Elder Will Murdoch-Ft. Worth Texas Mission

Car vs Elder: Friday, 1.25.19, 10:15 pm: I'm chilling in my Harambe shirt about to pray and blow out the light we plug our phone in and it lights up revealing we have 5 missed calls and 3 voicemails. We listen to the first voicemail from the senior missionary in charge of cars and he states very plainly "Elder Tafua just got hit by a car meet me at the ER ASAP."  We hurriedly redressed and raced through Fort Worth all the while I had flashbacks to my own incident with a car just 7 months earlier after all, we had driven through the exact spot where it occurred just hours before this. 10:30 pm: we arrive at the waiting room and Elder Tafuas companion walks out leaving Elder Tafua alone which in hindsight wasn't the greatest idea but we weren't thinking straight. Eventually the senior couple arrived and went back to be with Elder Tafua who was so out of it he was teaching the missionary lessons to no one but himself. We sat with Elder Theuson until about...

Martin Luther King.... Junior (day): It was MLK day this week and our stake combined with a bunch of different denominations to do a city wide day of service as a result, our Pday got moved to Wednesday. We congregated as a Zone to a black Baptist church in the hood and lucky us got to sit up on the choir seats. We had an hour long  inter-faith worship service that was really interesting to see. I never realized that in most religions they write out their prayers. I actually couldn't differentiate between a prayer and normal speaking because not even their tone of voice would change. The hymns were the best part though. They had some black dude with a classic black dude voice leading us out and at first he tried relying on us because we were supposed to be the choir but a lot of the Elders were really nervous and weren't swaying back and forth clapping their hands like they ought to have done so he kind of gave up on us and we sang with the congregation. The dudes vo...

It all started last week... I was waiting outside the bathroom for Elder Gurr to finish up when a member of the Spanish ward started to talk to me. He mistakenly thought I was a Spanish Elder and threw his arm around my shoulder and started talking about who knows what. I replied in broken Spanish that I don't speak Spanish and so he looked at my name tag. He had a hard time pronouncing my name as do most people that don't speak English but then after that the lie began. On my name tag it proudly read "L'Église de Jésus-Christ des Saints des Derniers Jours" which obviously isn't in English or Spanish and he took notice of that. He asked in broken English what language it was and I told him French.  He was so happy. He then asked me a question that I didn't quite understand, I thought he asked "Do you speak French" to which I replied yes but then he got really happy and said (again in broken English) "wow it's really rare to have a miss...

It was a good week. Well there was an ice storm on Wednesday, but for whatever reason the city didn't shut down so we went out and worked. The trees were all glossy with ice, it was really pretty.  We started teaching this couple and they are so cool. Halfway through a lesson yesterday their friends dropped in and before they could even talk to us the husband butted in and said "Yeah we're going to be members of their church and get baptized and all that." Which took us off guard so we invited them to pray about a date to be baptized. They just stated their concerns and told us to help them work around them. It was really cool. They also made us some fantastic Panamanian food.  Love y'all, Elder Murdoch 

Will wrote to say that he was too busy to write a group email.  Guess it's great that he's so busy!

Super short email but long story short. The drunk brother told us he wanted to get married to his girlfriend ASAP and so we told him that our bishop could do it for free. So I got to witness a civil marriage this week that was pretty cool. I also got a call while on exchange from the Stephenville elders and apparently a less active who I used to teach was in the hospital and neede a blessing so it was really cool to see that family again. Love y'all! Elder Murdoch 

The Blessing: I was on exchange with Elder Sims doing some studies in the church when we got a call from an 801. It was some frantic woman asking how close we were to the hospital. We were actually only 5 minutes from it and so she asked us to hurry there as fast as we could to give a blessing to her grandson. We got the parents number and hurried over. There was no one at the children's hospital when we first got there it was like the Walking Dead or a Call of Duty map according Elder Sims.  There were a few more people in the inside but it was very creepy. Children's hospitals are a very sad place with a happy façade if you think about what goes on in them.  We got to the BIcu or whatever a step above the Nicu is and aside from a sad looking nurse it was empty. We couldn't find the room and we had no service on our phone. Finally we found a door inaccessible from our side and we waited like 5 minutes for a nurse to walk out so we could quietly slip in. We wer...