25 May 2015

I think that this week involved the least tracting and visiting yet on my mission. There were several days without! On Tuesday, Elder Mackey had a doctor's appointment at a hospital, which ended up taking two or three hours. The actual time spent with the doctor was under five minutes, but factoring all the waiting and driving time, three hours. Then, we had to go all the way over to the other side of the mission to order a prescription, then all the way over elsewhere to get his contact lenses. Funny thing- we arrived just as they were closing. Literally exactly at closing time. They had already locked the door, but let us in anyway just for the pickup. Then, we did more service for the Wilson's- moving their fridge so they could paint behind it. While we were waiting, we trained their dog to jump in their pool. You know, basic community service. Then, we had dinner at the Cabo grill. There, I saw the biggest burrito I'd ever seen in my life. That thing was the size of a Duraflame log, easily. The five biggest burritos I've ever seen in my life have all been here, and I keep seeing bigger ones. It's crazy! That night, we went and visited a ward missionary, and got to listen to some of his Vietnam war stories. Apparently, at one point the plane he was in was shot down over enemy territory, and he and the pilot had to hike 50 miles back to their lines, carrying the copilot (he was the navigator). 

Wednesday, we ended up doing a lot of cleaning. A LOT of cleaning. Ever since Elder Mackey came in, the apartment fell into a death spiral when it came to cleanliness. Then, we drove all the way to the other side of the mission and back to pick up the prescription Elder Mackey had ordered the day before. The whole day got spent doing those two things! After that, we had a Book of Mormon study class that we are starting to teach with the Brea 3 sisters. There was a pretty good turnout, surprisingly: 8 people by the end. 

Everything we did on Thursday took hours. First came district meeting, from 9 till 12. Then came lunch, but we went to B-dubs, which took two hours (the first hour was spent just waiting for the food; B-dubs is horrible when it comes to that). Finally, we did online iPad training until dinner, and then more iPad training after. All in all, a very uneventful day. 

Friday was a very long day. We woke up super early to do an early morning seminary lesson, on hastening the work. Apparently, the teacher thought we'd be a good teacher for that sort of lesson. Then, we did some last minute cleaning on the apartment, and had an inspection. Elder Mackey was exhausted at that point, and took a nap until dinner after that. During that nap, I was super bored, and wrote a history of the area, purely to alleviate the boredom. To round off the day, we had a lesson with our investigator, Emily. She is super ready for baptism, but her family is dragging their heels and trying everything to slow her down, short of tying her up or forbidding her to leave the house. I mean, EVERYTHING!!! We are hoping to meet with them so we can talk, but so far no luck on that. 

On Saturday, we did exactly two things. We did weekly planning, then went over for service at a part member family's house. Have you ever seen a chain-link fence that has red plastic strips woven through it so you can't see through it? It's quite a look, but each strip takes about a minute to weave, and you have to use nearly a thousand of them. Even with four of us going, we were only 2/3 of the way done by the end of the day. It was a lot of work!

A lot happened in a very little time on Sunday. At church, at the class we teach, we had two people show up for the first ten minutes. One of them was a longtime  investigator (sort of) who had agreed to listen to the lessons before, then vanished for a while, then started coming back to church. The lessons stopped after that, and that was a year ago. He has come to church every week that he can since, and is super solid. So much so that when we asked if he wanted to be baptized today, he said yes, right off the bat. He hasn't been individually taught like an investigator in a year, so this was super exciting! We taught him the restoration lesson in class, and set a date for him- June 20, the same day as another investigator we have, Emily. A while later, we ended up going back to the church because a recent convert that my companion baptized a long while back said she had some questions that she wanted answered then. Unfortunately, she wasn't there, but we still hung out for a few minutes at the YSA's "Linger Longer" activity. As far as I could tell, the whole thing there was that the church would provide a quick meal, and all the YSA would hang out and talk. Apparently, it's the ward's headcount reduction method. At Persian that night with Sister Christensen, I noticed something interesting, too. If you go to the gospel library's home screen, where it gives you the option to select scriptures, general conference talks, etc. and you go to Settings, then Content, if you select Persian and go to the April 2015 conference, Saturday morning session, Linda K. Burton's talk "We'll ascend together" and listen to the audio of that, you can hear Sister Christensen translating it! She did a few talks, but that is the only one I know of for certain.