Monday, July 16, 2018

New Area - Greenville, South Carolina

This week flew by, I feel like I just emailed y'all and it's already Monday again. But a lot did happen, and so things are really flying past and days are so short now and all is happening so quickly and all that stuff. I wonder how it feels a year from now. Anyways...

Monday I can't remember much of what happened at the end of the day, oh I remember. We went to say goodbye to Jeff and we brought the Waldrops along with us. It was a good little visit.  Jeff seemed happy that we were able to come by and say goodbye to him. Then later we went to a less active members house who's husband has dementia and needed a blessing and did that, then we went to fhe with brother Livingston and sister Taylor. Then we said goodbye to them and that was that day.

Tuesday we had DC in the morning and did white wash notes after that. We then went to see Eddie Bledsoe our Baptist preacher friend. We made a lunch appointment for the following day. We then went to the library to do some stuff, said goodbye to some people - idk, it's all a blur.  I can't remember what was done. One thing that was cool is that I had a Daniel and the lions den experience, where we commited to knock on every door on a street. But one of the houses had a guard dog in the lawn with a shock collar on for the invisible fence. So we decided to go for it and right before we went up to the walkway, which just had to be like 100 ft long by the way, I looked at the dog that wanted to rip out our throats because of what we were wanting to do. And I commanded it to sit and it did and it stopped barking and just did this little head tilt thing. And I started to walk up on the walkway and got about 10 ft to the door until I was right next to the door, and then I let my pride get the best of me because I turned to my companion and said something like "wow look how good I am" and the dog immediately started to bark and get up and look very angry. Learned quite the lesson on humility and knowing when it is God's power, because I immediately repented and started to pray the hardest I ever had in my life. The dog didn't sit down again but it did walk away, and as we moved closer to the door, it would charge me only stopping a few inches from me and then walk away again. Well I wish I could tell you that when we got up to the door and knocked this guy answered and said "what my dog has killed everyone that has tried to knock on my door how did you do it" but no one answered the door, and we had to do the exact same thing over again when walking back. And then we had a cool spirit with us the rest of the night since we were able to exercise that much faith to not get killed and have a guardian angel with us. 

Wednesday was our last lt proselyting day in Newberry. We had lunch with Eddie, said goodbye to some people, went to mutual, and said goodbye to more people. And that was about it. 

Thursday was the day of transfers.  We left Newberry and made our way to the transfer building. There I saw everybody that I have known and found elder Powell.  Then I said goodbye to all 17 of the departing missionaries, and we went on our way to Greenville. Greenville is sick, it's so pretty here, there's actual hills, and there are so many Hispanics here. It's quite the promised land. We got to our apartment after getting lost quite a bit and started getting familiar with names of people that we had and all. Our calling here is pretty confusing. We cover the entire stake, but want to focus mostly on the Greenville 1st and 3rd wards as well as the simpsonville second ward. We are Spanish and English for the first couple of weeks and more when we need to help out the other elders in our area. We are supposed to focus on reactivating the members that used to make up the branch here. 
We seperated the Hispanic people from the non Hispanic people one night and there are 149 Hispanic members in the 1st ward alone. So we have quite the work cut out for us. Plus we have 2 progressing investigators of a part member family left here for us, and they are super cool, they took us out for tacos Friday night. They are pretty solid, the mom just has to get married to the member dad, but the dad is thinking of going to Mexico for a while to visit family and won't be here long enough to go through everything to get married. Saturday we went to a child baptism in our ward and met a lot of the members. The members here are really cool, a lot of them speak Spanish since they served missions in South America. We met our two strong hispanic families in the branch and they are super awesome to. Their testimonies are super strong and have offered to do all they can to help us reactivate the people on our list. We've tried to see a lot of the families on the list and have only had luck with one of them, and got a new investigator from it since it was a less active part member family. We did a bit of English work last night and drove through some really pretty parts of the country. 

Today we spent the day playing board games and such. 

Elder Bertoch

P.S.

This might be my favorite area so far and elder Powell is still super awesome. 


1. The house of the terrifying dog experience
2. Saw a cool golden eagle while driving. #mountainvistarepresent
3-6. Cool sunset with fields
7. Cool jungle forest. 




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