Azusa, California: Week 93

Wow, a lot of stuff happened this week! Easily one of the most eventful weeks of my mission. It's awesome.

So on Monday, we went to a place called Crumbl Cookie that opened a week ago. They have really big amazing cookies, and I guess places like that are really popular in Utah? But anyway, it's owned by members so they gave us some cookies for free.

On Tuesday, we did a big service project where we sorted and delivered boxes of food to various food pantry locations. Then a nice member took us out to a 50's themed burger place called Legends. We also went over to another member family's house for pancakes for dinner. 

On Wednesday, we did a Facebook activity with the whole zone. Elder Watson and I were the Facebook Finding Leaders this transfer, so we spent a lot of time trying to come up with something fun we could do to help the zone learn more about Facebook. Well, we ended up doing an Olympics style thing, where we put everyone into teams then had them compete in challenges of a relay race, cup flipping, and chair carrying (pics attached). And of course, we weaved in elements of commenting/posting on Facebook into the events as well so that it was a good training. It was a lot of fun and we even made medals for everyone. 

Thursday, we had a long meeting in Arcadia that took up most of the day. Then Friday, we did exchanges and I spent the day with an Elder from Florida named Elder Doolhoff. Saturday we did a giant zone-wide exchange for the evening and I got paired with Elder Doolhoff again. Then we all went to Dominos and Canes for dinner and waited until we got transfer news. 

Well, the transfer calls came in, and I'll be going back to Armenian work in Glendale! Woohoo! That'll be super fun, I can't wait to see how things have been since I left from there 10 months ago. 

And finally, here's a pretty crazy story from yesterday. There's a guy we're teaching named Israel, and we invited him to come to our church service, and he also invited us to come to his church. So we said sure! Why not? So he came to sacrament meeting at 9, then we headed over to Sandals church (a local non-denominational Christian church) for their service at 11. We got there, and everyone was really nice and welcoming. We were all dressed up in our suits so obviously everyone knew what church we're from. And there were about 40 people in the audience. 

Well, it started out with the band playing some awesome Christian music, then they turned on a tv to watch today's sermon, which was being broadcast from a different location. It was a good lesson on Romans 16 about greeting people, but then he mentioned a time when he met some Mormon missionaries, and he went on for a minute making jokes about Mormons and said that it's a cult. And we were just sitting there in the middle of everyone like uhhhh this is awkward. Hahaha it was kind of freaky! 

After the service, one of the leader guys came up to us and apologized. And it was fine, we weren't mad about it or anything. I think it's actually pretty funny that that happened on the one time we went to visit a different church. xD Definitely an experience that I will remember.

Anyway, have a fantastic week! 

Elder Clayton

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