Elder Jantsen Thorpe August 2017-2019: This week was like an ice cream sundae!

Hey gang!

This week on #whatsmysnack we have a Chicago masterpiece. The famous deep dish "meat and more meat" pizza from Giordanos! It's about $35 for a large pizza but worth every penny! It contains a whole lot of cheese, a whole lot of meat, and it is a whole lot of delicious! Giordanos is famous for their "cheese pull pictures" and you can see why!

This week was like an ice cream sundae, a ton of good missionary work and general conference was the cherry on top! I hope you all got to watch it! Haha I think this was the first general conference that I stayed awake and watched every single speaker! We went and watched it at the church building and the first session it was just us, the North elders, the Spanish elders and the hermanas! The other sessions we had some investigators come watch! Watching the priesthood session was super weird to me because I was used to having to show up an hour earlier just to get a good seat at the packed stake center. Here we got there about 2 minutes early and there was about 10 people total who watched with us. How awesome is it that we get to hear from the general authorities every 6 months!? We missionaries were challenged to go into conference with 3 questions. It's amazing how no matter what your questions are, they will be answered through what the general authorities say as well as through what the spirit says to you. One thing that I really liked was what Bishop Waddell said, "we cannot control what happens to us, but we have absolute control of how we respond." And "turning to our savior is always our best option"

I don't know what it was but we found a lot of solid investigators this week. We went on exchanges on Wednesday because Elder Kish hadn't been on one this transfer. So the first half of the day I was with Elder Aguirre who is super cool, we get along really well. He came out the transfer before me so he is still being trained too. He is a great missionary, he isn't afraid to talk to anyone! The second half of the day I was with Elder Ruiz, our district leader. We had such a cool experience. We went to visit a Hispanic lady in this Hispanic area and after elder Ruiz asked me which street I wanted to tract and street contact on, we only had time for 1 street because it was getting late. I picked a street and we started walking down it and only about the 3rd house in there was a guy sitting on his front porch looking at his computer. Elder Ruiz said hi to him and kept walking, I felt prompted to ask him if there was anything we could do for him and he said, "yeah, can you teach me something?" Haha I was so surprised I said "what" and he said "aren't you teaching about your church or something?" So I was like yeah haha we'd love to teach you something. We ended up sitting down with him on his front porch and talking with him for almost an hour and a half. He had so many questions that were pretty deep. He shared with us basically his whole life story and how he has been to prison 3 times and he's only 27. He had been researching a lot about religion because he really wants to know the truth. He asked us some difficult deep questions, but elder Ruiz and I were able to answer them. At the end I testified to him that Jesus Christ sent us to him at this specific time because we have what he needs. It was super powerful. He told us he had talked to a lot of people from different churches and asked them the same questions he asked us and we were the first ones to ever get through all of his questions. The last thing he said was "I'm really interested in your church and I want to learn more and find out if it's legit" it was so sweet! I'm really excited to keep teaching him!

I hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Elder Thorpe