Hello! First off, THANK YOU FOR THE AMAZING BIRTHDAY PACKAGE Elder Noall was a little bit jealous of all the letters and things I got this week. But really the package was amazing! Those caramel apple milky ways were sooo good! I have to ration them or else I will get fatter. Since we can only write letters on Pday, I felt bad not being able to write thank yous to people for their letters. I am going to write a lot of those today but really the package (and chic fil a gift card) were perfect!
The big 19 is here now. I guess if the mission age hadn't have changed, I would probably be leaving about now. That is so weird to think. I'm glad I am out now, I don't think I'd want to be just starting out again haha. And not to mention next week I will hit my 3 month mark! That's crazy! I've been writing in my journal everyday and it is so weird to see where I was just a couple of months ago.
It's good to hear about tennis! One potential investigator we have plays tennis. He always has racquets and tennis balls in the back of his truck, and it makes me want to play real bad! I know I am super rusty and It makes me sad to think it's been since I've played! Hallie needs to enjoy it because I thought I had all the time left to play but nope I'm on a mission now hopefully soon I'll run into a member who plays and I'll get some time in.
I'll give you my week and some fun things you can say in sacrament meeting for home:
Louisiana continues to treat me right! My experiences with Cajun (pronounced cage-un. It is the name for he locals who have their roots that go way back) food continues to grow! The three big Cajun meals you can have down here are gumbo, boudin (pronounced boo-dan) and jumbaliyah (Jum-bill-eye-yah. I think that's how you spell it?) and I've only had the pleasure to eat gumbo and boudin so far. When I come back I'm going to be starved of good sausage because down here, they do it right! I will bring home some Tony Chacharie's (pronounced Sach-aries. They have a lot of French root words!) seasoning too, that is a must have!
One thing we joke around with are:
1. Down here is a lot like home: it's hot and there is a church on every corner. The difference is the heat is humidity and all the churches are different!
It's a lot like when we read with Joseph Smith that there was a church on every corner and they all read out off the same book (the bible) and can't get along. But they can all relate to us because they are pieces of the whole truth that we are.
One thing I've also noticed is that people down here love to discuss religion (mostly Jesus). We had a super neat contact this week: we were about to knock on a door when he stopped us. After talking, we found out he thought we were Jehovah witnesses and came to bible bash! But when he found out we were Mormons he was super interested and started asking questions. He asked us, "how do yall get to heaven?" And I replied "the way back is only through Jesus Christ" he was all like "THATS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!" And he started high-five ing us and gettin real pumped on Jesus. The people down here love to discuss religion. We talked about the Book of Mormon with him and he totally understood the second witness thing. He wanted us to come back and teach some more. Days where we run into people like him make my mission seem easy. And it makes it easy to get pumped on the gospel.
On a little more serious note, we had interview training this week! The Drakes came down to our zone and taught a little bit. Sister Drake gave a great talk on the "Mormon glow". She spoke about what it is (Matt. 5) and discussed how we get one and why it matters. She shared a very interesting piece of information. Apparently a psychologist wanted to test out this "Mormon glow thing", so he set up an experiment where people at the local college were given head shots of people and they had to decide if they were LDS or not. Surprisingly, they were able to identify a LDS member 60% of the time if they were a non-member. If the person doing the test was LDS, they could pick out another member 70% of the time. I thought this was so cool!
And then to share another great thing: I had a day where I beat my previous record of Book of Mormons passed out. We gave out SEVEN one day! It was awesome!
Hope you guys have a great week!
Love,
Elder Blackburn
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