Week 5 & Star Wars

I will start with star wars because it happened first.

We got permission to go from the president because it is not in our area and might not be in our mission. We left at 11:30 and arrived about 12:15. For the first while no one was there. We/I bought the tickets and we went in. It was so amazingly geeky. I felt like such a looser because I knew exactly what everything was before reading the captions and I was able to tell at what part in what episodes everything was from. They had a bunch of cool stuff. Including; the space ship that Anacin flies in the space battle at the beginning of episode III, the flying car that Anacin steals in episode II when they are chasing the bounty hunter, the original Darth Vader Suit and the platform that he steps off of in episode III with his famous "NNOOOO!," also they had every light saber in the films (All except Yoda's because his is only animated), and the costumes of Chewbacca and Han Solo and Princess Leah, and many models of different spaceships and different vehicles. I also felt geeky when I could name almost all of them. I didn't know the names of a few of the clone vehicles. So I was basically in geek heaven. I took a lot of pictures and got in a little trouble for taking a video of the exhibit. I understand why they don't want you to make videos but at the time I hadn't thought it all the way through. They had the actual filming model of the Millennium Falcon and a few other ships from the original films. They also had several clips of the making of where they show the different steps from the green screen to the actual film. And one of them was the light saber duel between Anacin and Obi-Won in episode III. It took a little of the magic out of it to see them practicing the choreography (sp?). My favorite picture that I took was me out side the exposition making the startreck live-long and prosper sign with my hand. Don't worry Dad, I know its from the wrong show.

The rest I will explain with my pictures. Ill send them in small bunches in different emails.

Now this week, It was very good but also very disappointing. First of all we had 3 baptisms set up. This is our first week with a baptism in over a month. Thursday morning everything looked good for the baptisms but then everything went crazy. On Thursday Michelle (one of our planned baptisms) and her husband got in a fight about her joining the church. Her mother in law Odette (also one of our planned baptisms) felt obligated to take her son's side in the argument and didn't want to get baptized. So then we ended up only having 2 baptisms planned for Saturday. But two is not bad at all. We had the interview for Michelle and Igor (also one of our planned baptisms). But Igor wasn't at his house on Friday. So we then had just Michelle, but then we called Igor and he said we could do the interview at 2:00 (the baptism was planned for 5:00). We had the interview at 2:00 and everything looked good for the baptism. After the interview we had one other lesson and then went to the chapel to get things ready for the baptism. Some time in the two hours between the end of the interview and the baptism Igor decided not to come and at 5:15 we called him and he was about an hour away with friends and said he had some doubts and wanted to talk to us on Monday. So we ended up only having one out of the planned three baptisms. But the good news is that Michelle's husband was there at the baptism and that he now doesn't have any problems with her being in the church and wants to hear more about the church. So that is good, though Odette still doesn't want to be baptized. I don't know why.

Now I will explain about Monday. The day was crazy. First of all our lunch fell through, we called ahead of time and the husband said that his wife had given money to Ana Gomes (she coordinates our lunches) for our lunch. So we called Ana Gomes, she said she had recieved no money. So we tried to call them back but there was no answer and we went to there house and no one was there. So I ended up paying for lunch. Then we had our appointment with Igor. It did not go well. Elder Ramos went into attack mode and not much of anything got accomplished. He said that he believed that our church was true but thought that other churches were true also. He thinks that there couldn't only be one true church. Infact he thought that churches aren't nessessary, that only the bible matters. His arguements were completely illogical and completely unscriptural. He basically thinks that any Christian church that isnt Catholic is correct. He REALLY doesn't like the Catholics. His three big problems were: 1 He thinks Authority is given through desire, that anyone that wants to baptize has the right to baptize; 2 He doesn't believe that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joeseph Smith (I don't see how he thinks our church is true if its founding prophet was a liar); and 3 that the bible is more important then prophets revelation and inspiration, that the bible is all that we need for salvation (what is the bible but inspiration and couldn't an inspired prophet give us the bible over again if needed)

So that went badly we accomplished nothing.

I have to cut it off there so I have time to send some pictures.

Elder Reed Risenmay