Hill Bros Missions

11/4/13 - Jordon

¡Hola Familia! ¿Cómo están? Everything here is going alright. Some interesting things have happened here this past week.

First off, Happy Birthday, Mom!!!! It sounds like you had a wonderful birthday. In answer to your question about wearing slippers, if you recall, you use to wear my Scooby-Doo slippers all the time once I out grew them. hehe.

Next, Happy Birthday, DJ!!!! 27? Wow, that's odd to think of. Granted, it's hard to think that I'm almost 23, as well. Time is flying past.

Ok, now for what happened here.

On Thursday, we all gathered together for a special Mission Conference. (I think it was to help keep us off the streets for Halloween.

) There we received a DVD with some videos. Using the videos, we have prepared a 15 minute presentation about the temple. The purpose of the 15 minute presentation is to help prepare people for the temple open house. When our members invite their friends and family to go to the open house, if the answer is yes, they then are supposed to invite them to see a 15 minute presentation about the temple to learn a bit before they go. The reason I'm stressing 15 minutes is because President Nattress made us promise that it would be no longer than that, and that he had already promised several of the local leaders that it would be no longer than that too. But, most people won't be opposed to just 15 minutes of their time, so it's important for us to stress it and for our members to stress it in their invitations. It's pretty cool.

There are four videos incuded on the DVD:

http://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2010-05-1210-why-mormons-build-temples?lang=eng

http://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2009-03-10-the-blessings-of-the-temple?lang=eng

http://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2012-01-002-temples-are-a-beacon?lang=eng

http://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2009-02-07-are-we-christians?lang=eng

We'll only use one of them in the presentation as the spirit directs. I'm excited to start sharing this with people.

Guess what happened on Friday...I gave my first Baptismal interview. But, you know, I have a history with firsts. Whenever I have a first, there are usually complications involved. The candidate for my first baptismal interview was a little old hispanic lady who is hard of hearing. ugh! Complications:

1. She doesn't know any English. I've been in English work for two transfers. So, my Spanish is perhaps a little rusty. I'm fairly certain I was speaking correctly though. I could understand most of what she was saying too.

2. She was hard of of hearing. So, even if I was speaking correctly, she couldn't hear me. Thankfully, the Sister Missionaries wrote out the questions for her before the interview. She took it out and was reading along as I asked the questions.

3. Yes, she had the questions written out, but the Sisters failed to write down question 4. The written questions were supposed to be so she could review them before the interview. They said that when they went over the questions with her she had no problem with that question, so they decided to skip it. hehe. So, I had to somehow explain that she was missing a question. Eventually, I just had her read it from my list of questions.

4. She apparently haa some form of alzheimer's. So, she doesn't retain infromation much. So, she required a little bit of prompting for what some things meant.

We managed to get through it alright, and I felt that she was ready for baptism. Yay!

The next day, I gave another Baptismal interview. This one was in English, and went a lot smoother than the first one.

On Saturday, our stake had a Family Search activity open to the public. It was AWESOME!!! It was called the Ellis Island Experience. Everyone running the event, was dressed up and everything was decorated like Ellis Island back in the day. There was a Statue of Liberty stationed in the middle of the room. I got a picture with it. (See below.) There were also a ton of laptops set up for people to learn about FamilySearch.com, findagrave.com, and Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com even donated 100 accounts to be used during the day. It was a lot of fun.