Gosh! Freakin' Idiot!

"For lunch! Hahahaha!!"

I saw a picture this week of President Nelson holding a large sledgehammer in his 94+ year-old hands. The context of this photograph is that he was at what I believe was the 150th anniversary of the historic meeting of the two sides of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah. However, I take this picture as evidence that a man in his mid-nineties still has the vitality to swing a heavy bludgeoning implement, and therefore likely also still has it in him to continue living for at least six more decades. Just a random thought.

Now moving on to the happenings of this week and such...

We had a pretty solid week this time around. Unfortunately, our teaching pool is shrinking rapidly, those who we are teaching seem to be slipping away like sand through an hourglass. One of them is returning to China, and she will be coming back but in a month and a half. One of them seems to have simply dropped off of the face of the Earth, and is now nowhere to be found. One person that we were starting to teach is now moving to Los Angeles... Fun times, having all of your people poof away like this.

It's OK, though, because... We found a new person this week! It was pretty crazy. How it happened is a member of one of the English wards has an Airbnb host who is Chinese, and one time this member invited his host to church, and she said yes but it had to be a Mandarin-speaking church. Conveniently, our brach exists, so they were able to come two weeks ago. The member had said that he'd "keep in touch" with us about his host, and then never said anything, so we assumed that the lady wasn't interested. Until... This Wednesday we received a text from this member (his name is Ben) that said that he had talked to his host (named Amy) and she had agreed to have dinner with us and then have us teach her a quick lesson. So my companion and I gladly accepted this invitation of sorts, and, when Saturday evening rolled around, we went over to the appointment. Amy was super nice during dinner. She doesn’t speak a ton of English, so the conversation was mostly in Mandarin. At one point, she got up from her seat, opened the fridge, and handed us a cold bottle of Coors Light, apologizing that she, quote: "Only had one" (end quote). We graciously declined this particular beverage, as I'm sure the reader could have guessed. After we had finished the meal, we cleared off the table and taught a simple lesson. It went really well, and at the end Amy said her first prayer. This is literally the first time anyone has ever said a prayer the first time we invited them to do so, so it was pretty great. At the end she was literally asking Ben if she could come to church the next day (I don't know exactly why she was asking him, particularly) and she came again. Pretty spectacular, if you ask me.

Among other news, the temple open house started on Saturday. We took May up with one of our members, because it's the only time she will be able to go, since she's going to China and won't be back until after the open house concludes. We went up to get them situated and ready to go through the tour, and got them through all the areas where speaking English is important, and then we had to leave because we had other things to do that day. We texted them later and they said they had a great experience. 

There were several other things that happened when we were up on the hill. One, we saw this family who was apparently some sort of royalty. I'm not quite sure where they're from (my companion said that they might be from India, but I'm not certain), but they were wearing flowing gold-and-white robes of sorts, and there was one man wearing a golden (in appearance, at least) crown, and one lady who was wearing a HUGE crown-like thing on her head, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. There were also six or so slightly younger women who to me looked like they could've been concubines, but they may have just been sisters or something. 

The other thing that happened was as we were walking up the hill. We were walking past many people (The open house was fairly crowded on the first day). One person, a very old woman being pushed in a wheelchair, as she approached me asked, in a high-pitched, shakey voice: "Are you a missionary?" I responded in the positive to this inquiry, at which point her eyes started welling up with tears, and, her voice now even more shakey, says "Shake my hand, I love missionaries!"

Other than that, we just did a bunch more missionary work that I'm sure is too boring for busy people like yourselves to read. I suppose I'll just leave it at what I already have written, then, and give you all more time to live life.

So, yeah.

Bye, I guess.

-Ben "not the other one" Rivera

P.S. I forgot to tell you about how dinner went this Sunday. To give a little background, after church my companion and I were both super hungry, so we decided to fry up some corn tortillas and have tacos with some leftover ground beef that we had in the fridge. Well, we went a little overboard, eating around ten each. Therefore, when dinner rolled around, neither of us were hungry at all. But, the family brought us all out massive plates of food, with heaping portions of lasagna, ribs, and rice. We're both able to get it all down, but then they ask if we want more. I say that I'll take a little bit more, just to be polite. However, in their minds they must have only given us a little bit to start out with, because they come out with the exact same amount of food on the plates as was on them for the first portion. At this point, I'm literally having to force myself to eat, the food now nowhere near pleasant. After I get down the second plate, they announce that it's time for dessert. And they then bring out plates with a large slice of pie, a large piece of cheesecake, a huge brownie, and three scoops of ice cream. At this point I didn't know if I could do it, but, slowly and with a determination rarely seen but in the most pure-hearted of heroes, my companion and I were both able to finish our entire portions. Moving was not very fun for the rest of the evening. I am, as I write this this morning, still far from hungry.

P.P.S. It doesn't help that we had already made and eaten some brownies (we were making them for a member but we decided to make a few extra for ourselves) right before we went over there.

P.P.P.S. Hen Hao