Beating on Death's Door

December 14th

Dear family and other people,

All goeth all on the southern front. This week was a little bit more interesting that most. Tuesday we got to go to the temple and we had exchanges with the ZL's after that. That was kinda fun, I went with Elder Mccann to his area in the Woodlands, TX. It was weird teaching white people, I could actually understand what they were saying and I was able to speak to them and have them understand me also! It was fun. We went and visited this one less active member, because of some health problem he "can't come to church" and apparently can't go out of his house much either. Now based on the following event I came to the conclusion that perhaps it's good to go to church every sunday after all. So it was like 8:30 and we just wanted to drop in, share a quick scripture and go. We go in there and have a little chit chat with this man but he starts going and going and going off about crazy stuff, he was trying to teach us, he's one of those guys who tries to show off their "massive intellects". Anyway he was telling us that in the pre-mortal life we were already sinners and that based on our sins we were assigned to different planets, and that earth was for all the prideful people and therefore since we are here on earth we were extremely prideful in the pre-mortal life, “children of pride” is what he called it. We were like: Okkkkaaaayyyyy…… sure…. And then he proceeded to tell us that years ago some missionaries like us challenged him on it, and according to him it’s all in the scriptures. His evidence for it was in the book of Job, and he had these missionaries read the book like 5 times and they could not find until he pointed it out for them, later that night I went and found the scripture and it’s just the part where the Lord is talking to Job about how amazing the leviathan (a whale) is and it’s a sign of the Lord’s power, and in the very last verse of that chapter it says that “he (the whale) is king over all the children of pride”. So I guess that based on this verse is where this guy is getting all of this false doctrine from. Thus my conclusion is that if you’re cooped up in your house a lot and don’t go to church you start formulation your own bizarre doctrines and become crazy like this guy, so therefore we ought to go church more regularly so we don’t end up like that guy…

Anyway the rest of this guy’s family came home, his family is super active but he’s not and we managed to stop his monologue to share a quick scripture with them, I shared one of my favorites, a couple of verses in Mosiah 3: where it talks about “listing to obey the evil spirit” I think it’s cool because ‘listing’ is a naval term for when a vessel leans in the water so I have this cool little analogy about not spiritually capsizing. Unfortunately in the Spanish scriptures they don’t have a word equivalent to “listing” they use “opt” so it kind of ruins the whole analogy when I try to share it with Hispanics and I have to end up telling them that in the English scriptures it uses this one word that means this, etc. So I was pretty excited to share it with white people and especially this family, they’re 19 year old son is a Sea Scout and is about to get his equivalent of an Eagle in Sea Scouting and his family is also into sailing and nautical nonsense so they all understood it right off the bat and thus it was good. I was rather pleased with them.

What else happened this week? Hmmm…. Wednesday was rather dull, all of our appointments fell through and we tried to go through our list of contacts and it turns out that half of the addresses and telephone numbers don’t even exist, we tried visiting less actives and ward members too. Also to find that a lot of them don’t exist or had moved out of the ward like 10 years ago, in fact we tried to call this one family using the phone number listed on the ward list and it turned out being the number to the nearest Papa John’s. That was funny. Thursday was similar. Friday was cool though. We had what is called “Navidad en el Barrio”. Where all the missionaries in the mission (except for those in the College Station zone) go this big old warehouse somewhere within downtown Houston for this big huge service project, we wrap presents and stuff for poor families and stuff. And President actually invited us (myself, Elder Porter, Elder Brown, and Elder Lopez) to his house to have breakfast and then all 6 of us would drive down to it. It was the first time in a long time that I’d had a warm breakfast, it was good. Then we went to the thing in Houston. It was my first time in Houston, the city itself but it wasn’t all that big as I had imagined it to be. Anyway the best was that I got to meet up with my fellow comrades who were in the MTC with me and as we were wrapping presents and junk we swapped our epic stories and whatnot, it was from 9-3 so we had a lot of fun.

That’s about all that’s interesting that happened this week. The Home Front sounds like it’s still there, Dixon is still lame and it’s still cold up there. Though that’s crazy that there’s an In-N-Out Burger up there now, oh and happy birthday Dad, kind of delayed but I forgot, and before I forget I might as well say happy birthday to Austin too… Oh man, Austin is gonna be 13?! That’s madness! Austin a teenager? I can’t even imagine that. Christmas time around here is lame, everyone had decorations and stuff and yet there’s no snow so it just looks weird. It feels like late October here, except we have a lot of fog which is cool. Thanks for my jacket and flash drive, it makes doing these e-mails much easier. And I forgot how much I like that jacket, thanks for sending it. So the Christmas tree died? I thought it was fake, how could it die? Seems like we just got it not that long ago. We have a tiny little pathetic fake tree that looks more like a… shrubbery (DUH-NUH!) Christmas week is actually going to be quite fun. Monday will be a half p-day, because the next day is a mission wide P-day in which we’re all going to get together and do stuff like play sports and make gingerbread houses, Wednesday is Mission Temple day where all the missionaries go through the Temple on the same day (that will be fun for the temple workers) And then for Christmas Eve and Christmas day we don’t do anything, including missionary work (yay!) and then after new years we have a mission conference. So a lot of fun coming up. Oh and On Christmas Day my so far appointed calling time is 7:00 pm. Which I think is 6:00pm for y’all. So just be home that night and we will get to talk for an hour. My companion is a dork and is counting down the hours until he gets to call home, he’s dumb like that. Oh thanks to everyone for your generous donations to my well being, that’ll be put to good use here in a couple hours. I’ll be trying to get off actual written letters to everyone (extended family) but that’ll take awhile so don’t be surprised if you get them in like…. February… Or something. Well that’s all got for now. Peace out.

--Elder Rice