I can still dunk!

 Most of my friends are like me and will probably only read a little bit of the beginning of the missionary email and look at the pics and move on so I'll just talk about some of the spiritual highlights of my first week.

Update on the blessing from day one. In my last email I talked about this latino man that had stage 3 cancer and i was able to be apart of his blessing. We went back today and heard that he is now at stage 1, that he's feeling so much better, doesn't have to take many pain relief medications and he's able to drink water again (he has an issue and he was unable to drink water but he told us he drank a gallon and a half after the first blessing) it was amazing to be apart of a miracle like that.

"Its a good day to repent" one of my favorite quotes from zone conference this week. It's important to be repenting daily because we are all imperfect and we all have room to improve.

I had my first 2 lessons on Sunday, one with a 12 year old girl and her dad and another with a mother of 2. We taught the restoration to her and I talked about the first vision. It's hard to know when to talk in a trio especially when these 2 elders have been working together for awhile. The other lesson was outside with the mother since we're not really supposed to go into peoples houses and she said her house was too much of a mess. We taught her the plan of salvation and we tried to draw a diagram with a whiteboard but the marker died towards the beginning. I was looking at the rocks we were sitting on and I remembered what my dad had done on his mission when he taught the plan of salvation. He told me that he drew the diagram in the dirt so I had the idea to use rocks to show the 3 kingdoms (in the pictures) unfortunately she had to take care of some family issues before we could talk about the kingdoms and we ended early but I was glad to contribute more. It was kinda funny tho when we got to this woman's house she started smoking a cigarette as we started the lesson haha

This Sunday I was also asked to give a talk and I decided to talk about the holy ghost. I think it was one of my best talks and I was as nervous as I usually am because I hate giving talks haha. Got to meet more members and I already love them. We had the opportunity to go to a fireside on my second night here and we played cow pattie volleyball as they call it which is just volleyball on a farm. It was fun and the kids loved us. I was also informed by my comps that they teach mostly kids here which I'm excited about because I love working with kids. This mother is actually the first adult they had taught. Its been fun interacting with the youth and lots of them love basketball. 

On pioneer day we got to go to this super nice house, it was this huge house which u wouldn't expect out here but they had an indoor gym, nice pool with a slide, a half court basketball hoop/ tennis court, batting cage and just other awesome things. Wish I took a picture of the hoop cuz the view behind it its was amazing. It was like looking at the celestial kingdom. I tried to dunk in my church clothes but that didn't work out but I'll talk about my dunk in a minute. Another thing that house had was a huge bear of a dog. The dogs here are either huge and calm or small and on crack. Kinda annoying but they stay away from me so I'm ok with it. Anyways we got to watch fireworks that night too which was fun.

So this week in general was kinda slow missionary work wise. It's hard to get out and meet people and there's rules on that like we have to have a fellowshipper with us. So we usually just make calls. We didn't get many answers this week so we had lots of time of not doing much. We're encouraged to get our of the house so we went and played basketball. The elders know my name is Kobe so they assumed I'm good at basketball and i showed them how it's done when we played 21. Beat them 2 out of 2 games and i would even let them tip me so i would have to start my points over to give them a chance haha. They wanted to see if I could dunk and I did too. I lobbed it up to myself and I can still do it. Kinda shocked after being stuck on the computer for like 6 weeks and not exercising that much since school shut down. So yeah I can still dunk.

I'm sure I'm missing things but if u have questions about anything just send me an email. And congratulations if you made it this far on the email.

Love 

Elder Garrick

1. But pizza that was split amongst 7 elders. Not nearly as big as Big Lou's but it was pretty big

2. Three rocks of glory

3. Only video of fireworks that will send for some reason but there were really good and pretty close to us