Week 58: "Just man up a little."

July 21, 2014

I am super grateful that we don't have to worry about the cold weather anymore, but I'm pretty sure that we're currently being hit by a heat wave. Real talk. It's been 30+ degrees Celsius pretty much all week...we're being roasted. Also, most European homes don't have air conditioning, so our house (in addition to the church building and all members/investigators homes) has become, thanks to the humidity, a sauna. It's great. I haven't sweat this much for quite some time... Just one of the side effects of summertime. Which really is my favorite.

One benefit to having a car is that we get air conditioning in the car. One downside to the air conditioning in our car is that it only works on the highest setting... So, our car is usually either burning with hot humidity, or we're freezing with cold air blasting our faces. It's a rough life, having a car and not biking around the city in the heat...

Things are going so well here in Eindhoven. We've done some good work this past week and have been really busy. We haven't really found any new investigators, which is too bad, but the people we do have are going places. We really do have some great investigators here. Sometimes, though, it's pretty obvious that the trials come as they try to improve their lives. A small example --

Our Sudanese investigator, Genzeer, has made great progress. We visit him for a little bit about every other day to teach and talk. He has a testimony and really wants to be baptized. After talking to him on Saturday, he told us that he'd be coming to church on Sunday. He was excited. He'd been to church before, so it wasn't way new for him. On Sunday morning, after getting to church, Elder Alston and I wait...no Genzeer. We go out into the hall and call him right before church starts. No answer. Halfway through church, we give him another call...no answer. Gospel principles class starts (our other way positive investigator, who decided she was finally ready for baptism, was there, by the way!), and we give him another call. No answer. I didn't know what to think. At 12:15, though, we're working out the details of the baptismal service for the other investigator and talking to her, and the phone starts ringing -- it's Genzeer. I go out into the hall to pick up. "I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry!" It turns out, Genzeer had locked himself outside of his apartment on Saturday night, and they came to unlock his apartment for him at 12:15. In his apartment was his phone and all his stuff -- he had to spend the night at a friend's place. That's why he wasn't at church. What a great guy. Elder Alston and I had a good laugh over that.

I got to work with my MTC companion, Elder Price, for the first time since coming to the land almost a year ago! He's serving in Tilburg, a city in the zone. I got to work with him in Tilburg. He's definitely his own person, but he's a great missionary. It was great to reflect together on how far we both had come. And he has got some faith and courage! We were working together, and he called a group of punk teenagers to REPENTANCE. Seriously. He walked up to six smoking, laughing teenagers, and started preaching. I think I wet my pants, I was so uncomfortable. We ended up giving a card to one of the kids and leaving. What a guy. It was good to work with him again. And we tore it up -- we found five potential investigators together, taught two new investigators, and it was pretty much a day of miracles.

One of our investigators invited us and a member to come eat dinner with her the other day. She is super cool -- a real home girl. For real though. She's from Ivory Coast in Africa, and she has lived in the Netherlands for about twelve years. She made us some super tasty African food. She offered us some homemade pepper sauce stuff, but she wasn't sure if us white boys could handle it. Please, girl. Actually, I kind of said something that implied that I wasn't sure if I could handle it... Then she told me to man up. A challenge to my manliness? Of course I had to try it. For any of you that know me well, though, you know that spicy food gives me the hiccups. I got some pretty serious hiccups. But, it was way lekker. Way delicious. I hadn't had rice like that since I lived in Africa.

Saturday was a crazy day -- we got hit by a car and did some graffiti. Really though. I don't want to talk about the car accident (totally their fault), but the graffiti was pretty great. Eindhoven has crazy professional graffiti all over the place -- legally done. Our ward mission leader had the idea of us doing a graffiti project. It was great -- people can be exposed to it. But, we aren't exactly professional graffiti artists, and the professional graffiti artist who is a member who we'd wanted to help us couldn't, so we went ahead and did it. I was glad we did, but compared to the other graffiti, our artwork looked like a four year old had painted on a wall in the Louvre. Did I just say that out loud? Oops.

Keep calm and take a cold shower, you'll make it through the night.

--Elder Bonney

Just hanging out with someone with muscles like me. Kidding...

Without a ladder, we got creative. I was on Elder Nelson's shoulders for the high parts. Pro graffiti artists right there.