Email from 02.01.10

Ok, I’m in Coral Springs East now and it is a really big area. I went from living in poverty in El Portal to living in Luxury in Coral Springs. lol. My comps Name is Elder Jarvie. Elder Jarvie was in the area last transfer. I am in a “salt and pepper” companionship. Meaning one English and one Spanish Elder. Elder Jarvie is English, well the Ward is English. It works fine when we contact, if there is someone who only speaks Spanish then I talk to him. Then if he is interested I pass him to some Spanish elders.

I’m in a car area but we use bike mostly, so we can contact better, and, no my bike is still broken and I use a bike that was left here. lol.

I’m doing better; I just have a bad cough now so I’m steadily making progress.

Here is a spiritual experience to share with you. The first day we got to Coral Springs we had an appointment with a guy named Mike who is a recent convert but is now less active. Anyways, we found out that day that Mike had some bad drug problems in the past and a lot of other things so he is kind of hard to keep focused (o, side note this guy is smaller than me but has a lot more muscle and he had a lot of rough experiences in his life and doesn’t shy away from violence). So, he made us dinner and he put like a stick and a half of butter in it, and then poured like a pound of garlic salt in this pasta. My heart started hurting just looking at the thing lol. Anyways after dinner he started talking about how he was able to quit all the bad habits of his past except for Chew. So when he was talking he started to take some out, because he said he needed it, and when he started to open it I said "wo wo wo Mike, let’s just take a deep breath. Do you like being controlled by this stuff?" of course he said no. so I told him "ok you have to bottles of chew there, in front of you now what do you want to do with it? He said he would like to chew it because it is driving him crazy lol I told him, "ok but in reality what do you want to do with the chew?" he said to throw it away. I told him "Perfect that’s what we are going to do, we are going to throw it away and then after that give you a blessing of comfort and you won’t need chew if you rely on the lord and go to church." after some conversation and cheering him on. He said ok. I asked him for all the chew he had, and he gave them all to me there was like 6 total. And he gave them all to me I pocketed them and me and Elder Jarvie proceeded to give him a blessing. It was a very spiritual blessing. The lord promised him some amazing things if he would have faith in Him and go to church, and that he would be able to stop chewing. After the blessing, he said he felt fantastic and the desire to chew was gone" so everything was fine. We told him we would check up with him every day to make sure he is good, and if he needed help he could just call us and we would do all we can to help.

Then a couple of days go by he calls us telling us that he is having some major cravings for chew so we pray with him tell him it’s all alright then, he said he’s good and the cravings went away. Then he calls us another day and said his work was getting so crappy that he just had to chew so he did. I told him Mike. You were given a sacred promise of the lord that if you just have faith in him and go to church you will be free of this habit. He said ok I will try again. So, he went to church and so far so good. He even got some patches to help with the addiction. Cool story huh?