This
feels like the longest week on record, largely because p day got moved
up to Thursday. Tuesday, we did loads of tracting, because the 5 visits
we planned all fell through. On the other hand, it was the most
successful tracting day that we've ever had; we taught 3 lessons, and
found 2 people who said that we could come back to teach them. That is
almost unheard of in this area! We were passed a good-looking referral a
while back, but when we knocked on their door, no one answered, so we
called and tried to set something up, but just left a message. We met a
very interesting Jehovah's Witness who was "grounding" when we met him.
We tried to convert each other for an entertaining few minutes, but
ended up leaving each other some literature and going our separate ways.
Now, our car has a Jehovah's Witness booklet, a Quran, and about 50
Books of Mormon in it. Jehovah's Witnesses believe some interesting
things- for example, they refuse blood transfusions. Also while
tracting, we found a teen walking down the street wearing a hoodie- it
was 80 out. We talked to him and left a card.
Wednesday,
we tried again to visit Orlando, the most welcoming guy we've ever met.
We found him in the first 2 weeks I've been out, but haven't talked to
him since because he's either never home or, in this case, was sleeping
and his wife answered the door. After that, we went to volunteer at
another blood drive. Now, last time was the polar opposite of this one.
Then, we were inside a nice, air-conditioned building, and spent the
whole time talking with people and sharing stories, basically having
lots of fun and eating the donors' snacks. This time, the blood drive
was in a truck. The table we were at was right in front of the exhaust
on a 90 degree day. We had a nice canopy cover, but the sun gradually
crept closer and closer, so we had to scoot the table back three times
before our shift was up. Worse, we talked to about 2 people, because all
the donating and recovering was done inside the truck. Worse, they kept
all the snacks out of reach inside the truck! After we were done there,
we went out to visit loads of families. All the visits we had set up
fell through, and no one was home wherever we went. After a while of
that, we went out to visit an eternal investigator, sort of. She's an
older lady who is very nice (she tried to give us a monopoly set), and
loves having us over. Unfortunately, she's single, and so we can't come
in, and we've never actually managed to teach her a whole lesson at once
because she LOVES to talk. We had to turn her down on the monopoly set,
too, but it was a nice interlude in that day. While tracting, we met a
deist who called us servants of Satan, and talked about how the fluoride
in the water was calcifying our pineal glands, and how the world was
run by the power of the devil.
Thursday
was much more fun. We had district meeting, and then washed our car.
One elder in our district, Elder Christiansen, is widely acknowledged to
be the king of car washes. We spent a half hour out behind the church
doing that, then picked up my new orthotics. They feel a little
different, but it's pretty nice not to be rolling my feet inward so much
whenever I walk. Later, we tried to visit more people, but no one was
home. We spent a lot of time tracting, and found another interesting
character: he was dressed to the nines, was carrying a shoulder bag, and
30 seconds after we knocked, threw the door open and asked, "Do you
believe in the ministry of all Christians?"
When he got the expected blank stares and we asked him what he meant,
he just repeated himself. He did it about three times before Elder
Wilding just started testifying about what we believe. Then, the guy
(who never explained what he meant) said, "Well, if you don't believe in
the ministry of all Christians, I have nothing more to say to you."
Then he shut the door, leaving us nonplussed.
Friday,
we had weekly planning. After that, we visited another eternal
investigator, and had the most candid conversation I've ever heard. She
very clearly explained to us that she thought all religions were right
and that religion was not her biggest priority right then. She spent
much more time talking about her new car and its transmission problems.
