"Do you want to go to Hell?"

June 27, 2016

Heeeellllloooooo my good friends! It has been a very busy last week down here in Abilene, TX. Very busy indeed. Definitely lots to keep my mind occupied.

Well to start of I will tell you why this email is titled the way it is so that you don't have to worry about me chastising you the whole time you read this. It ain't about you, its just a funny story. Well, Elder Moschetti and I were walking down the street on like Wednesdayish, and the phone rang with President Heap on the other end. So I answer normally, "Hello, this is Elder Ericson!"

President Heap: "Hello son, this is President Heap! How are you doing?"

Elder Ericson: "I'm doing well, President. I'm pretty warm right now, but nonetheless doing well!"

President Heap: "Well, let me ask you something... do you want to go to Hell?"

Elder Ericson: "No sir! I do not desire to go to Hell!"

President Heap: "Well son, let this be a lesson for you for the rest of your life. Its a lot hotter in Hell than in Abilene, TX! You don't want to live with that for eternity do you?"

He then went on for another few sentences, but I was too busy laughing to catch his words. Good stuff. President Heap always has something like that up his sleeve! Nobody is better than good ol' President Heap!

Anyway, he was calling us about a call he received from a lady in Phoenix about her non-member friend who lives in Baird (20 miles east of Abilene) whose house flooded and needs some work getting stuff cleaned out. So we went out on Thursday and got some work done. The house flooded a month ago, but no clean up company/organization would come to help. In order for this one company to come do work there needed to be at least 10 houses that got at least 18 inches of water. However her house and one other house were the only ones to get 18 inches. So they didn't receive any help. Her husband is gone for work most of the time, and she has lupus, and a special needs daughter. So their ability to do the work themselves is limited. The city did bring her a big dumpster to throw stuff out in, and they only have it until today, so time was limited. It seems like some others have come to do some work already, but she needed some more help! So we went out and took out a section of fence, and then worked on tearing out some vinyl flooring for a couple hours. Also, this house seems to have been a smoker house for years and years and years. So needless to say our truck still has a nice aroma to it after driving home in our nastiness. It was some good service though. We only got a portion of the vinyl flooring up so we were going to go back out on Saturday to try to get more flooring up, but she said that her uncle or someone like that said that he can get a vinyl floor remover thing that will make it so they can just pull it right up. Well then, I'm glad we spent 2+ hours on the floor trying to get that stuff up when it could have been that easy! Its alright though, we did some good work for them! We did a lot of other service this past week as well. Since we had some other stuff going on we only set a goal for 6 hours. But then things just happened and we ended up with 10 hours with just Wednesday and Thursday! So that pretty much took up most of our work time.

We did have an interesting lesson however. We taught a lady named Erica and her daughter Victoria on Tuesday evening. That went well. Good stuff. We then set an appointment for Thursday night. So we went and we taught. At the end of the lesson we extended a baptismal invitation, and then it was our privilege to hear that she was baptized into our church quite some time ago up near Lubbock.......... I got a pretty good kick out of that one! We had a member with us and he found great joy in that experience! Hey, at least she mentioned it before she got baptized, unlike my good friend Larry from Sweetwater! We're still legends for baptizing him for the second time. And I'm quite proud of it! We for sure followed the spirit telling us to baptize him!

We had a pretty legit MLC on Friday. We had all the district leaders there as well, which was fun! MLC is always fun to get to see a lot of friends! Especially when the district leaders come! I saw tons of former companions and others that I have served around and are good buddies with! I have been blessed to serve with some amazing people! I am definitely thankful to be called to the Texas Lubbock Mission for many reasons, and all the missionaries that I have grown to be friends with is one of them. A lot of the training was very mission leadership oriented, so nothing you'd care about. However the last instruction of the day was from President Heap, and it was titled on the agenda as "Doctrinal Presentation". Holy cow. When you see that with President Heap's name by it you have a cow. Insane stuff is about to happen. He did an instruction of the scattering and gathering of Israel, but he kept it to his allotted time of 30 minutes. So he just gave us the brief outline of the happenings, but it was still pretty sweet, and then gave us a print out of his slides and told us to study the rest ourselves to learn more. I wish he could have had an hour or so, that would have been mind-blowing stuff. But it was still interesting some of the stuff he talked about as part of it all! It was a good day!

Everything is going well down here. We have a lot of good plans and such for this week to hopefully get things going around here. Elder Moschetti has come in with a lot of new ideas to use and hopefully things will work out for us! Just gotta keep on fighting the good fight and do the work of the Lord in the Lord's way! This coming week we will have Zone Conference here in Abilene, and I have been asked to instruct again. Two zone conferences in a row. I don't like this. But hopefully I'll be able to do some good training on working with members, which I have been assigned to instruct on! Definitely something we are trying to improve down here to help the work!

Well, that'll be it for me this week! I love y'all and pray that y'all have a wonderful week and a blessed Independence Day! God Bless America!!!!

God bless ya!

Much love,

Elder Reed Ericson