Testified and Taught

Sorry that I'm emailing early this week. We're going up to Julian to do a mine tour, and we have to do our emailing early. Plus, Elder M hasn't had any time at all up to this point to email, so I'm going to make this short this week so that he has time to write.

This week was a pretty good one as far as things go with service. We weren't able to have many lessons this week, but we've fixed a couple of cars, and tomorrow, Elder M is going to tear into an engine that he's really familiar with, so he's pretty excited. We fixed a couple of cars yesterday, and tonight we're repairing a radio in a less-active's car. We had interviews with President yesterday, and it went really well. He mostly just asked us about who we were and what we felt our strengths were. I simply said that the Book of Mormon is my strong point since it pretty much carries the proof of the restored church.

On that point, last night, we FINALLY were able to meet with V. We walked in, and he first said that from what he understood, the Catholic doctrine and our doctrine is pretty much the same. (He still hasn't read the Book of Mormon hardly at all.) We shut that down, and taught the end of the Plan of Salvation to clear up what he misunderstood. After that, he really didn't listen much to what we were saying, and instead tried to pull us down. He pulled out his version of the Bible, the "Vida Plena" or the "Plain Life" version of the Bible, and when we tried to teach the three kingdoms of glory, he didn't believe us, because it wasn't found in his Bible. We tried to teach the apostasy again, about how the Bible was translated and picked apart by men, and he said that if you can't trust the Bible, what can you trust? We said you can trust God, and you can know if He's restored His church through prayer. We once again turned to the Book of Mormon, taught of its importance, and testified that it was true. He said it was interesting, but didn't really seem convinced at all. We didn't sleep very well last night, so we're pretty tired today.

Yesterday we were working on a car over in a complex in our area, and as we worked on it, I noticed a big plume of black smoke going up a block behind one of the buildings. The fire got very large, and the smoke was everywhere and black. Instead of firetrucks being the first on the scene, it was firefighting planes that flew in first. They had one circling way up high, a second plane circling lower and dumping fire retardant, and a helicopter that was right above the fire. They got it put out REALLY fast, since Ramona is on a huge wildfire watch right now because of the drought. Turns out that a small junk yard had caught fire and gotten out of hand. It was pretty neat.

Have a great week everyone!

-Love, Elder Crook