However, she said that we could come back anytime, so I'm counting that
as a partial victory. Later, while tracting, we knocked on one
particular door. There, the guy who answered left the screen door closed
as we talked, so we couldn't even tell what he looked like. Then, while
talking to him, he decided he was finished talking to us in the middle
of a sentence and just closed the door. We also went down to the mission
office to drop off our car report, and I got the most unexpected news
of my mission. Elder Wilding was dropping off the car report while I
hung out in the office, and Sister Jameson, the mission secretary,
turned to me and asked me to grab Elder Wilding because she had
something to tell me. Visions of visas to India danced before my eyes as
I rushed out to grab Elder Wilding. When we were both in front of
Sister Jameson, she first destroyed my hopes about the visa, then, while
I sweated, wondering if I was in trouble, she explained that one of my
Grandmas and a great grandmother were going to be taking me out to lunch
in a week. Oh, and somehow, she cleared it with the mission president. I
think that the Elders in the next room over could hear my jaw hitting
the floor. In the mission handbook that President Taggart quotes as a
matter of scripture, it very clearly states that we can't have visits
from our families. I have absolutely no idea how she did it, but I am
NOT complaining. Later, we had absolutely nothing planned for that
night, so we tracted. At 8 at night. What's worse, we were in the
richest part of the area, so all the houses looked like they were lifted
straight from a horror movie. Some of them were gigantic, too. You have
not seen big houses until you go to California. They had their own
grounds and gatehouses! One of them was two towers, a portcullis, and a
moat away from being a castle. It was HUGE!
Saturday,
we had a fun service project. Someone built a Mexican-style villa in
the middle of an orange plantation in 1909, but since then the
plantation got plowed under, and the house was abandoned. Fortunately
for the new owners, the house had been lived in since (until 2000), and
so had electricity and modern plumbing. Unfortunately, 15 years of
neglect wrecked the sheetrock. A family in the ward had bought it, and
was restoring it to live in it. They had got a
30x8x10
dumpster, and we filled it to overflowing with all the sheetrock, loose
wood, and various debris we tore out of there. What was even more fun
was the dozen 90 pound bags of plaster leaned up against a wall that we
had to carry 100 feet to the dumpster. What was yet more fun than that
was filling trash cans (the big ones that get picked up by the garbage
trucks) full of junk, dragging them over to the dumpster, then hefting
them overhead to clear the side of the dumpster, then dumping them out
and repeating. After 4 hours of work like
that, we were finally finished. On the way home to clean up, because we
were covered in dust, we got a call from a ward member who needed us to
move a couch for them. After that, we cleaned ourselves up and went out
tracting.
Sunday started out super early because we had ward council before 9:00
church. After teaching our lesson there, we tried to meet up with some
more families. Later, we had dinner with a Disney security manager. He
definitely had some interesting stories. Apparently, Disney has a big
problem with people being drunk and disorderly. He also got to do
escorts for celebrities, like Johnny Depp right after Pirates of the
Caribbean 1 came out, and Michael Jackson. With Michael Jackson, he said
they only got about 100 feet down Main Street before the 20 security
people they had there had to circle him and link arms to keep off the
crowds, and retreat to take him through the back passages. We went to
the Christiansens' again for Persian study, and had a very interesting
discussion. I mean, VERY interesting. As in, one of the highlights of it
was me deciding that I would name a pet skunk Balofasale Gomoshtan,
which is Persian for "to immediately have guests." One of the Sisters
who comes there too had a birthday, so Sister Christiansen had made
strawberry cake, a kind that she had never had before.
Monday
wasn't P-day, so the week felt really long. We started it off by
helping a nonmember move to a different apartment in the same complex.
That was mostly easy, except for the enormous fridge that we had to get
down a flight of stairs. After that, we had to go shopping because we
were out of food, then tried to visit a bunch more families. We had
another very interesting dinner, where we talked about how much fun you
could have on a trampoline, and swapped stories about funny things that
had happened on them. The family was all girls, so they had invited a
nonmember friend to sit in. He was deprived of some of life's most
essential experiences, like root beer. He said that he had never had it
before, and when we got him one, he took one sip, and said that it
tasted like breath mints. That night, I tried cutting my own hair for
the first time. I made a rookie mistake there- I like short hair, so I
decided that a 3/8 would be a good place to start. So until my hair
grows out, I'll be sporting a nice close cut.
