such as the police helicopters flying around with their spotlights searching people out most nights.
Meanwhile, my companions have whole-heartedly jumped into Christmas music, which I am not sure if I personally support until December, but I did relent and buy some egg-nog. This week the weather switched up suddenly too and got pretty cold and has stayed in the 50s. I haven't been cold for like a year and a half, so that's funny. Love some sweater weather!
Yesterday we visited a middle-aged member who is super energetic and nice. In the first 5 minutes she gave us each a fake Gucci mask. And then asked us what kind she should get us next week. Within another 5 minutes she had liked our Facebook page and made us a post to put up, and then she gave us dinner to take home, frozen garlic bread to heat up later, and some yogurt. She then offered to bake a cake to bring to the ward talent show, and in the space of about two minutes, she also asked what day we get haircuts, called a friend at a haircut place, and hooked us up with free haircuts. She then gave us each several handfuls of Halloween candy, and we were barely able to dissuade her from pouring the entire bucket of candy into the bag she had already put our dinner in. Haha, she was so so nice. We had to get out of there, though, or she probably would have given us her whole house!
There was another member that came to help out with a lesson with a couple we are teaching. Right after the lesson was over, she asked us to help bring in some extra food she had brought for the people we are teaching. Before we knew, it she was suddenly cooking up a storm of Mexican food in the kitchen of these people she had just met. We have some crazy awesome members.
We have been working crazy hard at getting valley-wide english classes up and running. The vision is that each chapel will become like a community center, where loads of Hispanics will come and the church will just grow like crazy. We now have english classes in about 8 or 9 chapels across our half of Las Vegas, and there are lots of others in the West mission. So when anyone anywhere in Las Vegas wants to learn English for free, we just point them in the right direction, and everything is already set up!
We have been advertising the classes like crazy, and I am probably going to drown in notifications. We put up some ads on Facebook, and have had roughly 100 conversations started with a ton of people wanting information about English classes. Just yesterday we sent out like 8 referrals in an hour. I have like 25 unread messages right now, so sometimes I think I might explode keeping track of all these people, but it will be awesome. Our ward has 4 sets of missionaries, and just our area has 17 nonmembers so far that want to come to the english class. It will be something really big.
One fun thing we did was go and hang up flyers all over our area about the class. We put them on lamp posts and things, but the most fun was going into all the spanish restaurants we could find and hanging them up. Almost all of them were okay with it! We put one on a chicken truck, at a grocery store, in a barber shop, and a ton of restaurants. One super cool thing that happened was a text we got from someone that had seen the flyers. She said she that she is a less-active member of another ward, and she saw us come in and put up the flyer. She hasn't gone to church because she works on Sundays, but when she saw us, she thought there might be a church close by where she could go before work. She then came to church with us on Sunday. It was really cool to me that God could work things out so that not only were we working on this english class project, but also he cared enough about this one less-active member that he had us go over at just the right time, that she would see us and want to come back to church. It is amazing.
So anyway, last week was our first english class and we are gearing up for round two. Last week we had one member and four nonmembers. One that came was a guy we had never met before. He was a big guy with ear gauges and lots of tattoos. I was helping him during the class, and he told me a little about all the hard times he's been going through. He said, "I don't know if this is the time to talk about it, but I really want to come to church and be closer to God again." Then, on this Sunday, he came back! He may have looked a little different with his hoody and tattoos (and sipping his coffee the whole time, haha), but is hard to explain how happy I felt to have him there. I think it is awesome to get a little glimpse of how much God just wants us all to come to him, no matter who we are, or wherever we are on the path of life. We also had another guy come in that we just met and invited on the street, so that was another huge blessing.
Our main man from Guatemala gave us a scare. We had a lesson at a member's house where we watched the restoration video. After the video, the member asked him when he was getting baptized. He said, "Well, I was going to on the 27th, but I don't think I want to anymore..." We were trying to look calm but inside were like, "Oh no! What happened? What went wrong?" Then he said, "...I think I would rather do it sooner!" He gave us a little scare, but we are so excited for him. He has his date on the 22nd now. The other day he invited us to his house and cooked for us, and introduced us to his whole family. They were all super nice and invited us back for Thanksgiving.
One last story was a member we visited. They are less-active, but the daughter suddenly had started feeling like she wanted to set things straight a little bit. She mentioned that the missionaries hadn't been in touch in a while, and right after that was when we called them and set up an appointment! They seemed super grateful to have us there.
I am constantly amazed at how God guides us blind little people down here. All we have to do is walk!
His work is not finished.
Till we meet,
Elder Harris
Pictured is us enjoying some of the first sweater weather of the year and a five-minute rain shower, new Christmas lights, and my second picture with the Clark County fire department!
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