Hello Family. This week was rather uneventful as they all seem to be lately. I did get your letter mom, I've noticed that it takes approximately 10 days to receive a letter from y'all, that is if you sent it the same day you wrote it. Though I got Dad's letter pretty fast within 4 days (by the way that was an excellent letter dad, thank you). So maybe the office isn't the best way to go. When I get to my new area (which should hopefully be in a couple of weeks). I'll give you the address for the apartment so I don't have to put up with this slowness anymore.
So as I said this week was slow and uneventful, we don't have any progressing investigators, we've had to do a lot of finding this week. Last Tuesday we had a throw down with Gionvanni Dubon, I'm not sure what happened but he flipped out a bit. He has this obnoxious habit of liking to bash and catch people in their words. He brought up the Word of Wisdom and how we're all hypocrites because we drink coca-cola. Now when Elder Woodruff and I had taught him that nearly a month ago he had no problem with it and he understood it just fine and we cleared up all his questions and he committed to live it. Now he brought it up again. I told him very plainly that we can't drink coffee or tea, we can drink all the coca-cola or caffeinated beverages we want, it's probably not that good for you but we don't have a commandment forbidding caffeine, just coffee and tea. We had a member with us and we spent twenty minutes on that subject. We all told him that we obey commandments because of faith, you don't always have to know the details of why or why not. Like in Old Testament times why did the Israelites have commandments not to eat pigs, dolphins, rabbits, and various other kinds of animals? There's nothing wrong with the meat of those animals, they had it just because Jehovah said so. So today when we don't know necessarily why coffee or tea is bad for us we obey it anyway because we trust God.
Then we got into the Book of Mormon again and it came down to "it's hard me to accept new things". A lame excuse, first he was like "you guys don't know, you were born in the church!" Our member and Elder Ordaz then reminded him that they in fact were converts... Then he was like "uhh.... well... Rice! He's not a convert! He can't possibly understand what I'm going through! And you two are young I'm 40something years old blah blah blah!" Yeah... That was a long night, he was on one. It was the first time on my mission I'd been angry during a lesson. I was getting really tired of him, we've been doing this with him for the past 7 months and it's getting really really old. I didn't actually get mad during it, I didn't say anything to reveal my anger I just stared directly into his eyes and bored holes through his pupils he wouldn't look at me straight in the eyes after a few minutes. I want to drop him and let him just sit for a month or so and then go back and see how he's doing but Elder Ordaz doesn't want to drop him because of Gionvanni's two teenage daughters... yup... That's my companion... We spent the rest of week finding and tracting and generally not getting much success at all, I hate this area now. I need to leave before I go insane, there's nothing here.
On saturday we had some fun though. The english elders invited us along to go help out this part member family. They lived deep within the depths of Cut-N-Shoot and we spent the whole day clearing out forest from their property. It was too much fun, we were armed with machetes, axes, hatchets, chainsaws, lawnmowers, clippers, you name it. We had just about every sort of sharp and pointy cutting tool imaginable. If you can imagine 6 missionaries armed to the teeth and running around hacking at every green or brown thing in sight all of them screaming war cries and generally just destroying everything, that was us. We demolished so many trees and vines and everything and even after 6 hours we barely made a dent in that jungle, we're going back soon sometime though, I can't wait.
Yeah that was basically the highlight of the week, other than that mostly boringness, and rain. Lots and lots of rain. It was bizarre, this one day it rained brutally hard for 20 minutes, stopped. The sun came out and dried up everything and then a half hour later the rain came back out of nowhere. This cycle continued all day, it was the weirdest thing.
Oh and Beth Breeland tracked me down yesterday, I did get your letter mom and when I read that part about her I was like yeah-sure-okay-whatever. But sure enough I was just sitting in sacrament meeting yesterday zoning out and when the service ended she tapped me on the shoulder and was right there. I'm not sure how she tracked me down but she'd probably be a good bounty hunter or something. So that's that picture up there.
Well that's all for this week, hopefully something amazing will happen this week or there won't be much for me to write about next monday. I love you all, bye.
-- Elder Rice
No comments:
Post a Comment