Banana Splittin'!

Good Afternoon!

Things are great here in the Bronx! This past week has certainly been an eventful one so I will spare you a boring intro talking about the weather and I will tell you about ten awesome experiences I have had this past week. Here we go:

1. On the way back from the Bronx zoo, I decided to try to contact this guy on the bus. Usually when I am with a big group of missionaries, I try to just spend time with them talking with them and use that as an excuse to not talk to people. Talking to this guy was okay- he seemed a little drunk or something. But after he got off, a couple stops down a girl actually started talking with me- I had probably the best bus/train contact I have ever had- talked about the restoration and committed her to read The Book of Mormon. The sisters went on a little after we got off, and they say that she had already started reading. Cool stuff happens when you do what God wants!

 2. Thursday- started working with a couple of less actives. Stephanie and Yoneiry are awesome- they love the bible and say that we don't talk about the bible enough at church. That is not too bad of a problem to work out, so I am looking forward to working with them. And Sister Burke- I actually met her while I was on a split with a Spanish elder that works in our area. She is solid- she is from Jamaica and has a great testimony and wants to come to church, but she works Saturday to Tuesday taking care of the elderly. As we add our faith to hers, and get the wards faith going as well, our prayers will be answered and she will get Sundays off.

3. For a few hours on Thursday, we went on a split with the assistants. I went with Elder Kerr- he is a great guy. We came out together, he was born on July 31, 1993 and his first name is Jeffrey. What are the odds? But he was my zone leader up in Newburgh- we are good buds so it was fun and uplifting. He reminded me that the best things that we can do as leaders are 1. Live worthily of the Holy Ghost 2. Love those we serve and 3. Teach true doctrine. Doing those three things, in that order will allow us to influence all around us for the better. Split number one this week was great!

4. split number two with Elder Porter. In my old area in concourse. It was sweet! That happened Friday, and it was cool but weird being back there. We visited my recent convert Rafael with his fellowshipping member, Sister Nuñez- that was he best! He is doing well and serving as a secretary in the Elders Quorum presidency and working on getting to the temple. I told him to get there before August, so hopefully I will get to go with him. We saw some other people that I worked with and that was good. Elder Porter is a good guy and I enjoyed getting to know him better.

5. On Saturday we had an activity on Fordham road (one of the busier roads in the Bronx) near the metro-north station (the train that takes us to Scarsdale and other places upstate). Basically what we did was drawn on the sidewalk with chalk "Because of Him" and then had people fill in what they felt came after that phrase. We used our iPads to show people that video (if you haven't seen it go look for it right now! It is called "Because of Him") and it was great! We talked to a lot of people and we got a lot of attention. It was really uplifting for me and everybody involved and I feel like we helped bring  a little bit of the Easter spirit to this part of the Bronx.

6. Sacrament meetings can be crazy in the Bronx. This week we had a drunk guy in there hootin and saying hallelujah and clapping and trying to play this metal flute that he made and tried to kiss Sister Newsome who tried to sit next to her. Sister Newsome is awesome though and that it was sad that they kicked him out because he really needed it. I wish I was more like sister Newsome. At the end, there was a misunderstanding and a really old guy was assisted up to the stand to give what we thought would be a closing prayer. It was a really weird mumbled testimony sort of thing, though, and nobody really knew what to do. We all just bowed our heads and looked up occasionally and them said amen at the end. Haha it seems like there were some other funny occurrences, but I can't remember them.

7. Sunday we went to Sister Ihrig's house for dinner. She made us real enchiladas de mole and they were pretty good! Sister Ihrig is awesome- she is an engineer and likes may and all that hooplah so we get along. It was a dinner with the whole district so we had a good time all ten of us. She has a good spirit in her home so it was an all around good experience.

8. Monday morning we had kind of a random training meeting before district meeting at the Columbus square chapel (the temple). All of the city missionaries were there and we talked about faith. President came away from a mission president's seminar and was fired up about it. He explained that we can anything when we have focused faith. We focus our faith as we set inspired goals and make plans to accomplish the goals. We can be accountable to one another as we talk about and focus on our goals, in our case, the goals being missionary work related. He gave us a goal to have 100 baptisms between now and the end of May, so we are going to be working on that! That is about twice as many as our mission has baptized in a month before, so it is a good challenge! That meeting fired us up though, and so we will see what happens!

9. Monday night we had dinner at bishop merkley's house. It is just him and his wife- they are younger with no kids. He lives up in Woodlawn and there are a bunch of Irish people up there- that was cool. But they have an awesome spirit in their home, fed us great food and we had a great gospel discussion. We challenged them to look for opportunities to exercise their faith, then take note of what happens when they exercise their faith. They agreed and that fired them up! It was a good experience, but then we missed the bus by like two minutes and the next one came like twenty minutes later and we had a couple of other complications so we got home at like 10:30... Haha it is crazy how long it takes to travel such a short distance. Anyways, we came out of it laughing so it was good.

10. Tuesday I went on a split with Elder Ross- he came out five weeks ago and is still on fire so we took advantage of it. Plus that faith talk from President had pumped us up, so we aimed big. We planned out like six lessons. Lots of people ended up not being there but we kept chugging and working. Even though things didn't work out, we realized that in the attempt to achieve our great goals we had a lot of great experiences. We met like three people on the street that we made retire appointments with and then we got a new investigator from Antigua (Caribbean Island) and a lot of other great thing happened. It was a good lesson for both of us and we both learned a lot. I love that fire!

11. During the day Tuesday, we ran into a couple of French speakers. One was a Haitian on the bus. She was friendly and I threw out what I knew and it opened her up. We gave her a card and knvited her to church. We will see if she comes to church! Then we met a French guy from France as we were doing church tours. He wasn't too interested, but had I had a couple of other hinges to say maybe it would have caught his attention a little more. It was a good opportunity to be accountable- I feel like that is why it has been a little easier to pick up languages is because those goals are easily accounted for when you are put on the spot and have to use it. That motivated me to keep learning, so we will see where I can go.

So yeah good week! Transfers next week- we will see what happens!
Thanks for all and have a good week!

-Elder Griffiths