4 February 2019

So I now have done my first week in Clinton. It's bigger than Wallace, but that isn't a very difficult feat. Still, it has some more stuff. We'll just have to figure out something to do on P-Days now... Anyway, on to the week.

It started off with getting the apartment cleaned out and throwing out a lot of food. Wallace got shut down due to a lack of missionaries, and we had to clean out everything, and the APs were very insistent that everything be taken out. Nothing was allowed to stay. The rest of the day was saying bye to the members and finishing up our cleaning. 

Tuesday rolled around and that meant it was time for the hour and a half drive to Raleigh. I'd picked up quite a bit of stuff in my months in Wallace, and Elder Reynolds also had a lot, plus all of the stuff that had to be taken out. (Mostly the food.) So, the Malibu was riding pretty low. And got terrible gas mileage all the way to Raleigh. But we made it, and I got my new companion, Elder Rivas. He's from Utah and has been out for eight months. So we went and headed off to Clinton, where I was almost overwhelmed by the size. A whole whoppin 8,600 according to Google Maps. It did feel a lot bigger though. The apartment is interesting. We're next door neighbors to our branch president, and it's not an apartment. It's actually a little stand-alone house. That's really nice because we don't have to worry about loud neighbors or anything like that. 

Throughout the week I've mostly been getting to know the people we're teaching. We've got some really good people, and we set a baptismal date for someone named Cornelius. He's a really nice guy, he just needs to stop smoking. I also had my first online lesson with someone named Esther. She's been learning from the missionaries for a long time now, but just hasn't taken the steps to develop her faith all the way. We're trying to encourage her to read the Book of Mormon, as that's been the hardest thing for her to do. She's a college student with a kid, so it's understandable that she's busy. The lesson was just us reading the Book of Mormon with her, and that was interesting. Doing it over Facebook Messenger gives you kind of a weird seperation, and the connection dropped at one point. Still, she liked it and ended up coming to church. 

Speaking of Sunday, we went to someone's house who we'd set up a return appointment with only to find that there were a bunch of 20 ish year olds there as well. We were pleasantly surprised at how well they received us, and they had a lot of good questions about what it was like to be a missionary. Two of them were 20, and it was hard for them to think about what it would be like to just give up two years of your life to go and preach the gospel. This was made even better by the baliadas the mom had made us. We won't be able to keep teaching any of the kids because they had to go back to school the next day across NC, but hopefully they'll remember what they heard when other missionaries find them down the road. 

I think that's all the major news for this week, I'll keep you all informed!

(Oh, yeah, I hit my 18 month mark this week too. I forgot about that.)