Monday, January 26 2015

what a crazy week! so we started the week with district meeting and then i started exchanges with our DL elder casillas and that was a lot of fun! we went to the church tuesday night to teach english class and when we got done with it we went to our bikes and someone bought us some marshmellow mateys and put them on our bikes and it was awesome! tender mercy from the lord. love when things like that happen! and then on wednesday we went to LSU for a thing called free speech alley, its basically a place where you have a whiteboard with a question on it and we answer the question for people that come by and want to know what we believe. but it was a nice break away from spanish work because we were on LSU campus so it was really just a bunch of college kids! on thursday we ended exchanges and elder joubert and i did weekly planing, nothing really important happened that day. but we did have a dinner appointment with a member on the branch and that was cool. he has a really extensive collection of elephant statues, and a sweet collection of really small dictionaries! like some are as small as my thumb! friday was a crazy day though! we went to go to try and meet with rojer because we havent heard from him since our first lesson with him. so we go to his appartment and knock his door and while we are waiting the owner of the complex drives up and we thought he was going to tell us that he didnt want us tracting here or something like that and he told us that rojet wasnt there anymore because he was deported back to honduras!! how crazy! haha so i take back everything i said last week about him being so promising! because hes not even in the same country anymore! but saturday is the crazy part about this week! so if you didnt hear about it on the news (i hear it was some big nation wide thing) there was this thing that the governer of LA called for. its called the response and it was a big prayer thing at the pete maravich center at LSU. it was where everyone can come and like sit in on prayers and stuff. but anways we were asked to be ushers for it. so when we got there the guys asked us if we could take our name tags off and president hansen would not say yes to that. so long story short they kicked us off of the volunteer squad but let us stay for the activity thing. so we went in and watched for liek an hour and it was the weirdest thing. it was just a rock concert and every now and then there would be a prayer so president hansen said we should leave. so we all left and when we walked out of the building there were just thousands of protesters outside in the parking lots and everywhere! they had riot police and k9 units and everything! it was crazy! total chaos! and here is the crazy part, if we were to still be ushers then we were actually assinged to work in the parking lots and tell people where to park! and im sure if we did that we would have all been beat to death! crazy thing. major tender mercy right there! then we went to stake confrence that night. it was fun but next sunday we have elder cook from the 12 coming to give us a special devotional about missionary work so that is going to be exciting to hear from him! talk to you guys next week love, elder horrocks

