Triple Split Success

Dear All,

Crazy milestone: I have now been out on the mission longer than Kyle!
😲 That took place yesterday! I have been out for 16.5 months now. I
don't want anyone to think I'm rubbing that in because it was not the
greatest circumstances for coming home early and I wouldn't want to
have that happen to anyone else. Shoutout to Elder Bade for the months
of service he has rendered in the mission field and I hope you'll do
well back home as you recover and move on with life. Thinking about ya
and praying for ya!

A lot of good things happened this past week out here in Arlington,
Virginia. We had interviews with President Huntsman and he told me
that he's gonna break up the trio haha we found out he said that to
all 3 of us. We helped Hermano Vasquez after interviews with his
computer for the nth time haha he's this 65 year old member from El
Salvador and he struggles to use technology, he's trying to learn how
to do some basic things with a computer so we help him like once a
week. He helps us a TON though when it comes to coming out with us to
lessons and stuff. He's single and lives alone and he's retired so he
has nothing to do. That night we taught Pedro Meruvia and his gf
Veronica. It started out good and the lesson we had with them last
time was excellent! But this time Veronica opened up on how she truly
feels about the BOM and she said she doesn't trust anything outside
the Bible. We showed her the video of the testimony of the BOM talk
given by Jeffrey R. Holland and she still kept shooting rebuttals at
us after the video. 😢

Wednesday we had a scheduled time to all meet as a zone for a Zone
picture and it took WAAAY too long for just a picture but oh well. We
did it. And Thursday we had district meeting because our zone leaders
did the training for my district. The LeSuers were there too!

SO! Friday was our triple split!!! And it was a success!! ✅🤣 it was a
little bit stressful as you could imagine but we made it happen. Im
gonna put in a screenshot of our schedule of that night. We had some
good plans. I went with Roberto Martinez, he's 18 but looks like he
could be 25 haha he really needed to go out with the missionaries so
it was good for him to be on the split. My companions Elder Andrus
went with Hermano Vasquez and Cardona went with our WML Dany Montoya.
It was awesome. I can now say while I was in a trio, we did a triple
split haha me and Berto went to a couple of appointments we had set up
but nobody answered so we visited 2 members.

Saturday morning we had an interesting lesson with this guy named
Carlos. We had to tactfully approach his lesson like PMG says because
he just talks and talks. We straight up asked him what his
expectations are from us and he said he wants to teach US haha. Anyway
we found out in his rambling that we were talking to a cold blooded
murderer...crazy right? The people you meet on the mission. But that
night we had a lesson with a new investigator Gilmer, and he is
actually pretty solid! He calls us and we have good lessons with him.
We explained really well what the BOM is and he really liked the new
information. We'll see how it goes with him.

Well Saturday night we got our transfer doctrine PDF again! I will be
staying here in Bella Vista as district leader and Elder Pickett will
be coming back to Bella Vista to be with me! He was in my very first
district in the mission field and it was in this ward! We are the 2
most senior missionaries now and we're gonna be together. Should be
fun. I've liked the trio. It's been fun and interesting to learn from!

Sunday was good. Elder Andrus and I blessed the Sacrament and it was
the first time I had done it in a long time....since the MTC! I said
one of the prayers and I said the closing prayer in Sacrament for the
third time already haha and Obispo's and his counselor Hermano
Reynolds approached me and they said "we thought it was Moroni himself
offering the sacramental prayer! We need to teach the youth to say the
prayers like that! It's little things like that that matter" They and
multiple other members complimented me on how well I recited the
prayer...I mean I just read the thing like normal but Elder Cardona
said that from the congregation it sounded like my voice was
resonating just a little bit and the expression, tone and speed was
amazing. So that made me feel good!

Later that night we had the Charlafooganera way down in Woodbridge! It
was a spiritual meeting. There were 4 speakers and 2 of them were from
our ward. We got Ruben and Solange to go! Rudy drove us in our
Obispo's Lincoln (a reminder that our Obispo is the guy in between
Ford and the gov) and Rudy is a crazy driver we were busting 80
heading down there and back and we were able to talk to Rudy and
Berto. It was a great night.

