June 12, 2023 - Rain, Wind, and Escargot

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One of the best parts about serving a stateside mission is that the food is not even a problem. Members feed us every night and they pull out their best meals. But we have one of our buddies Hans Maracek from Austria in the ward and he wanted to make us something we've never had. So we sit down and he pulls out these tiny plates with these 6 spots and each one has a snail in it. I mean it was baked in so much butter, garlic, pesto, and cheese but man snails are not my thing. The texture is so weird, just really chewy. I put away all 6 of them and thought I was done and then he put another 6 haha. Those last 6 snails were a battle let me tell ya. But meanwhile Hans was just chowing down on his snails he was loving it. 

Reno is getting the storms recently its wild. It feels like Florida, it'll be hot and sunny then it'll be a torrential down poor for a couple hours. Being bikes is so fun in it tho, we just get home soaked and my white shirts all have a nice stripe up the back from the mud off the tires. 


I didn't write last week but the last 2 weeks have been so good. Last week we had 6 people pull up to church and it was cool to see. Berson our friend from Haiti has been coming 5 weeks in a row. A girl named Sydney finally came and she came again this week. We're going to hopefully get her and her fiance married so she can be baptized soon. We had 2 dudes pull up that we didn't actually think would come. We hadn't taught either of them but we invited them and they showed up. One of them showed up again this week. 

The highlight of this last week was Sal got baptized in the YSA ward!! It was so cool, I taught him for a month and then passed him off to the ysa elders and he got baptized this week. When we first started teaching him he had no prior knowledge of God or Jesus Christ. Literally a blank slate. It was so cool to teach someone from ground zero and teach them the true reality of everything. "Things as they really are and things as they really will be." As he acted on little principles of prayer and scripture study, then repentance, and coming to church he grew a ton. In a prayer he expressed to God how excited he was to be baptized it was really cool to see. God prepared him for sure. He was a perfect example of sincere heart and real intent. 


Also our zone was doing a picture challenge each day so we took some fire pictures haha. I'll add a second email with all the pics. 



Happy 18th Birthday to my brother Luke! Crazy he's that old, I still feel like I'm 18 haha. 

Love yall, have a good week!


Elder Barlow 🐮
















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