4 June 2018

For some reason, my email is limiting me to sending this to 4 people, so spreading it to others who'd like to hear would be great.

This was probably the hardest week that I've had so far in my mission. Friday was really the hardest part of it all. We've not found many investigators this week, and so we had a big day of tracting planned out. 7 hours of it. From this, we ended up with only 8 doors being opened at all, 3 Hispanics, and only one of those was interested at all in learning more. However, Saturday helped make up for that. It was one of the best days I've had out here. It started out by going out tracting from 10-12 and not being able to find anyone who would open the door, let alone Hispanics. So we decided to go store contacting. We found a little Mexican store, and walked around it for a minute. A girl who worked there walked up to us and asked if we needed any help. (In English) I responded in Spanish asking the price of a drink. She told me, but then commented on how good my Spanish was and asked how I learned. We then talked about how we were serving missions for our church and taught her a bit about the Restoration. She wasn't super interested, but we gave her a card with the church address and time it started on it, as well as our number. As Elder Hull was checking out, the lady at the counter asked us how we learned Spanish and so we went through the whole missionary spiel again. She immediately turned to the girl we'd been talking to earlier and said something to the effect of how she needed to go to church because she hadn't been in a long time. She then told us to give the first girl a card from our church, and then she demanded that the first goal go to our church and how she would go with her.  We think she was the first girl's mom, but we weren't sure and didn't ask. They didn't make it to church this week, but we hope they'll make it soon. After lunch, we went out to go knock some more doors, but decided instead to go and visit someone who we hadn't been able to get up with before. As we're walking down this trailer park, an ice cream truck is driving by us on the street. Right after he passed us, he leaned out the window and yelled, gesturing to the other side of the truck, "Hey, c'mere!" Fearing getting yelled at, but hoping for ice cream, we walked around it. Inside was a Hispanic man dressed as Mario who asked if we wanted slushies. We told him that we didn't have any money with us, but he said, "Es gratis!" We glady accepted our free slushies. As he was giving us them, a little kid who Elder Hull recognized as the investigator's nephew walked up to get some ice cream. We asked if Christian (the investigator) was home and he told us that he was. So we went and talked to him about baptism, and he said that he would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it and Joseph Smith and if he should get baptized. That was pretty great. We also found out that his member friend was taking him to church the next day as well. We knocked doors for a while and then headed to dinner at the chapel, which was followed by a musical devotional from a missionary who had served here about 4 years ago. It was really good. Afterwards, we went back out to Knightdale and were about to knock some more, but felt like we should go visit someone else who had previously brushed off our return appointment. We did, and not only was he there, he invited us right in! We got to talk to him and his wife about the Restoration, and by the end he asked how could get a Book of Mormon. He was surprised when I handed him the copy I was holding, and promised that he would read and pray about it. He also said that he'd go to church. He didn't show up, but we have another appointment with him to check up with him on. That finished up the night! It was pretty great. 

Earlier in the week I went on exchanges with another elder in my district. It was pretty interesting. We only found one person who was interested, but we found some very interesting people. The first one we met was a Satanist. That was very odd, and neither of us knew quite how to respond to him. He said that he was too busy to talk, and wished us a good day. Of course, we could see the game running in the background. Very busy. Later that night, we got caught by a group of drunk and possibly high people. One of them kept asking us if smoking weed was a sin, another kept spouting off about how Elon Musk was a prophet because he was going to take people to Mars, and the other one was mixed between yelling at the prophet one about him not being a prophet, how what he liked to do was drink, smoke, swear a lot, and **** *******, telling us how he used to be a Jehovah's Witness but now wasn't, and him telling us that we hadn't answered his questions. We had answered them to the best of our ability, but they were really weird and didn't make much sense at all. We excused ourselves from that as expiditiously as possible, but it took a while to extricate ourselves from that. It was a mix between unnerving because it was a drunk man getting up in our faces and really funny because of the kind of things that the Elon Musk prophet one was saying, which also included how "weed couldn't be bad because they found it growing on King Solomon's grave." That was just a weird day. Other than that, I can't think of much more that happened this week. Oh yeah, we did  find an abandoned lawnmower thrown into a creekbed and Christian just had his bearded dragon hanging out on his porch. And the closest parking job I've ever seen without them touching. A thick piece of paper might not make it through that.