Él Día de Las Brujas

With Elder Ross, a recent RM from Brazil. He served in the same mission
as Mitch Rogers. (Elder Alley's friend from home.)

So the Ross family made this giant statue to welcome their son home from his
mission. I'm expecting something of at LEAST this caliber when I get back.
Otherwise, I'm getting in the car and driving myself back to the airport. 

This is next series of photos were taken at interviews courtesy of Sis. Ross 

This is Pres. Pratt. He was the CCM president when I was there. He lives in the
stake I'm serving in. We chatted it up in Spanish. #CCMmemories

Mission Office shenanigans

On Monday, we participated in a pumpkin carving activity at a neighborhood
pot luck. Now you may be asking, "Elder Alley, why did you just carve a giant
hole in your pumpkin?" Well, to the artistically uninclined it may look that way. But
any true artist will recognize that I made a reflective, thought provoking modern
art piece. When you look at my pumpkin you see what you want to see. You
might see the Statue of Liberty formed from the guts still inside or you might
see emptiness and hollowness that represent the lack of depth in our current
generation. You're right both times. And that's called art.

Great thing about living with members: pets! This is my buddy, Buddy.

Well I hope every one just had the most spooktacular Halloween ever! They take it pretty serious down here in Vegas. For me it's always just been another stepping stone to Christmas :), but for sure this last week was a good one!

The family we found on Sacrifice Saturday is doing well. They all really want to take their time and spend a while investigating before they make any decision. However, the 12 year old son is super into it and came to church with us. His parents said if he wants to get baptized that they're totally fine with that and he said he does! So we are going to be working with him now. 

We fasted on Sunday to find someone who is searching for the truth. The family who has us over for dinner that night invited their friend to come eat as well. We ended up teaching their friend the first lesson right after dinner and he accepted a baptismal date! It was cool because we got in the car afterwards and we were talking about how golden he was because he was actually searching for answers before he met us, and then it clicked right there: he was he answer to our fast!

Sunday was overall crazy because one of our wards starts at 8:30am and then both the other ones start at 1pm so we had to go on exchanges for all of church. It was fun, though, because there is one guy in the Elk Ridge who is preparing for a mission and we've really hit it off. He was my comp for all of church and we had a really good talk afterwards about missions and life and all that good stuff. I think that's probably been my favorite part about being English so far is that I've actually been able to connect with the youth in our wards more so than when I was in Spanish wards.

Other cool story of the week is the Ross family. Sister Ross is getting baptized this Saturday! She married a RM about 25 years ago and has been investigating the church ever since, but has never actually gotten baptized. Their two kids grew up in the church and their son just got back from his mission in Brazil (the same one that Mitch Rogers was in) and is going to be the one to baptize her! We are super excited for that!

We also have MLC this week and our temple trip on Friday. So it's going to be another jam packed week but I'm looking forward to it!

I guess the last thing that happened I should mention was that we had a fun little Halloween. We had to be in our home by 6pm, but the mission approved certain movies that we could watch. So we watched "Freetown", which was a real good story about missionaries in Liberia in the 80's during a civil war, and then we also got to watch "Finding Nemo"! Random fact, whenever I watch that I always remember a time way back when we watched it and Uncle Jon was with us and all the fish in the tank are making comments about the dentist and naming all sorts
of equipment and stuff and Uncle Jon was just dying at that part. I don't know why I always remember that, but I do :)

That's it for this week I guess! Take care and talk to ya later!

-Elder Alley


P.S. Tell Uncle Matt that Gluteus is proud of him for being called as a bishop and that I'll be visiting him after I get home to give him some pointers on how to run a "Missionary Work" minded ward. I seriously have notes. haha