Tuesday
was just plain exciting. In the morning, we helped another family move
out, and I learned that one of the missionaries in our district, Elder
Christiansen, is amazing at U-haul tetris. Then, we had loads of free
time again, so we went out tracting. We met quite a few REALLY
interesting people. The first was an Asian named Charles, who was an
evangelical Christian, who lived up to the evangelical part of his
belief. I'm not sure he was a good one though, because he spent the
whole time picking on our beliefs, so we still have no idea what he
believes, except that he told us that he didn't feel that prayer was
necessary because all truth can be found in the bible. Then, we found
the best investigator ever. See, when tracting, it's just a fact of life
that you won't find anyone serious. Elder Wilding has knocked on a few
thousand doors, and never found anyone serious. Then, I came along, and
one of our tracting finds is attending church,
and then we found this new guy. Basically, we knocked on his door, and
he told us he was ex catholic, which is what we hear easily half of the
time. But, when we asked him what he was looking for in a religion, he
told us he was looking for something that felt right, and that he had
investigated several other churches but none of them had that. We talked
for a while, and it was going just like a role play. This was the
tracting equivalent of winning the lottery twice, with one ticket. To
help you understand exactly how awesome he was, he gave us his business
card and requested that we send him reminder emails about the
appointment he set up 3 days later. Then, we gave him a Book of Mormon,
and he said he'd read loads, because he was a big reader. To end, we
said a prayer with him on the doorstep, and as we were leaving, he came
running out and asked if his daughter could sit in on the lesson. This
is the tracting equivalent of a 50,000 carat diamond falling out of the
sky to land at your feet.
Wednesday
was fairly uneventful, because we spent the whole day scouring out the
area book. We went from 100 potentials, down to 20.
Today,
the reason that we had p day right now was a temple trip. We went down
to Newport Beach for a 7 o clock session, which meant getting up at 5.
It was still totally worth it, though.
A few miscellaneous things that I've forgotten to include in other emails:
A
week back, we were at b-dubs, and as we were leaving, we had to cross
the street to get to where we were parked at. As we were crossing, a
redneck in an oversized Ford truck pulled up next to us and yelled, "You
Mormons jaywalking!" Then, to look super cool, he revved the engine and
took off- right into the bumper of the Corolla in front of him. He
totalled its back end, leaving glass everywhere. He showed us!
I've
heard loads of stories about "apos" (really disobedient, short for
apostasy) missionaries who go out and do stuff like go to nightclubs,
but the one that I heard that takes the cake is where one missionary got
a TV and an Xbox, and spent his time playing it. However, he didn't
want to look apos, so he'd make up investigators to talk about. On the
corner of his TV, one pixel would flicker, and so he actually went to
the ward council and talked about this new investigator he'd found,
Jerry Pixel, who'd be on and off about religion. I'm not sure whether or
not it's true, but it definitely jives with everything else I've heard
about him.
While
visiting with a super old member (she served her mission right after
WWII), we were discussing mission slang, and she told us that "trunky"
(homesick) and "green" (new) were still commonly used in 1940! You never
think...
The
craziest thing I've heard all mission: one of the elders in my zone,
Elder Nesom, is from Edmunton, Canada. One of the elders in my
MTC district was the one and only Australian Elder Pollard. Elder Nesom
was talking after district meeting about how his family got a new
Australian elder in their ward. I'm going to be emailing Elder Pollard
about that.
Also,
when I first got out on my mission, I thought that I'd be cooking a
bunch every day. Three days out of the MTC, I thought I'd just be eating
pop-tarts and McDonald's. My first two weeks, I cooked next to nothing
and ate out a bunch. Now, I haven't bought food at a restaurant in a few
weeks, and I'm starting to cook real food. However, sugary cereals are
starting to lose their charm. Any way you could send a few muffin
recipes, especially the pumpkin chocolate chip one? Thanks!
