Hurricanes, WALKING and Prayers

8/11/14

Aloha Family!

That's exciting to hear all the updates! As for us. We're hanging in! As I'm sure you've heard We just recently went through TWO GIANT hurricanes here!!!! We're currently working on re-building houses and collecting fruit to try and survive. I actually almost died of starvation but thankfully a local minister who had been a bit of trouble before had a change of heart and gave me a jar of jam and I survived off of that and some bugs and.......Oh wait no... that's not my story... sorry. Yeah, they were both duds. :P haha! The first one hit on Friday and honestly I've seen MUCH bigger rain storms in Arizona alone! it was nothing, we just stayed in side and studied for a few hours than went out in the afternoon and kept doing what we do every day. Walking! :) haha! As for the second one it never even hit us! although I almost wish it did. We could have used the rain and cloud cover because it was HOT!! I'm still adjusting to the humidity and especially a couple days this last week have just been awful! Well... awful that is for Hawaii's standards. I guess it's still been pretty nice compared to Tempe. But anyway, enough about the lack of seasons over here! This week was pretty eventful as well aside from all the people frantically buying large cases of water, flashlights and boxes upon boxes of chocolate covered macadamia nuts in preparation for the storms that never hit.

As you might imagine the vast majority of our time has been spent exactly how it was spent last week. WALKING! haha! I wish I would have brought a pedometer or something cause we seriously walk a minimum of about 10 miles a DAY! and that's rounding down! It's rough. But it's all good! It's been nice getting to talk to people on the street (although with the whole hurricane scare the only people on the streets for the most part this weekend where the crazy homeless folk that live under the bridge by our pad, but they're still fun to talk to! :) haha). 

But enough blabbering. So this week we made a lot of visits to less-actives and such as usual but, probably the most exciting part was when we met S. :) So last Monday after p-day was over we were just visiting families in one of the many apartment complexes in our area and we were talking to this one member family and asked if they had any referrals and they did! They gave us two names, one was not interested at all but were still friendly, but the other we went by and visited that same night was S. He's a single father with kids. Anyway, we went over to his apartment and the door was open and well long story short he was VERY prepared by the Lord for us to meet him!! haha! The second he saw us it was like his face just lit up! He smiled and called us in and asked us what church we were from and all this stuff and he was just super excited about everything we had to say! We ended up teaching him a bit about the restoration and Book of Mormon and he was just super excited! He had been through some really rough stuff in his life and had been looking to change for quite a while but didn't know where to go or what to do and then we knocked on his door! :) Anyway, since then we've taught him two more lessons and he is making sure his oldest  (who is 10) is at all of them and wants his other kids there too but they're kind of harder to handle since they're quite a bit younger so they kind of just run around. Anyway, we're meeting with him again tonight and hope to put him on date to be baptized and also will hopefully get his oldest son on date as well! :) I'm super excited and so is he!

Well sorry if this e-mail was a little all over the place. I honestly haven't been feeling too well recently. I think it's a combination of all the walking, sun exposure, lack of a/c and humidity that's just totally draining me every day! :P That being said, it has only made my testimony stronger that Heavenly Father is watching out for us and that he has heard all of your prayers in our behalf and that he will not ask us to do anything we cannot do, because if I was trying to do everything we do in one day or one week by myself... well let's just say I would have been on a plane home a long time ago!! So thank you again for everything you do to support me out here! Thank you for your love and prayers and know that they are felt and that they do make a difference! Also know that I am praying for each of you every day and night!! Also thank you to all the family and members of the Relief Society for the notes!! I know it seems small and yet I cannot even begin express how incredibly important that was to me when it showed up. It had been a particularly rough day and I came home rather discouraged when our landlady handed me those two envelopes and well it turned everything around for me that week! :) I love you all! Hope you have a great week and of course don't forget to be awesome! :)

Mahalo!

-Elder Powell