Ridge's Mission: Chastity with a sex offender and a Ghost Pepper

Well with a title like that how can you not read my email? Haha life's been pretty interesting here in the DC mission! First off, to answer everyone's questions I don't know anything about my visa other than the fact that they told me to expect it around the 25th of this month. I still have a few good weeks left here and to be honest it's going to be another life changing thing when it comes and I've had a lot of those lately so a few weeks of the same thing is alright by me. Like my president asked me to I've been trying to just bury myself in the work here. My new area is weird, we have like to people we're teaching but everyone we tract into is way nicer than in my last area. They just are not interested. Also the members aren't kicking in as much as we'd like.

Shout out to Elle! Going to Louisiana Spanish speaking, that's so awesome! That'll be a very interesting place to go! Good luck!

So yeah, I taught the Law of Chastity to a sex offender yesterday. He's actually a really nice guy and working on changing. I really would not include that part in my letter but none of you have any idea who I'm talking about, and I just thought it was kind of ironic. My companion told me that we were gonna go teach a guy who was a less active but that we weren't allowed to invite him to church, after learning why he wasn't legally allowed to be in the building I asked what lesson we were teaching... yep. Chastity. It was great.

Also, has anyone ever heard of the Ghost Pepper? You can't buy them anywhere in the US, I don't know if it's illegal or what but the family that had us over for dinner got a hold of the seeds somehow and grew them in their back yard. It is the 7th hottest pepper in the entire world, around 10,000 times the strength of a Jalepeno. I tried one about the size of my pinky finger's nail and it destroyed me. My tongue was pretty much numb and after eating steak, potatos, and a lot of liquids it was still growing stronger. So that was interesting... It took about 30 minutes for it to go away. I felt like I could melt glass with my breath haha.

Oh, and I have new investigators now! There is a really interesting guy named Steve that the missionaries have been working on for a long time. He is 59 and works in the pentagon. He's all the way to Helaman in the Book of Mormon and has been to church something like 7 times. Still won't commit to baptism. He says he wants to finish the book and then see from there. In my personal opinion he is doing it because he enjoys spending time with the neighbors whose house we use to teach him and all the other parts of investigating. He looks at everything super logically and since his divorce I feel like he really wants things to keep him busy so he is on like a thousand committees and is an avid adult scouter. We're working on trying to get him to feel that there is something out there you can't describe but that you feel through prayer and similar things. I don't know if he'll get baptized but we're certainly doing everything we can to get him there! I think it would help him so much personally.

There's another girl named Teressa who is 17 and we put her on date for baptism the other day! That was my first time doing it, and it was great. She's on date for baptism on Elder Ni's birthday actually haha but I most likely won't be here in October so I hope everything goes well with that. I only met her once for like 20 minutes at her house. We're trying to get a members house we can teach her at because her house has at least 70,000 dogs and somewhere in the vicinity of eleven hundred screaming babies. Also her dad is always watching movies and not participating which is also distracting. Try teaching someone about the Word of Wisdom while Adam Sandler is wrestling a half naked man on the TV in the background... The biggest problem with Teressa though is that she can't come to church because of her job. If we can find a way around that though she is really enjoying our visits and is really likely to be baptized next month!

Umm lets see, what else. For those of you asking me what to send me I really just would like pictures or else song lyrics, I miss music haha :) We actually are super lucky and have a keyboard in our apartment so I get to play a few minutes of piano each night which is awesome. Elder Ni is like a prodigy though. He's had ten years of piano and it's like a second language for him. (well.. third?) He can hear any note and tell you what it is, for example he told me our bathroom fan is an A flat. I just hum the songs I want to hear and he can crank them out on the piano just from listening to me haha it's crazy!

Keep sending me questions and news about college and family and sports and all sorts of stuff, I miss you all so much!

Gud vaere med dig til vi ses igen! (God be with you till we meet again)

Elder Durrant

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