Las Vegas as it is meant to be: sweating on a bike in the 100 degree summer weather with my very attractive watch tan-line and collar tan-line in good development. I'm here enjoying my new area in North Las Vegas. We cover the area between Las Vegas Blvd and the I-15 above the strip. It is such an amazing place. Over half of the people you talk to out on the street speak Spanish, and stores, restaurants, and signs are about half Spanish as well. The streets are always busy and it is right in the 'hood' of Las Vegas. I love it a bunch. Back to some good old streets with broken glass. To picture what a lot of it looks like, imagine a lot of really small houses that all have a chain link fence and a gate in front with a terrifying dog inside. If you put all that in the hot desert, there we are. A lot of the scents and scenes remind me a little of El Salvador, so I am actually just really happy to be here!
My new companion is named Elder Buxton and is from Nebraska. He is super nice and has been out for a little less than a year. We live in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with another trio of missionaries, so it is pretty packed. We have two bunk beds with just enough room between them for a cot. I love all the guys we live with, though. They are a great, goofy crowd. We are all in bike areas, so our porch is loaded with bikes, and all the action is out on the streets, so we aren't inside very much anyway.
On transfer day, I said fare-well to Elder Gastelum. I will definitely miss working so closely with President and Sister Rodarte. I learned a lot from being around them. The new assistant is the only missionary in our mission who speaks Swahili, so he has spent his entire mission in a ward that has a large percentage of members that speak Swahili. He is one of the coolest guys ever. Now they combined that area with our old Spanish area. Elder Gastelum certainly doesn't speak any Swahili, and the new elder doesn't speak a word of Spanish, so they are in for an adventure.
Our other responsibility is managing the moderating for the ads we have on our Facebook pages for our Centro Hispano and all our English classes. There are about a dozen chapels that offer English classes, and one also has classes on family history, employment, emotional resilience, and lots of things like that. This Tuesday we will be there, and I believe there will be also some people from Congress coming to see what is happening with it.
So, we have been out on the streets trying to spread the good news of the gospel. There was one day this week where we talked to about 40 people, and nobody wanted to hear anything. I think this week I definitely had more rejection than I ever have had before on my mission, but on the other hand we also found more people to teach this week than I ever have before in this country. I suppose sometimes to get to a lot of good you go through some equally high hills of tough. When Elder McKay came to our mission, a big thing he talked about was that every time we talk to someone who rejects it, we can count it as a success because we got a prompting and followed through.
One hot day after several lessons fell through, we decided to pray specifically for guidance as we continued on our way. We talked to some more uninterested people, and then Elder Buxton felt like we should go down a certain street. We pedaled along and out of the corner of our eyes saw a couple sitting on their porch as we biked past. It would have been easy to keep going, but we decided to turn around. We asked them if we could pray with them, and they said sure and had us pull up some chairs! As we got to know them, the wife said, "It's interesting that we saw you today," and told us about some challenges her family has been going through. She said that her grandma was a member of the church and asked us some questions about John Smith and the tablets he found in the ground. This caused some confusion for her poor husband who thought that we were talking about the discovery of the iPad for a minute. But we got it straightened out and shared a scripture that seemed to bring them some peace. They applied it to their lives really well. They told us to come back and that they were open to learning, and when we did, they had three of their kids their too! They were between 13 and 17. There are relatively few times in my mission that I've taught a complete family before, so it was so much fun. They are so ready to hear the gospel. It was definitely an answer to that prayer.
We also met a man from the Philippines and had a cool conversation with him. He mentioned questions about why we are here and where we go when we die. We shared a scripture about the resurrection. He said, "Wow, the same body! Like the same face, the same hands, the same you? That would be cool!" Moments like that just make you so grateful to be a missionary.
Another cool little experience happened last week on my last Sunday in our English ward. The brother giving the Sunday School lesson mentioned a quote and said, "I was just on Zoom, but somebody said that in church a few weeks ago and it hit me like a ton of bricks!" It actually happened to be something I had said in a short testimony on fast Sunday. It made me really happy that something I didn't think really had any influence on anyone had stuck with this member. I think we often have moments like that in our lives, where people remember things we say or do. We don't always get to see it come back around, but it sure is amazing when you do.
'Til we meet,
Elder Harris
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