Saturday, November 21, 2015

Time flies by when you don't have time to stop and think about anything

September 28, 2015

Hey everyone!! This week was a busy one which is good. Time flies by when you don't have time to stop and think about anything lol. I hope everything is going well for all of you in SLC.

Some crazy things happened this week in Granada hills!! First, this Sunday we had gospel doctrine class after sacrament meeting. I was still pretty new to the ward so we started off class by introducing ourselves and sharing a little fact about our life. Well it gets to our teacher, Brother Wyatt, and he said he was the director of Napoleon Dynamite!!! My companion and I flipped out! We started to quote funny lines from the movie and he would just burst out laughing! He was so excited that we knew the movie so well! Also, this week during knockout we went up into the hills which is the really nice neighborhood in our area. We knocked on a mans door and asked him if he would like to hear our message and he said no thanks but asked if we would like some soda. It was super hot as usual so obviously we accepted and he invited us in.  He showed us all his band memorabilia and talked to us for a while about our missions and why we were out here. Then I asked him where he got all of his stuff and he said he was a guitar player and member of the band Chicago.   Elder Anderson said it's pretty common to run into famous people here in the valley so I'll let you know if I meet anyone else!

I went on my first exchange this Friday. An exchange for those of you that don't know is when you switch companions for a day to get a little break from your area and experience mission work with a new companion. I exchanged to the Northridge area with Elder Bagly who is also from Utah (Seriously everyone in this mission is from Utah!) it ended up being a bike area...biking in 114 degree heat wearing dress pants and dress shoes is not fun at all! We rode to this one area of town that is known to be pretty sketchy and started knocking doors up and down streets. Half way into knockout we came to this one house with security cameras everywhere. It had flood lights on every corner and they were on in the middle of the day which was really weird to us. We started walking up the driveway and then we both just stopped. Something told me not to knock this door and Bagly felt the same impression. We skipped it and knocked on the next door. The neighbor answered and asked if we had knocked on the door of the house we had skipped and looked really worried. We said no and he said "Oh good don't knock on that house. It's a drug house". I don't know what would have happened if we knocked on that door but I know that the spirit did. I know we are protected out here so seriously don't worry about us!!

We had a ward cultural night yesterday which ended up being really cool! A bunch of ward members set up booths and talked about countries they either lived in or served their mission. We thought it would be funny to do a booth on Utah and hand out jello, so we did and everyone got a kick out of that! Some of the kids in the ward had never tried jello before which blew my mind! Their parents aren't raising them right!  Just kidding.
Sister Carpenter, from China, tried to get Anderson and I to try 100 year old duck egg. Oh man we ran for our lives!!! I guess it's a delicacy in China...but it sounds super gross to me!!

I learned a lot about faith this week. We often face trials in our lives that stretch our faith to the breaking point, but we have to always remember that God doesn't give us challenges he knows we won't be able to overcome. Our investigator Aaron has been having trouble with his faith that he can overcome smoking but we told him that every challenge we receive is for us to grow and learn from and that seemed to really help him.  I also learned that we need to have the faith to follow the promptings we receive...If we wouldn't have had faith during knockout who knows what would have happened.

I miss all of you so much and the distance never really gets easier but that's ok! I hope that you all enjoyed the blood moon last night like we did! Here are some pictures of my week for you to all enjoy!

Love you guys,

Elder Jensen

We had a ward cultural night yesterday which ended up being really cool! A bunch of ward members set up booths and talked about countries they either lived in or served their mission. We thought it would be funny to do a booth on Utah and hand out jello haha so we did and everyone got a kick out of that! Some of the kids in the ward had never tried jello before which blew my mind! Their parents aren't raising them right! Haha just kidding.