Called to Serve In Fort Lauderdale: LEMONADE!

Group picture with our friend working the counter

Hello everyone! So this week definitely went by much quicker than last week, and a couple cool things happened that I can talk about.

First off, TRANSFERS are TOMORROW! I will be STAYING in Naples. Elder Steed is going home, but both Elder Dick and Elder Spotts are TRANSFERRING! Meaning I'm the only one staying in the house... Elder Dick is going to the Creole ward in Boynton Beach and Elder Spotts is going DL in Alapatta. Taking their places will be my new companion ELDER BLOOD, as well as Elder Anderson and a new missionary in Naples English. Lots of changes, looks like I'll have to make sure I know everything about everything. I guess I just need to figure out how to mount a gps to a bike haha...

This week we also had Zone Conference, which was pretty fun. It went pretty long, but we got some good training about following the Spirit in all aspects of the work. I also got to see some of my friends from past areas again which was fun. The biggest news of the conference is that we will now be able to go to the temple 2 TIMES A YEAR! That's in addition to any time we go with our recent converts for baptisms or endowments. Pretty exciting!

I also went on exchanges with the ZLs this week, I went with Elder Webster in their area. It's a Spanish area, so I didn't really talk much the whole day haha. It was fun though and I got a good comp study from Elder Webster about staying positive and keeping the Spirit. A good thought that I liked from that is that we need to be transparent so that the Spirit can shine through us, and I took that to mean being yourself and not trying to make yourself into just a "missionary" if that makes sense.

The last cool thing from this week was that some of the Sisters in our district came up with an idea to set up a free lemonade stand in a park as a finding method. To be honest I was a little skeptical, but we all went and set up this lemonade stand. There were hardly any people at the park, and no one was coming over so we sent teams out to "recruit" people to come to the stand.

It was nearing the end of the time that we could stay when one of the teams comes back with a Haitian young man! His name is Jovensky, and he was super open to talking with us and coming to church. We set up a time to meet with him and he said he'd come to church too. When we went to his house, his cousin came out and told us that he didn't live there anymore (we thought she was lying, but turns out he gave us the wrong apartment number) so we decided to knock around his building. This was an area that had been knocked a lot, so we never went there the whole transfer.

As we're knocking doors, we run into the Sa[.....] family, a couple straight out of Haiti that we had met with a couple times but had dropped off the face of the earth because they didn't have a house or a car to get to church to meet. Turns out they're living with some family now in the same complex! It's still a hard situation since they still don't really have transport but at least we know where they live. And after all that, Jovensky actually came to church and loved it! Our return appointment fell through again, but he should be coming to the English class on Wednesday so that'll be good.

Moral of the story is that I can never make fun of the lemonade stand ever again hahaha.

That's pretty much it. Today marks 11 MONTHS as a missionary and the start of my 8TH TRANSFER in the field! Time's flying by, this is the transfer where I hit my year mark! [I think he's counting his time after the MTC, because it's already been a year since he became a missionary] I definitely don't feel like I've been out for that long. I'm going to do my best to finish off my first year strong, even if it means lots more biking haha. It's worth it. Love you all!

Thank you so much for your support! Here's lots of pictures!