My week in a nutshell!!

Hello everyone!! I hope your week was good! Mine has been pretty awesome! Very interesting! So this week I'm just going to make things easy and break things down day by day. I've actually been a ton better at keeping my journal updated so I can actually remember things that happened! :)

Thursday:

We had an awesome lesson with Lina over at the Chinatown ward mission leader's house. He is a student at Columbia University so he lives right in our area. It was a good lesson about the Plan of Salvation that was taught pretty much all in Chinese. I just kinda sat there, smiled, and tried not to fall asleep haha. After that we went to Walter Rane's house for dinner (he is the famous painter that paints pictures of Christ and such...look him up! I'm sure that you'll recognize his paintings! They're in pretty much all of the chapels around the world.) And then we had ANOTHER dinner at these ridiculously crazy cousins' house hahaha. They are just...crazy. I can't even explain them haha

Friday: 

Was pretty normal. We went on an APF (a finding activity where everyone in the zone works in one companionships area for like 2 hours) and we went and looked up this less active but he wasn't there, so we went tracting and found a few more potential investigators! I still love tracting the most. No one believes me that I love tracting so much but I really do! Tracting is where all of the interesting stories happen ;)

Saturday: 

Was crazy....... Elder Hincapie (the Elder that I live with) has been having a lot of troubles lately. Some of them started becoming way too far out there and started to REALLY affect the rest of us. I won't go into any details just so I don't give away any sensitive information. But anyway, he got ET'ed (emergency transferred) to another area and we got another elder to come in and be companions with Elder Wilkins (Elder Hincapie's original companion). We then went to Silvia's Restaurant (this pretty famous soul-food restaurant here in Harlem) for dinner to celebrate one of the elders's birthdays.

Sunday: 

Was pretty normal. Because church starts at 1:00 for us, when we get out the day is already pretty much over. After talking to members for a little while, we just went over to a members house for dinner.

Monday: 

We had an awesome district meeting and then ate lunch together as a zone. After that we went and saw Bernie (a less active we are working with), and then tried to see another less active but we weren't able to, so we saw another less active and her son! Haha (if you didn't guess already...we have a lot of less actives)

Tuesday: 

We started out at the church and then left to go see a person we ran into tracting the other day, but ended up seeing someone we had run into on the subway a few weeks ago, so we just rode the subway with them until they got off so we could talk with him. Then we rode the subway back up to the church and had an AWESOME lesson with Lina. She is so cool! We taught her most of the Plan of Salvation that we never got to the other day and it was really cool! She kept saying, "I really like that I can continue after the physical death". After the lesson, we invited her to be baptized and she said that she would...but that she doesn't want to say yes until she feels like she knows everything she needs to and she feels like she's ready. That's totally fine because we'd rather have her say that than just say yes to say yes and then go less active in a month haha. But yeah, she's doing super good.

Other than that, I'm doing pretty good! Things with Elder Wang are...okay. He really really misses Chinatown...and it's starting to affect our relationship and his relationship with the zone. He's been kind of rude to everyone because he thinks that he's one of the "special" Chinese-speaking missionaries and so he's just going to leave us all in a cycle or two and go back to "where he's supposed to be" as he would say. He's just not putting his heart into the work here really... It's super sad but I wish that he'd at least try and act like he's interested in the work here. He never really asks me any questions about the people that we're working with; he just goes from appointment to appointment and let's me do all the work. It's fine, though...it's just how it goes. Other than that, I'm loving my zone and I'm loving serving here in Harlem! The people here are great and it's been so nice to be out in the warm sun we've gotten the last few days!

I love you all so much and I can't wait to see you in like than 15 months! (Yikes!) have an awesome day!! :)

-Elder Stafford