I'm Feeling Whammed!!

Bonjour.

As I'm flipping through my daily planner to help me recall the events of the week, I just thought I'd let you all know that I took the liberty of drawing a fruit, full color, on most of the pages in my planner this week. Banana, orange, pear, strawberry.

So, remember Alan? Well, he has three other brothers that are members of the Church. Recently, we've made some good headway with two of them, Jose and Daniel. Jose would never jamás listen to us. He's 17. Daniel is 12, and he'll always listen to us. He's a good kid. But anyway, with our new focus on the less-actives in the Branch, we are trying everything we can to get through to them. So we decided to try by these brothers with the Sister missionaries. And man, it was awesome! Jose normally would just blow us off and cuss at us if we invited him to listen to a message, but he wasn't about to do that to the Sisters! He still resisted, but in the end agreed to listen. We've had to lessons with them so far, and I think it's a good start. Alan didn't listen though. It's hard being 15.

Oh, I went on an exchange with Elder Donovan this week! It was good, but I was pretty much a solo missionary again. Él no spreken the Español. No earth-shattering lessons this time, though.

On Friday we had a lesson with the Moreno family. I can't remember if I told you or not... If I did, then it won't be big news. But Oscar and Patty got married! They had been together for about two years, and I guess they just decided to go down to the courthouse on Friday last week and tie the knot. That's a huge step, and it'll make teaching the law of chastity go a lot smoother! Anyway, we had a good lesson with them on Friday about the Spirit World. Then, we focused pretty hard on committing them to come to Church. We said we'd even come and wake them up on Sunday morning. Patty said, "Only if you make us pancakes!" And we agreed. She was kidding, but we weren't. We went over to their house on Sunday at 9:45 in the morning, and woke them up by knocking on the door. They told us Oscar was out buying donuts for breakfast. Whatever! We were there to make pancakes! They told us we didn't have to. And we sat and talked for a few minutes and encouraged them to go get ready for Church. When they didn't, I finally said, "Forget it! I'm making pancakes!" So I got up and went into their cupboards until I found the pancake mix and a bowl (they were cool with it), then I started mixing it up. Elder Baker was pretty confident in his batter mixing skills, so he took over that for me while I started grilling them up. We made them one at a time in a small skillet. I think they were pretty good! Everyone was impressed with my spatula-less flipping skills. I also scrambled up some eggs for them. Patty was pretty pleased, and said they would all come to church. Then we left. And they didn't come to church... But Patty texted during sacrament meeting and said that the girls were fighting, because one of them wanted to stay home and work on her homework, and the other one wanted to go, and... I don't know. I'm not a teenage girl. But they ended up not coming. I guess we'll have to bring bacon next time! That night we went back to their house and had another lesson on resurrection and judgement. It was good. Except that the one who had wanted to work on homework was working on her homework. But they've done a lot better about reading from the Book of Mormon! The two teenage daughters even read 1 Nephi 1 together and took notes on their questions!

We had another Branch Council meeting yesterday as well, and we're making good progress in our focus on the less-active members. If everyone participates sincerely, I think a lot of good could come from this effort. The goal is to have these people reactivated before April General Conference. They talked about taking a trip to Salt Lake as a Branch to attend a session! The plan is to have these currently less-active families participate in that trip. That sounds sweet to me! Man, I've never even been to General Conference... But that will be exciting for them!

Keep working hard and getting up early and keeping the commandments! Know that I love you all! The work is true! The Church is true!

Sincerely,
Elder Rogers

p.s. We've been going over to the members houses at 8pm to talk with them about helping the less-actives. I can't remember how it came up, but we were at the home of the Burr family and we started talking about the word "wham." Finally, Brother Burr (who is quite the character) said, "I'm feeling whammed!" I know it's not that funny to you; you had to be there. It was funny.