November 2, 2015--Selamat Halloween....

Dearest beautiful Mother,

This week was crazy! There's always so much that happens but so little time to tell it all. Where to even start?

This week we went on splits to Bandung. I went on splits with Elder Thomas, who is from my mtc group so that was really fun!! We tried talking to as many people as we could and we got 9 contacts in one day which was a good faith-building experience. We also wanted to go visit this member and had to ride the train to get there. But, we accidentally got off one stop too early. So, we ended up walking along the tracks in the middle of the jungle for like 2 hours. Haha it was so funny and my feet were pretty tired from walking in the gravel. Always good times in Bandung :)

This week we also got our water shut off!! That was a fun experience... it all started when this guy came to our house a few months ago and told us he thought we had a leak because our water meter was going crazy. He checked and sure enough, there was a leak underneath the house. So we had a guy come in and start digging and all this stuff and he fixed up the leak. But the water had been leaking for about a month's time before they caught it, so our tagihan (bill) was like 11 juta (million) rupiah. I don't know how much that is in dollars but it is wayyy more money than we could ever pay. (It's actually over $800 in US money!) So we talked to the mission office and they said they would take care of it. We had to follow up a few times over these past couple months but somehow it never really got taken care of because one day this week these guys just come over in this truck and say, "we're here to shut off your water since it hasn't been paid for so long." And in a matter of moments we had no running water. So we had to sleep over at the other Elders' house and shower there. It was super funny but also a bit stressful. :)

This week we also had some cool miracles. One was this new investigator named Mak T. She found a bag that someone had thrown away in a field, and she wanted to return it to its owner. The person who owned the bag before must have been contacted by the missionaries because they had a missionary pass along inside. So when Mak T called the number on the pass along, we met with her to see if it was maybe our bag or another missionary's. We determined that it wasn't, and when we invited Mak T to our English class she was really excited to come! And so she came this week and liked it and then she also wanted to meet to discuss the Book of Mormon. That was a really neat little miracle.

Also this week on Saturday we had service at about 8 am till 12 pm, and an appointment at about 3 pm, but nothing in between. So we decided to park our bikes close to the meeting-place for the appointment at 3 and just walk around and try to talk to people. We had two people approach us, one who stopped on their motorcycle, already knew we were Elders, and asked us about English class because before they used to go to an English class with some Elders. The other guy was a newspaper salesman who knew Elders from before and invited us over to his house. Those were the first two miracles of that day, but the best one was after that. We were walking and saw this little store with super old Nintendo NES's and Playstations and card games and stuff. We had a feeling we should go in, so we entered and tried talking to the owner and just looking at the stuff. The owner wasn't too interested in talking to us, I think maybe he thought we were just prideful white American businessmen. So we kind of gave up because there was no one else in the store, but before we left we decided to buy a yugioh deck (they had yugioh cards for really cheap!). After we bought it, the owner asked us where we were from, and we told him from America. He kept asking questions and we explained how we are missionaries who don't get paid and are just here to do service for 2 years. He thought we were crazy! And he told us he is from a Buddhist family but he himself is atheist. He didn't understand how we could believe in God so strongly that we would give up 2 years in comfort in America to just "waste our time" in Indonesia. He told us he didn't know why he didn't believe in God, but he wanted to. And he asked if he could hear the message that we shared with people. He said if we were devoted enough to spend 2 years of our life without earning any money and just serving, he wanted to know more. It was really cool and just amazing how the Lord led us to him. Hopefully he can continue learning and make choices to come unto Christ :)

This week was a hard one, we had some days where nobody could meet and it was just taxing. But it was also a great week because the Lord blessed us for our faith, even though it is still just small. I love Him and I love this work. I love you too mom and I pray for you and the fam every single day :) 

Love you so much!!!

Elder Paskett

Group photo from last PLD