Elder Kaden Rees

This week was great. On Wednesday I went on an exchange with Elder Zhu. He is from FuJian, China. He moved to Manhattan in 2017 and joined the church a year and a half ago. He is already 24 years old and has a lot of life experiences. Before he was converted to the gospel he was heavy into smoking and drinking so his testimony of the word of wisdom is very powerful. During the exchange we were on bikes and we did some finding at the park. While we were there we saw some Chinese dudes shooting hoops so I asked if one of them wanted to play. This guy was like 5'6 but insane at basketball. He was lights out from three and super quick. It started pretty light but after he started making shots I kicked it into gear. It got a little too intense however, because playing streetball in church shoes resulted in me getting pretty bad blood blisters on both my feet. Once I stepped off the court I took my shoes off to find my socks covered in blood. Wasn't so fun biking home after that, but...

This week we had a zone conference, a mission leadership meeting and went to the temple visitors center, so it was pretty eventful. During the Zone conference our whole mission went to a cemetery in Glendale called Forest Lawn. There are some famous people buried there like Walt Disney, Michael Jackson, and Jimmy Stewart.  At Forest Lawn there is a massive beautiful painting of Jesus Christ on Golgotha before he is crucified. The painting is called the Crucifixion, and it is 195 feet wide and 45 feet tall. It is the biggest painting in the western United states. It is so big they built a massive theater just to showcase it. After our mission got to see the painting we walked up to another part of the cemetery and had a devotional in front of a statue of Christ. It was quite a spiritual experience.  Yesterday we also went to the LA temple with our friend David. He is planning on getting baptized may 12! Scripture of the Week: 1 Nephi 1:12 And it came to pass that as he read, he...