Tuesday, January 20 2015

this week was a really fast week. to start it off we had a great zone confrence! elder michael jonh Teh from the quorum of the 70 came and spoke to us, it was a really spiritual experience. he talked to us about how we can become exact obedient missionaries and about how we need to be guided by the spirit and always have an inspired question throught the day. so going into the meeting i was wondering how i can be as great a missionary as ammon and how i can use the spirit to discern what i actually need to say when teaching a lesson. and about one of the first things he said was that up untill the point when ammon was cutting off the arms and stuff we were all missionaries like ammon. he explained how ammon and the sons of mosiah had left everything to go teach the gospel, even though the sons of mosiah could have been kings and rulers over the land. he then asked us what we all left behind and, at least for me, i didnt give up being a ruler over the land but there definetley was some things i did not want to leave! but it was a really neat experience to see how i can relate myself to ammon. and after he explained how even after ammon got to the field he was offered to be a king over the land many times and instead of agreeing he was jsut like "no, i want to serve you" and i thought that was really cool. i know that i havent been out that long but i do beleive that everyone on their mission will be offered something that they would really want, and when that gets offered to me i want to have a reaction like ammon. funny story about where we live haha. elder joubert and i were doing weekly planning on thursday and every weekly planning we try and get something special like a treat or somethign like that. so this week we decided that we wanted to order a pizza from pizza hut. so we call the lady and she askes for out address and we said it was along blvd de province, and as soon as we said that the lady said sorry we dont deliver there after 3:30!! thats when you know you live in the ghetto. haha anyways on friday we had a really neat experience! so elder joubert had to give a talk on sunday and so we decided to go to the library to print out some talks about the plan of salvation to study, and we got there at like 5:30, and the library closed at six so all the computers were shut off. so that was a no go. so then we decided to just go knock some doors and say hi to the old investigators. and while we were knocking doors we met this guy from honduras (lots of people from honduras here) his name was Rojer. we told him at the door that since there is only one god there should only be one church and we was like super down for it. then he told us that he wanted to get baptized into our church and so we asked him if we can teach him. so he lets us in and we teach the restoration and he was believing everything we told him! we were talking about baptism by someone holding the proper authority of god and he was like, yeah if you arent baptised by someone holding the priesthood its just like you are only taking a bath! so the lesson goes great and everything was awesome and then we invited him to be baptized and he was like " I would love to, but i need to come to church and meet the members and learn more about your church" so that was a really neat experience and we had a lot of fun getting to know him. he was telling us about how he lives and he seriously lives like all the comandments. haha but saturday was a whole different day. after friday we were on like a missionary high haha, we went to bishop storehouse again and it was fun, then a lady from the denham springs stake shared us an experience about how here daughter is in mississipi getting lessons from the missionaries and so she thanked us all for the work that we do. basically the day was a good day until we had our lesson with walter and alma. i wouldnt say it was a bad lesson but it did not go the way we wanted it to go. so we get there and they made us food and it was pretty good, we had a good time talking while we eating. we then started the lesson and shared a video called "together forever" which is about marriage because we really need them to get married. so after the video was over we tried to commit them to get their marriage license and that didnt work haha. just so many excuses as to why they couldnt get married and elder joubert was just like "you guys have a child. thats the biggest reason as to why you guys should get married." so after that we just asked if they could pray about it and read the scriptures together. thats basically it nothing else really happened. i do like riding around baton rouge, so many nice cars haha. i cant go one day without seeing a new corvette now! ill talk to you guys next week, love you

Monday, January 12 2015

this week was a pretty fun one. we always have district meeting on tuesday and at the last district meeting we all shared one tender mercy that we noticed this week, so me and elder joubert were sharing about that honduran family and about how promising the mother was and how we are going to kill the next lesson we had with her. but throught the tender mercies we all just kept thinking of more and more and what was supposed to be a 1 hour meeting went to 2 and a half hours! it was so much fun! lots of tender mercies this week. one of them was that we were all out of money so we couldnt buy groceries, so we asked the senior office elders when we get money back in our cards and they told us they didnt know. so then we were sitting at the apartment planning and the senior offic elders text us and ask if we are going to be home at five and we say yes. so five comes around and they call us and we walk out and they went and bought us groceries! it was so nice of them! they got us a roticery chicken and we ate that that night haha. but then we got money the next day so we felt kind of bad. so the next day we had the lesson with the honduran lady whos name is elsy. anywasy it was about 20 degrees and raining and extremely windy and she lived about 6 miles away. so it took us forever to ride our bikes all they way there! and when we got there we were soaking wet and freezzing and knocked on the door and a little girl answered and basically told us that elsy didnt want to meet with us! so we didnt want to go home because we had a lesson with walter in two hours so we decided to try and knock some doors. so we went around and knocked on some door and no one was there. so we saw this mexican couple drive up and go inside so we went and knocked on their door liek five minutes later and they turned off all the lights and went super quiet. so elder joubert was like "its the missionaries!" and like 30 seconds later they said who? then we said the missionaries of the church. they then opened the door and said they were eating so we couldnt come in. basically we walked in the freezing, blowing, rain for two hours with no luck! then we had our lesson with walter and we tought him about how families can be eternal and stuff but it was lame because his girlfriend alma did not come and join the lesson (if i didnt mention who alma was, she is a return missionary who is inactive now. and they have a kid) so it was just walter and their daughter rochelle. other than that it was a great lesson! then walter came to church again by himself on sunday which is good for him but then that means that there is something up with alma now. that is basically it. oh and tomorrow we have a big confrence because one of the members of the 70 is coming. his name is elder teh, its going to be pretty cool from what i have heard about it. talk to you next week. love you elder horrocks

