Sound the Alarms

Another great week out here in Durham. Last Monday we went grocery shopping and I had $43 in my wallet and about $0.50 on my card. When I checked out my total came out to $43.33! Haha I had just enough so that was a pretty cool little miracle from this week.

This has been a suuuuper slow week tho. Elder Cook has been sick all week and it's been hard to get out the door and get things rolling everyday. But we did 33 hours of service this week which is insane. We worked with the American red cross and installed fire alarms in people's homes. We went door to door and asked people if we could test their detectors and install new ones. There were 70 teams total and our team was the smallest. It was just me, Elder Cook, and a man named Barry. Even though we had the smallest team we installed more than twice as many alarms than any other team in a total of about 20 homes. It was a lot of fun and the people were very appreciative. The craziest one was this guy Mr. Brown. He was walking in when we knocked on his door. We went in with him and inside the door there was a burning candle on the wooden stairs right under neath a broken smoke detector that was dangling hahaha.

We also helped some guy burn a ton of leaves which was so much fun because I haven't got to play with fire in awhile.

Things have been going good with the work here. We had a lesson with a lady, Naomi we've been teaching. She wants to be baptized she just has to quit smoking. We gave her the biggest pep talk ever and she hasn't smoked in a few days. We were going to set a date yesterday but our appointment fell through.

Also that lady with the twin boys, Kristen, that fell off the face of the earth for a month, we got in contact with her!! We've been trying to call and text her for a month and we finally got in contact with her through Facebook. She's going through a rough time but we are planning to meet with her this next Week.

Like I said Elder Cook has been sick and it's been hard to get out some days. We finally got out the other day and headed a few miles from our apartment. Well of course my chain popped off on my bike and snagged the derailer and broke it and it got caught in the wheel. So.....after a few minutes of struggling with it we determined it was broken and I threw it on my shoulders and walked 3 miles back to the apartment. We are now on foot and we have a massive area, so that kind of blows.

But sometimes that's just how it goes. We all have trials we go through and that's part of life. We wouldn't grow or learn if everything was easy all of the time. Nephi and his brothers failed to get the plates from Laban twice. It wasn't until the third time that Nephi was able to secure the plates. Nephi didn't complain once throughout the whole experience. He put his trust in the Lord and his timing. He went, and he did. When we fail we have to get back up and keep trying. When we put our trust in the Lord we will succeed.

Hope everything is going good back home! Love you all.

Elder Forrest

Before his bike broke