Yesterday was blazingly hot. We had to ride our bikes home in the heat after Church and since it was fast Sunday we hadn't eaten since the day before. We just about died. Apparently when it gets really hot here the wind feels hot. It's like a blow dryer in your face.
We had a really good week this week. We've been finding some cool people and we have three people with a baptismal date right now. One of them, Jose, is awesome. He's about our age and is super solid. He was in jail a while back for immigration problems and everyone in the jail was listening to different preachers who would come in to the jail. One night he got fed up with all the confusion and prayed to God that he would give him the truth. That's when someone in jail gave him a Book of Mormon. He's just a super nice guy. He works to support his mom and he is constantly trying to help her out. We're pretty excited for him.
We also did a service project this week where we helped clean up some of the alleys in the neighborhood around the Church. Alleys are gross. They are definitely not a part of good city planning. You might as well just put a big sign up outside of them that says, "Fill me with your grossest garbage and graffiti. I don't care. I'm an alley. I'm already gross." So we went there with the boy scouts from our ward and they painted the graffiti while we cleaned up the trash. It wasn't fun, but it looked good when we finish. We helped to clean an alley behind the Buddhist temple close to our Church and we got to look inside the temple for a couple of minutes. They had some pretty awesome statues. Lots of fat Buddhas and mean looking guys with swords.
My Spanish is coming along really well. I feel like I've hit a new level in my fluency. I can speak pretty fast now and I feel like my accent's improving. I think the biggest difference might be that I don't really have to think about grammar forms anymore. My brain just kinda knows them. It's nice because it makes teaching and communicating a lot easier when I'm not devoting part of my attention to how to say what I want to say. Still, I'm definitely not all the way there yet. When people talk about things that aren't the Gospel I still can get a little lost.
We got a new ward mission leader this week. His name is Moises. He's in his late twenties or so. He's a really great guy. He told us he normally only gets a few hours of sleep everyday because he works nights as a medical dispatcher and then he comes home and helps his wife with his daughter. He said that when you have that responsibility to care for your family and everything that you just find the strength somewhere in you to do it. I've felt like that at times on the mission, that I just find the strength to keep going because I have a responsibility, even if I feel completely worn out. The mission really is great preparation for later in life.
Love,
Elder Grasley
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