Monday, January 5 2015

This week went by super fast! We didn’t really do much until Thursday but Thursday night we went out finding and we met a family from Honduras and we told them how families can live together forever and they were really interested and we were able to teach them the first lesson and we are going back on Tuesday to teach them about the plan of salvation! We then on Saturday we did bishop storehouse at the church and that was a lot of fun but it was really hard work, then after that we were hanging out in the gym with the English elders and one of the English members comes up to us and asks if they can give him a blessing so my comp and I go with them. When they asked who wants to give it I had to because I was brand new. So I gave my first blessing out in the mission field to a guy that I’ve never met! Now we have church at 9 o’clock and sacrament first so we were sitting in the car making bets to see who would all show up to church and we all agreed that there would be 26 people there. Because President Hansen and his family were coming and the missionaries were going to be there. We predicted that there were going to be more investigators then members there! As we were getting ready the branch presidency comes in and 3 or 4 members come in and that was it for the members, then president and his family come in, then a family that Elders Casillas and Quist are teaching came and that family alone out numbers the people in the branch that came today haha. Then one of our investigators came who only comes because his girlfriend (who is a returned missionary) makes him come. But yesterday he walks in alone and his girlfriend had to do something else so he came alone! Then during testimony meeting all the branch members went up and shared some really strong testimonies and you could really feel the spirit strongly while we were there! so after that we had to go to a meeting with the branch president so we couldn’t go to priesthood, so we thought that Walter would have just skipped out on the rest, but when we got out the meeting we saw that he was there and that he stayed the full 3 hours! He is getting married on the 17th this month and so hopefully after that we can commit him to be baptized! But we were on lockdown a lot because of tornado warnings this week so we were inside a lot this week. But this was a great week. love you guys, talk to you next week

Monday, December 29 2014

Not much really happened this week since I talked to you guys. But after we got done with skype the missionaries in our district played killer bunnies and watched Up with the mission president! We then went to this family who just moved in and they made us dinner and hot chocolate which was a lot of fun! The day after Christmas was pretty rough because like no one was home or the appointments we had with people they all dropped because they had like crazy parties and just wanted to sleep. We went on companion exchanges this week and I was with Elder Quist for a day. Elder Quist is from Idaho and he is a pretty cool guy. He is really smart and he’s only been out for 3 months but his Spanish is already really good. This week though we had two lockdowns due to bad weather and they were pretty fun to watch all the rain and lightning! We were going to go shopping today but then we all realized we are out of money on out cards so we can’t go shopping until Saturday! That’s basically all for this week. Love you guys. Talk to you next week. elder horrocks

Monday, December 22 2014

The mission life is crazy! So the day after we got here I got to meet my trainer and he is pretty cool. His name is Elder Caleb Joubert and he is from San Diego but went to BYU. That night we went out tracting and had a dinner appointment (which apparently a rare thing in my area) but we had these really spicy tamales haha. But it really hasn’t rained at all since we got here. But there is supposed to be a big storm coming up tomorrow that might put us on lockdown in our apartment! This week’s email isn’t going to be super long because I left my journal at home so I can’t really remember what to talk about, plus I left my camera home as well. But I did have to give a little introduction talk yesterday at church and it went surprisingly well. Although I can’t understand what most of the people are saying most of the time I could still feel the spirit at church pretty strongly. When we got to the stake center my first day everyone was saying that my bike was sweet and that they were all jealous of my seat haha. Our apartment is pretty trashy though. Its’ funny, I got some Christmas lights at a white elephant in the mtc so I set them up around my bed, but I don’t have any pictures for it. Sorry this email is short I know you all were expecting something big but there was a lot that happened this week and I can’t remember any of it haha. But one of the APs went to Bingham with me! His name is Tyler White, I didn’t really talk to him but it was really neat to see him at the airport when he came to pick me up. This week has been a fun week though. Haven’t really been homesick because there is no time to think about it haha. but there is no other place that I would rather be right now. te amo mucho. hasta luego. elder horrocks