An Elder Roderer Christmas Card

Hello!

 

So this week was pretty good! Really wet the last couple of days though. Because it was so wet, and because of all the salt that the city dumps on the roads, my bike was getting rusty on a few places. That made me quite sad, because that bike cost me quite a substantial lump of dough. So in order to protect my investment, we went to a hardware store to buy some WD-40 to help keep things in somewhat good condition. But while I was looking at the solvents and stuff, my eye caught sight of a can that I've never seen before. It was a WD-40 equivalent that was made out of soy, and it said it works better than petroleum. So I bought it :) It actually works really well! It's just funny to think that soy is what is keeping my bike in good working order :)

Anyways...

Something else that happened this week that kind of confused and irritated me, was that my gloves and my beanie got stolen... at the church... during church... I don't know why anyone would want to take them, because they were pretty smelly and dirty (I was going to wash them today though). I guess they needed them more than I do. But I finally got something stolen on my mission now, so that's kind of cool :)

I was also told this week that I have eyebrows "like eagles wings"... I'm not too sure how to take that, but the lady that told me that was jealous of my brows (at least it's not one brow), so I guess it's a good things :)

We had a really good Zone Conference last week. One of the Elders that came out with me and that I worked around a lot in one of my areas is now an Assistant to the President, so it was fun hearing him give us an instruction. It was pretty crazy though. He went from District Leader to AP at 10 months. The guy is a beast :)

But the chapel that we had the meeting at was sweet. It used to be a Greek Orthodox church, but they went bankrupt, so the church bought the building at turned it into an LDS church. It's pretty epic. I think it's the only Mormon church where you will find crosses on the pews (The church just left some of the crosses hanging around :)).

The mission is going to have a mission wide Christmas party tomorrow (Christmas Eve), so that will be a lot of fun. Our district is going to perform a musical number, so we'll see how that goes ;)

I'm pretty stoked for Christmas, not just because it's a wonderful time to remember what Christ has done for us, but because I get to Skype my family. Woo!! 

TTYL and merry Christ-mas! Don't forget Who that day is named after :)

Love,

Elder Roderer

Biking in da snow!

December 16, 2013

Hey everybody!

So this past week was pretty great! While on an exchange with the District Leader, we worked at a soup kitchen for a couple of hours. That was a fun and different experience. There are some funny people that come into soup kitchens, especially in Detroit. But it was a lot of fun, and I totally would do it again.

We were going to have our Branch Christmas party last Saturday, but it ended up getting canceled because we got like 8 inches of "treacherous Utah like snow", so we just turned it into a linger longer after church the next day. It was/is CRAZY biking in the snow though! Biking in snow is so much harder than you would think. Literally everything makes you almost wipe out. It's so much fun! But the city of Detroit stinks at plowing. All they did is dump massive amounts of salt on the road without plowing first. It was funny, because it was just somebody who had a pickup with a plow that ended up being the one clearing the street we live on. Gotta love the D :)

But yeah, it's pretty cold outside, and our heat doesn't work, so that's nice :) I am surviving the cold quite well! If I get cold, I just need to bike for a few minutes and then I'm sweating, which makes me get cold again when we stop. It's a process ;)

We had a fun experience with getting a headquarter referral. So we get a text from HQ (BYU) telling us that a person in our area requested a Bible. Of course she lives at the farthest corner of our area, but we bike the 30 or so minutes to her house only to find that she wasn't there. Then we had the brilliant idea to call her. So we do that, and she asks us to just leave the Bible on her steps. We were like ...Rats, now we can't even share our message with her. So what I did was I took a Book of Mormon pass-along card, stuck it in Isaiah 29, and underlined the chapter heading (Look it up). We'll  see if anything comes of it :)

Anyways, That's my letter for the week :)                    

                                                                                                   (What we do to District Leaders in Detroit)

I'll talk to you all next week!

Hello From Detroit

Hey everybody!

So this week was great! My new area is legit, and my new companion is even legiter...

But for real, Elder Fox is a stud. He is from San Francisco, California, He has been out about 5 months, and he is just a lot of fun to be around. People ask him "what does the fox say?" all the time. (It's from some new super popular video on youtube) It's pretty funny.

The Branch is sweet too!

So this week, I found out that Safety Kids are actually a real thing. I had no idea, but we saw some while we were biking past a school.

I went on an exchanges with the other Elders in the Branch the other day, and it was a lot of fun. There is some extreme diversity in Detroit. One street you have ghetto everything, and then the next you have million dollar

houses. It's fun :) But on the exchange, I found the most disgusting cake EVER! It was crazy.

It snowed some yesterday, but only like half an inch.

The Christmas Devotional was AMAZING! Everybody should totally watch it.

So I got another flat tire this week. I'm getting kind of sick of flat tires, so I bought a super thick tube to hopefully get rid of some of the flats. It's 4mm thick and thorn resistant. The problem is that I haven't seen any thorns in Detroit, just broken glass, so it was probably a vain investment :)

Anyways, I'll try to have many more fun stories for next week ;)

 

Thanks!

 

Elder Roderer

 

New Area

December 3, 2013

Hello everybody!

So I got transferred to a new area after being in Detroit River for only 1 transfer. It's kind of lame that I spent such a short time there, but it's okay because I'm still in Detroit, just in a different part really close to my first area. I'm still in a bike area, so that's cool I guess. I was hoping for a car now that winter is coming, but I guess that's not what the Lord wanted :) Elder Leonard had to train, and President feels that being trained in a trio isn't the best route to go, so I got shipped out.

But anyways, my new area is Belle Isle Central in the Belle Isle branch that apparently has more active members than pretty much any other Ward that I've been in on my mission, so that's pretty sweet. My new companion is

Elder Fox, and he is pretty awesome! This will be his 4th transfer, so he has been out about half as long as me, and I am super excited to be able to work with him in this area!

So since I've been in my new area for like two hours, there is not a lot to tell you about it, so I'll tell you some things that happened in my last area :)

Now that it has become winter, the heaters (which are old school radiators) in our flat decided it would be a good time to stop working; so they did just that. So we didn't have heat for a couple of days, until one of the other areas in the branch with working heat, gave us some space heaters, and that kept the apartment around 60 degrees at night, which was a good improvement.

One of our investigators recommended that we try this taco bus that was just down the street. We had seen it lots before, but we never decided to try it until then. It turned out that they sell super yummy tacos for $1.00 each, so I got two of them and decided that I would make many more visits to this wonderful bus... Except that it vanished the rest of the time I was in that area. It made me pretty sad.

We got a little bit of snow last week that stuck around for a couple of days, so we had a lot of fun fishtailing our bikes on the slippery road. At one point we decided to try to spin 180 degrees while riding. I did it just fine, and then Elder Romero tried it. He almost made it, but when he put his foot down after doing the 180, it slipped out from underneath him, and he fell over and just sat there groaning for a bit. I almost passed out and fell down too from laughing so hard. He was fine though, so it was okay :)

Yesterday for the last couple hours of out P-day, we went to a super cool member's house who's birthday was that day (he turned 16) and played a few games of Yu-Gi-Oh. I was kind of completely lost, so really it was him playing against his older brother, with two of us missionaries holding the cards, but it was still fun :)

So anyways, that's my update! :) Thx for reading!

Elder Roderer

BTW, my new address is:

3500 Bluehill St. #207

Detroit, MI 48224