That's what went down this week for us.  We just got done playing
volleyball 🏐 instead of basket ball and it was pretty dang fun. Hope
you all have a wonderful Pioneer Day!!

❤️ Elder Thompson

Me and Berto!!
A screenshot of our plans for that night
Así dice la gente de Arlington -- if I had a dollar for every time I
heard this...

Check this out! Josh Doctson is a wide receiver for the Washington
Redskins in the NFL and he's getting baptized in our mission!!! (This
is our warrior report we get one every week and read it in district
meeting, normally a random missionary writes a testimony but this week
was president!)

Patricia and Fajardo

Dear All,

The Noche de Hogar went really really well last week! We got Patricia
and her daughter Zahira there and there was a less active there who's
also 15 so we were able to help make relations. It was cool.  We have
another NDH planned tonight in a different home. Not much happened
this week. We dropped Barón on Tuesday. He's gah....so arrogant. I did
not like meeting with that guy. My comp Elder Cardona was really bold
and said to him the this would be the last time that we would visit
him. And then he went off on how we were dropping him probably because
we knew that he knew too much about the scriptures which was not true
at all. Anyway we left him.

Thursday was another service day. We helped pull more weeds in McLean
and we helped an hermana in the Ward translate a couple of letters
from Spanish to English.  That day we also ate with the Wise family
again! We had a true American meal and it was SO GOOD!!! Elder Wise,
your brother Dave can smoke some pretty dang good brisket...

Had another lesson with Patricia and the Fajardo girls too! They are
doing alright. Church was normal. We had a less active finally come
with her new boyfriend who's not a member and we talked a little bit
about them in a meeting because she just turned 17 and her bf she
brought to church is 28!!! 🤢 so weird...well...we're gonna talk to
him and teach him. We got Patricia to church and she liked it, she
actually participates in the classes and she's just so solid.

So this week we have planned something new we haven't done that we
want to do as a trio: Operation Triple-Split!!! We want to take 3
members with us out on Friday and do a triple Split and do 3 different
things at the same times! It's gonna be so sick! Until next time!

❤️ Elder Thompson


We made a baptismal calendar for Patricia!
Took a pic of this never-before-seen car....it's an Acura
Kinda a crap picture but we were right next to D.C. Yesterday so we
took a pic with the Air Force memorial

Independence Day, Patricia on Date for Baptism, 8 Months Left!

Dear Everyone,

We had an awesome 4th of July here in Virginia! We spent the night
with the Wise family in Vienna! It was good to be with the Wise family
again. We ate with them and their missionaries (our zone leaders)
were with us too. We had a really good time, and ate tons of super
amazing food! We found out the Wise family love riddles and that was
the subject of talk for most of the night haha I'll put one of them at
the end of this letter. We heard lots of fireworks but of course
couldn't see them ☹️

We had an amazing lesson with our investigator Patricia! We taught her
about the 10 commandments using Mosiah 13 and we talked about her
baptismal date. She has been trying to think of a date but we helped
her out and invited her to be baptized on August 12 and she readily
accepted and agreed! We got her ON DATE!! 😃 were super excited for
Patricia.

She also came to church yesterday...along with 3 other of our
investigators!!! It was an amazing week as far as getting people to
church and helping people progress towards baptism. Patricia even
introduced herself in gospel principles class by adding the fact that
she's preparing to be baptized soon. We are beyond happy for her.

We also had a baptism we attended in Old Town Ward on Saturday. Our
Spanish senior couple, the LeSuers took us and we show up and Elder
Cottle and Brunsdale are filling up the font with buckets, a hose and
the font filling up the normal way hahaha they had shown up 45 minutes
before the baptism and they had forgotten to start filling up the font
but amazingly they did it!! Haha! A lady named Joanna was baptized and
Elder Andrus had found her. It was a good service.

Yeah so we had a ton of people at church along with the Hermanas! We
made up half of our zone's church attendance key indicator. That's
basically what happened this week. We have an awesome Noche de Hogar
set up for Patricia tonight in a member's home. She's getting
baptized!! Have a good week!

