Mountain Climbing

Today for a P-Day activity we hiked one of the "mountains" (they're like large hills) in our zone. It was really fun. It made me miss hiking in the cascades in Oregon. In Oregon when you go hiking, you're surrounded by trees, but in Arizona, you're surrounded by rocks and cactuses, which are pretty in their own right, but I think I like the trees and little rivers better. The rocky hills and cliffs reminded me of the place they'd always use for alien planets in Star Trek, like in the one episode where Captain Kirk has to fight the lizard guy by randomly making a cannon out of stuff just lying around. I think that place is called the Vasquez Rocks or something like that. The hike did a good job of reminding me that I'm a nerd.

We had a good week this week. We had a lot of people come to Church this Sunday, although it was Stake Conference, which isn't exactly the best Sunday to go for your first time. We're kind of worried one of our investigators didn't like it. We got a new stake president in the stake, so two seventies came down and helped to call the new stake president. The new stake president is pretty young. He's got a lot of kids under the age of 12. All of the members of the new presidency can speak Spanish, although none of them are hispanos.

This week one of our investigators got his answer to the Book of Mormon. It was pretty cool to see his progression. His name is Jose. He's about our age and is from Durango, Mexico. He's awesome and just seems to have been prepared for our message. He was in jail a while back for immigration and he said while he was there he prayed to know if God was there and he just felt a warm peaceful feeling helping him to know He was there. He said he felt similarly when he prayed about the Book of Mormon. He told us that because of his immigration issues he'll get deported in 6 months unless he can get married or work something else out. He's looking into joining the military. He's kinda strange for a kid our age in our area because he just seems to care about helping his mom instead of running around getting into trouble. We're pretty excited for him.

We finally got our conference issue of the Liahona. I'd been dying to read the talks. They're really great. Elder Bednar's talk has really helped to strengthen me in some of the areas I find difficult.

Love you all,

Elder Grasley