28 Dec 2015

Well I forgot my journal today so this might end up being a much shorter E-mail.

Monday- I can only remember a couple of things but I know we went to the Idaho Museum for p-day. We had a recent convert family come with us. The museum was doing a big Christmas around the world and had all these different nativity sets and stuff. It was pretty neat. The weirdest part is one of our Ward missionaries was there and he and his wife were doing a musical accompaniment and they were crazy good. The only other thing I remember doing that day was dinner with a less active family. This family is a different situation. They have faith in the church and believe it, but refuse to go to church because several times they have been severely hurt by church members. The last time was much more extreme than anything I've heard of before but the situation ended up bankrupting them. I've heard a lot of stories out here about people refusing to go to church because a bishop or a member offended them. So I just want to stress the importance of following your baptismal covenants and striving to be a Christ-like person. People associate the truthfulness of the gospel with how the church members behave. That shouldn't be the case but at the same time we have made promises to stand as witnesses of Christ and be an example of Him. These last few weeks have been a huge testimony builder for me of the importance of charity.

Tuesday- Today we did just about nothing, Elder Gillespie was having severe back pains so we didn't get out until dinner time, and we didn't have any lessons today and I kind of hated it, but I'm not going to push my comp and make him more injured. I mostly just had a study day. I read through 2 Nephi 24 to 32 and I think that 28 and 29 might be some of my favorite chapters.

Wednesday- Today we met one of the craziest investigators I've had and I mean that in the best way. He went to church last sunday before we ever even met this guy. He went to church and just said to the bishop, "how do i get baptized?" Anyway that's how we got the lead we met him in his ummm office. He grows mushrooms for a living. His office is on the top floor of this ginormous old building. We couldn't get up there through the stairs so we had to take this sketchy elevator and as soon as the doors open you see walls that are falling apart and we just thought, "this couldn't be the right place" until we heard music coming down the hall. We met Jason. He's been investigating churches for 20 odd years, but he's way beyond the basics and we went into talking about the Apocrypha and all these other things that aren't bad to talk about but we should focus on more of the basics. The other lesson we had was with like 9 children at once. We had a big lunch/breakfast meal then shared a lesson to all of them. They listened surprisingly well for having that many kids in one room.

Thursday- once again not much happened today but that's because it was Christmas Eve!!!! So everyone wanted to be with their families instead of talking to missionaries. In the afternoon we had a p-day/ movie night, we were allowed to watch any G rated movie which ended up being Toy Story 3. Honestly it was just a pretty chill day.

Christmas- Well this was alot busier than Christmas eve. It's supposed to be a preparation day but everyone took it more as a day off. So a lot of people slept in and skipped studies. But one of the highlights was talking to our families. Elder Gillespie and I went over to the Stafford's. The whole time I was talking Elder Gillespie and the Staffords were just laughing about our Wisconsin accent (I guess we sound like Canadians). Afterwards we had lunch and hung out with the Staffords a bit then headed out to the hospital. We had a visit with our boy Eugene and it was awesome to see that he had all these little gifts from people that visited him. We got kind of shewed out of the hospital because the physical therapist wanted to go home for Christmas. He was super nice about it though. After the hospital we had dinner with one of the High Counsel members, Brother Maynes. It was a fun dinner with a really big family; kind of felt like home. We didn't get to stick around for games though because we got called to the visitor's center to sing. Well that's what the text said, only a few missionaries where actually singing/playing instruments. The rest of the night was board games with the zone. Pretty fun Christmas.

Saturday- Kaci Lang's baptism!!! She was an OAY in an active family so we didn't have to do much as far as teaching her. Also the family wanted to plan the baptism themselves. It wasn't bad but could have gone a lot smoother. The mother was giving a talk on Baptism and had a visual aid with food coloring and bleach but it didn't work so that was a little awkward. But the important thing happened and she got baptized. It was an evening baptism to so instead of losing our study time like we normally would, we lost all our proselyting  time instead. So the baptism was all that really went down that day.

Sunday- We gave talks again. I have a feeling this is going to happen a lot on my mission. I talked on the restoration. The youth speaker before me also did, so instead I just decided to focus on testifying of the Book of Mormon. Then Elder Gillespie talked on hastening the work, which I was a little jealous about. That's become one of my favorite topics because being on a mission you realize how important missionary work is and how important the members are in it. We got the coolest thing in gospel doctrine, it's a guide to symbolism in Hebrew writing.  Revelation makes a sense now or at least a little bit. For example, in Hebrew 6 represents something imperfect or incomplete, and instead of good, better, best they repeat 1, 2 or 3 times. So three sixes would be the most imperfect; hence it is the devil's number. After Gospel doctrine we had Kaci's confirmation and that took a while to get to, There were four baby blessings before her confirmation. It was a crazy meeting.

That's all I have for this week, Hope you all had a great Christmas and have a good new year, Love each other, have charity, and have an awesome week.