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