Brand new visitor's center, temple service, and sleep talking!

Elder Hopoate's planners compared to mine. He goes home next week.

The brand new Visitor's Center just opened on Saturday! IT IS SO AWESOME!!!!!! If you ever come to Los Angeles you need to go to the Visitor's Center, because it is the best attraction out here! It is like the Superbowl of church attraction. It is right behind the L.A. Temple. It has been closed for a couple years, and they finally finished it and it is full of state-of-the-art technology and fancy things like that! I felt like a kid at a carnival when I was there. It has a really nice Christus statue with an ocean background, and it has all kinds of video presentations. And it has this really cool room with two glass walls so you can see into it, but you can push some buttons and the glass is no longer see-through! I don't know how it works, but it's basically a miracle! Anyway, we have gone there twice so far, once with an investigator and his family, and again with a recent convert. It is really awesome! The Visitor's Center is so awesome that I talked about it in my sleep. Elder Cruz said he heard me say "The visitors center is so cool" in my sleep the other night haha! And guess what else??? I spoke Spanish in my sleep the night before that!

In front of the brand new visitor's center

Ricardo, an investigator, and his family at the visitor's center.

Things have been going well with the work this past week. We had a bunch of people at church on Sunday! But we're afraid that one of our families might be dropping us. We haven't been able to contact them for a little while, and they weren't at church on Sunday, but we will keep trying. We have a couple of investigators who have been progressing pretty well, and we are hoping they will be baptized this coming Sunday. They were at church on Sunday, but they didn't stay the whole time. Their names are Tania and Milton. Tania is from Mexico and barely speaks English, and is the single mother of Milton, who is 10 years old. We found them tracting one day, and we found that she has a few family members who are members of the Church! We will be seeing them tomorrow, so we will pray for the best. We have one other baptismal date, but it is a very unstable date. His name is Bryan, and he is the son of our recent convert Gema. He is a very difficult investigator because he has been involved in drugs and he doesn't completely understand why he needs to be baptized. It is sad because I know it is what he needs, but he doesn't seem to have any faith. But he really likes going to church and having the missionaries over, but we can't seem to help him enough.

Yesterday for p-day we had the opportunity to clean the temple!!!!!! It was very awesome! The temple is temporarily closed for the biannual cleaning, and our zone got to spend 4 or 5 hours cleaning it! Most of the missionaries got to help on the inside, but our group cleaned in the gardens. We helped to prune a TON of Birds of Paradise plants. The grounds at the L.A. temple are sooooo big and it takes a lot of people to take care of it. The other Elders were on the inside doing different jobs. The temple isn't too far from our area so we have been down there quite a few times. Actually our area is right in the middle between Downtown and Santa Monica, and you can see both of them from where we work.

Behind the Los Angeles Temple

I love you all! I really appreciated the letter from Emily and from home! It's really nice getting letters! I hope everything is going well. It sounds like the Merrell Camp was a blast! You should sent me some fish in a refrigerated package haha! I love you all so much and I pray for you! Thanks for sending me Tyler's e-mail mom! It is a lot easier to do it that way, so thank you a bunch! I know this Gospel is true. Stay firm and strong and the blessings will be amazing! Have an awesome week!

Love, Elder Ross Watkins