Elder Zach Greene: Fiesta!

Oh hey,

Nice to hear from you guys again! Sounds like lots of fun stuff with a lot of setbacks going on in the Greene household! Sorry about the boat, and the mis-timing of homecoming. That's life yeah? I received a sweet package this week from our Ward's Miamaids and a letter from Brother Smith and others. I'm so grateful to have such an awesome and supportive ward. I have really learned how awesome our ward really is out here on my mission. Oh, also your comment about Tagman receiving the priesthood in 5 months was crazy. I seriously didn't believe it for a second. Everyone's growing so fast!

As always, we had some pretty cool miracles this week! Dad, I loved your comment about not focusing on numbers last week, I tried to apply that more this week and to just serve and be a missionary. And it paid off! About 8 weeks ago, me and Elder Rose found a family while knocking. The father turned out to be a member that wasn't on record, his name is Juan Gomez. After a lot of tries to try and get a hold of them again, we kinda lost hope. But on this past Saturday, me and Elder Martinez knocked the door and the whole Gomez family was home. We taught them and they decided to come to our Branch activity that night! After that lesson we had to go to the Church to help prepare. It was hard to sacrifice some time teaching to help our members but after that night I'm a big believer in service. We had the Gomez family there, two women and their kids, and another family, the Barahonas. In total we brought 18 people to the activity! It was such a sweet miracle. Plus the party was way cool, it's basically a fiesta celebrating the independence of all the Latin American countries (maybe Elder T. Ward was doing the same thing!) I even ate a bunch of that corn you see on Nacho Libre (Jared knows what I'm talking about).

Anyways, the next day was Sunday and the Gomez family ended up coming to church too! They seemed to really like it. The mom, Luz, of this family isn't a member and we want to keep working towards baptism with her. But the problem is that they aren't married. Come to find out, yesterday, that Juan has a wife named Alejandra (Non-member) that he hasn't divorced yet. But God works by small means to bring about miracles and somehow, Alejandra came to our branch because she was invited by a super inactive member that decided she wanted to go to Church yesterday. So turns out, that Juan and Alejandra talked yesterday about getting divorced so that Juan and Luz could get married. I can't believe how miraculous some of these "coincidences" are. We are way excited about this family.

We had another super sweet opportunity this week too. One day while we were studying this young white guy (this is strange in Baltimore) with shaggy hair knocks on our door. Turns out he is a Lutheran pastor and has a small group of people who meet every Thursday at a bar to talk about God. His little gang wants to know more about Mormonism and he wanted us to come to talk to them. So after talking to President Richards we got permission to teach about 10 Lutherans outside a bar about the basics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Obviously this was in English and let me tell you, it was hard sometimes. I rolled my r while saying Terrestrial kingdom and they all laughed, hahah. But it was a lot of fun to teach them and they were genuinely interested so that helped.

We meet some of the coolest little kids out here on the mission. Especially in Spanish work cause everyone has like 50 kids. Yesterday we were at the Sandovals house, one of my favorite member families. Their son Christopher is 5 or 6 and he is completely fluent in Spanish, obviously, and English, but it's all from Nick Jr. haha. Last night he said,"Elder Greene, you know what? I have my own dance, it's called the Christopher shuffle and it's only for winners!" I was dying but also, it made me think of Taggert, hahah.

Well I gotta go, love you guys!

Warm regards,

Elder Greene

PS I got a letter from Alex this week! I can't believe he's still in Alabama, hahah.