Elder Tanner Rogers: Won't You Shake A Poor Sinner's Hand?

Howdy,

It's been a pretty good week. The weird thing that happened this week was definitely on Monday. A guy called us and told us that we needed to come and visit with him that day. We were pretty excited because that doesn't happen very often. When we showed up he told us that he had signed up for some witchcraft thing through the radio. He said that the guy said that he would do a cleansing on him, but it turned out that the witchdoctor guy said that he was bewitched and that he only had one year left to live. Apparently, someone down in Mexico has a voodoo doll of him and is going to kill his life in a year unless he pays 30k to the witch doctor who will then "give it to the Catholic church". The witch doctor apologized but then told him that if he drank some magic potion he could maybe be saved. It didn't work, but then he started throwing up some weird bugs. It was a weird situation. We told him that if he came to church it would get better. It was definitely weird. We think he's just being scammed but he sure was worried about it. After that, he gave us some nice soup and some tostadas that were really good.

We found out on Tuesday that our Elder's quorum president is quitting so that was a bummer. He and his family decided they were jumping ship from the branch and are going to go to an English ward. He said he was going to tell the branch president, but apparently, he didn't because we all showed up at church and nobody knew what was happening for our Elders Quorum meeting. It ended up working out well and we had a nice discussion tailored to the needs of the other Elder's friend named Daniel, but the branch president was pretty upset.

Other highlights include getting sick, having a really fun English class, getting poured on, and running completely out of food leaving us nothing but white rice with soy sauce for dinner on Sunday. All in all, it was a pretty great week.

I really enjoyed this quote about our growing faith and testimony this week: "Belief and testimony and faith are not passive principles. They do not just happen to us. Belief is something we choose—we hope for it, we work for it, and we sacrifice for it. We will not accidentally come to believe in the Savior and His gospel any more than we will accidentally pray or pay tithing. We actively choose to believe, just like we choose to keep other commandments." It takes work to have faith and follow the Savior. Sometimes we have to dig deep into our spiritual wells to find the strength we need, but when we dig a little deeper then we'll know that Christ lives, that He has a plan for us, and that it will all work out in the end.

Keep Striving,

Élderito Rogers

Pictures are of:

1. A Little Caesars man that I drew

2. We got dumped on

3. Random picture we took in our apartment

4. Random picture we took in our apartment

5. Me in front of the flag