Monday, May 18, 2015

18 May 2015

Things have been going by incredibly quickly. This whole week lasted less than a few seconds, or so it seems. Which is weird, because not too much has been happening. On Tuesday, we spent the whole day finding. We met with a bunch of members to try and get referrals and to get a plan for the ward mission effort, and visited half the less actives in the ward. One of the ward missionaries that we met with had a whole bunch of stories to tell about crashing his motorcycle and kicking in car doors while going 70 on the freeway, too. He's quite a character.

Wednesday, we had zone conference. That went from 9 am to 3 pm. We learned a lot, but a 6 hour meeting is never fun. President Taggart talked about a lot of stuff, from charity to mold to faith, and everything in between. Right after the conference, we went out to a lesson with the zone leaders with a guy that we are passing off to them. He has an interesting backstory, to say the least. He's been meeting with the missionaries since he was 14. That wouldn't be a problem, except that he is 19. He's made no progress in the last few years because we can't meet with him because we don't have his number, and he is never home. That proved to be true today too, and so we just sent the records to the zone leaders and let them have free reign with him. Then came dinner, then a lesson with our most progressing investigator, Emily. She has a date set for baptism, but she was very hesitant about it, and not very informative about why. Her parents are against her being baptized, but we hope to meet with them soon and figure out why, and how we can help. We ended up giving Emily a blessing that she would be able to receive an answer from God about her baptismal date, and assigned her to write down some questions she had about anything. 

Thursday was a very, very long day. Last night, after the lesson, Elder Mackey and one of the guys we brought to the lesson, Josiah, were joking around and tried to flip Jaina's car (she came to the lesson too). Elder Mackey said that he felt a pinch in his back while trying to flip the car, and ignored it. Apparently, that was a mistake, as he could barely get out of bed today. We ended up sitting around the apartment doing nothing until 3, when we had a lesson with Trent, another eternal investigator. He's been meeting with us for a year, and hasn't made any progress in a while because we can't meet with him. He is in college, and has a crazy schedule. We brought the zone leaders to the lesson because they are in the YSA ward, and Trent is old enough to go there. He more or less said no to that, but we still had a good lesson. He has some holdups about getting baptized, such as the church's stance on some issues. We tried to address them, and set him on date to determine whether or not he wanted to be on date to get baptized. Trent had refused to commit to a baptismal date until he was certain he wanted to get baptized, so this was the best we could do. Other than that, I spent the whole day practicing my solitaire skills.

On Friday, we had weekly planning. We didn't get very much of that done before Elder Mackey had a doctor's appointment (not for his back). That took two hours. Afterwards, we did more planning until dinner. We had another lesson with Emily. This was a really good one, because she went above and beyond with the questions we asked her to write. She wrote down 10 questions that really showed where she had problems, and how we could help. That was unprecedented when it comes to investigators. We answered a few of them as well as we could before running out of time, and are going to seriously prepare for the next few. Emily said she had received an answer to baptism- she was pushing it back 3 weeks.

We spent Saturday doing loads of service. We started out early at a part-member family's house, planting trees and moving a cabinet. The Orlands are a lot of fun- they are an older couple who love having us over, but mostly for the conversation. They cook really well, though. Sister Orland was less active, but since we started doing service for them, has actually reactivated, and comes to church! We borrowed a saw from the Hill family to reduce some boards at the Orlands down, but we had another project scheduled before we could use it. At the Wilson's, we helped them do a lot of painting. She is repainting her kitchen white, gray, and light green. All of the cabinets are being painted gray, which is what we did there today. We went right back to the Orlands after finishing there, and sawed some lumber. Sister Orland had some boxed bikes for her grandchildren, and needed us to assemble them. We did that fairly quickly, but they were still unridable because their spokes and brakes were way off. We had an amazing lunch there with their grandchildren, and told loads of jokes. Then, we visited all the ward missionaries, then finalized our weekly planning. We went to dinner, then dropped by the Christensen's to see if they still needed our help with something they'd called about an hour ago, while we were in the middle of something. They didn't, but we were invited to study scriptures with them, which we did. 

Sunday was not the most thrilling day of the week. We had ward council in the morning, then church. We tried visiting a few people, but no one was home. Then, we had a general ward missionary meeting. We discussed what was going on at the fifth Sunday activity in church that we are doing on the 31st, and who was speaking on what. We have two less actives in the ward missionary group, and one of them showed up for the meeting! Right after that was dinner, which was a little more exciting than usual. One of the family's kids had just been baptized, and they had gone all-out. They had a bounce house, a cotton candy maker, and 8 rowdy kids bouncing around. It was loads of fun. After dinner, we ended up teaching all of them how to play Mafia. Then, we had a lesson with Andy, our recent convert. That went well, and then we went to Persian, where the Christensen's had some relatives over. Crazy week!

No comments:

Post a Comment