Welcome to the Jungle

 

"Hanging out" (from Elder Slavens blog)

One day Elder Slavens and I were biking around looking for someone to contact in the city when Elder Slavens sees a guy on a bike and, like a lion after prey, determines to contact this guy. So I kind of bike with them while Elder Slavens talks to this guy, and I couldn't really hear much except for, "Yeah. Hey, can you guys come hang out at my house?" So we were like, "ight," and we just follow him from the city. It gets more and more jungly until we finally get to his house super far from the city. I knew he was totally drunk, but I was just rolling with it. So we get there and he shows us around back to his brother and nephew chilling in hammocks. 

Me and Elder Slavens: "Hey, how are you guys?" 
No answer.

So we just keep following this guy to the front of his house, and then we sit down with him and his brother.  They both had like maybe 6 or 7 fingers between them, and they just ask us all these questions about America--like how much a plane ticket to get there is and stuff. We were pretty fed up, so I was just like, 

Me: "We have special power. We can teach you a way of life where you can be happier. Do you want that?" 

Brothers: "Yeah yeah, but like all the girls in america are super hot right? They're all really white and stuff, right?" 
Me: "We teach about Jesus. Do you want to learn?" 
Brothers: "Oohhh, yeah, yeah. You teach half about Jesus and we teach half about Buddhism." 

I started talking about prayer for like 30 seconds.

Brothers: "Yeah, the people next door are Christian. You can go teach people over there. They're Christian, the people next door. They will listen to you, they're just right next door, they're christian, ya know?" 
Me: "Ok so back to prayer--" 

--and they would not let up just drunk talking about their christian neighbors, so I was done wasting my time and we just left. It wasn't really spiritual or anything. It was just interesting to see how insanely ignorant some people can be when it comes to the gospel. Satan's power is strong, so we need to carefully defend ourselves. 

We started teaching a man and his wife, though. Just recently we started meeting with him regularly. He has dreams of stuff we teach him all the time and sucks all our teaching in. When we leave, he's always telling us, "Is that it? I can learn a lot more," but we don't have time. It's super cool how prepared he is, BUT, he just won't come to church. Actually, he was on his way to church yesterday, but he saw some police and he didn't have a helmet on, or have mirrors (both against the law), so he turned around and went home, haha. That's a lot farther than he's made it before. His neighbor is helping us teach him, and his neighbor hadn't gone to church for like a year until yesterday, so it was really cool to see that come together. After church we went to the new investigator's house and had this neighbor help teach about going to church, reading, and praying. When we were talking about going to church, the neighbor bore his testimony and said how important church was and that even though he hadn't gone in forever, he was really happy that he went today. Some cool miracles. 

Also it rains everyday now, and we bike through the jungle while it's raining at night. I feel like I'm in a movie. Actually, even when it's not raining, the moon shines at night and the moon shadows of palm trees on the dirt paths I'm biking on remind me of how cool of a mission Cambodia really is. 

Love, 

Elder Hall