❤️ Elder Thompson

Sorry for not having pictures this week...other than this epic one
with Jesus and America

Busiest Craziest Week Ever!

So this week was so jam packed it has been exhausting. There have been
just so many things back to back and we've been so dang busy!! But
that can be a good thing. It's good to have a schedule like that every
so often. ...this letter will probably be super long FYI.

After p day last week our night had a bunch of random things and tasks
we had to do. And we see this young couple trying to change a spare
tire so we go over in our pros clothes and helped them out. After like
30 minutes they got their spare on and they offered us 20$ for our gas
but we refused it.

Tuesday, after district meeting we had an exchange with the McLean
zone leaders. All 3 of us went to their area so we were in the English
program for a day. We had a big ol' service of weed pulling in the sun
for a few hours. Then we had a dinner with a member and split up and I
went with Elder Hastings. We spent the night with their WML Brother
Williams whose from England. He's the coolest guy I've met here
honestly...we had a lesson with akid named Rubis and later we taught
this guy named James and we taught him the Restoration. It was the
MOST spiritual lesson of my mission. He accepted a baptismal invite
and we taught him to his needs and having a member there is usually
always best.

We stayed the night at the zone leaders place and then went straight
to zone conference Wednesday morning from there. We had our zone
conference for 6 hours and it was spiritually uplifting as always.
That night, we taught an investigator I had taught last year named
Pedro Meruvia about the Family. We used the proclamation to the world
and they really liked it and they had missed having the missionaries
over.

So we had ANOTHER exchange this week but this time with the Spanish
Zone leaders in Woodbridge. We drove way down there and spent the day
with them. I was with Elder Lucero and we had 2 lessons one was with
this SUPER solid guy named Jorge...typical Hispanic name I know. We
read the First 12 verses of the BOM with him and he says to us..."So
if it says there was One who descended down from heaven...was it the
Angel Moroni?" And this was his second meeting with the missionaries.
Haha he had kept his commitment of reading the introduction!!! So he
had read a bit about Moroni earlier. That made us smile. Our other
lesson was with a couple and I learned so much about teaching to
people's needs from Elder Lucero. He's awesome. He has a thing where
he asks to take pictures of as many people as he contacts and teaches
in the streets and in homes so we got a pic with them haha

So then we go spent the night at their place in Woodbridge and then
headed back home early morning and got stuck in some good I-95
traffic. It was awful.  We went straight to a move. We helped Hermano
Torres move from his home to a new apartment in Falls Church. We got
there at around 10 and didn't finish until 3. We were starving by the
time we were done and exhausted. Thankfully Hermano Torres took us to
Taco Bamba after. We came back and tried to finish some weekly
planning but I just crashed and basically passed out. We were pretty
drained. That night, we had the chance to meet the father of the
Fajardo family because he's visiting from El Salvador! We had a last
minute Noche de Hogar with him and it was so great to meet him!
*Shoutout to Elder Fajardo serving in San Jose, California!* I love
that family.

The next day guess what happened? We had ANOTHER move! This time we
helped a member in the Falls Church Ward put all their stuff in a
moving truck. This time we said we were only gonna help for a couple
hours and no more. It was pretty successful. AND Saturday was another
one of those car fast days so we couldn't use our car.

Nothing happened Sunday out of the ordinary except we had comp study
at the church and our stake president was leaving his office and my
comp Elder Cardona asked if he had time to do a practice teach with us
so we did a role play with him in Spanish and he was taking the role
of our investigator haha

 It was a hectic week. Anyway...I'm all written out. I think that's
basically everything that went down. I hope you all have a happy 4th
of July tomorrow! Time surely is going by, for this Wednesday the 5th
marks my dad's 52nd birthday. Love you all.

❤️ Elder Thompson

My companions right now Elders Cardona and Andrus
Yard work service
Exchange with Lucero and his investigators
Jaime Fajardo with our WML Dany (the one whose not looking lol)