Wherever I May Roam

October 19, 2009

Wherever I May Roam

Well.... I guess we get to e-mail again today... We had nothing else to do right now while it's still P-Day and we all got in the car and showed up here at the library so I guess we're here to e-mail again...

Anyway I guess I could tell you about other things. Last Week one of the English Elders who lives in another apartment a couple blocks away from us, Elder Pitts, was doing his laundry in ours because they don't have a washer or Dryer I guess, and he flooded our apartment somehow. We were just sitting in the front room talking when Elder Astin got up to go into the kitchen when he noticed that it was underwater. Well almost underwater, like 1 inch of water on the floor and it was spreading fast under the carpet. He panicked and all of this commotion starts, one of the bathrooms flooded too, and the carpet in our room and in the sitting room was soaked. It was a nightmare, but I was just laughing the whole time. We had to move all the furniture and we spent all night cleaning that up as best we could. We're not exactly sure what caused the flooding, if it was the washer that overflowed or something else but the apartment people tell us that it is the washer and the next they came and tore up the apartment the remove the soaked pads underneath and they're supposed to replace them tomorrow. So we've spent about a week with our furniture stacked in a corner or outside of the apartment in a little shelter thing. So yeah it's pretty annoying.

Oh let me tell you about my first real tracting. So we rode our bikes out to this ghetto trailer park where one of our appointments were, she wasn't there, as usual. So instead of riding all the way back we decided to tract the place. And we did, it was a little scary. We spent most of our time warding off mangy dogs by bending down as if we were picking up rocks to throw at them. Turns out that everyone living there was from Honduras, we talked to this one guy who had gray eyes and sounded like Dracula speaking spanish, we talked to another lady who was washing her dishes in a little stream that ran behind her trailer. And in a driveway there were like 6 guys sitting around with lot of beer and whatnot, drinking and they had their car playing Lady In Red really loud. That was funny, we went up talk to them and I accidentally knocked over one of their half full bottles that was on the ground while I was trying to shake everyone's hand. I hastily tried to apologize but they were cool with it, they were pretty chill in general and they actually wanted to hear our message (another time). Then we went to another trailer and this time we actually got let in and we taught the first lesson about the restoration. Which was neat, it's not often that tracting actually gets any results, Elder Astin was telling me that 1 out of every 600 converts are found through tracting. I'm not sure where he got that statistic from but it seems pretty accurate to me after doing all that tracting. That lesson went well, it was some guy who was 19, was going to school and his two sisters that went to High School, they spoke good english and preferred to be taught in english, which was a blessing. They were really interested and wanted us to come back and teach them again. Which is what we will do this week. Elder Astin said that teaching young people are the best because they are "uncorrupted by the traditions of their fathers" which seemed true.

So today was P-Day, we kinda just drove to the mall with the english Elders and wandered around and then went to random places like sports centers and wandered around looking at stuff in them. That's what both of our P-Days have been so far, which is fine with me. It's nice to be out in the real world and seeing normal people. The first time it was really weird because I had been the MTC for two months and been around people in only white shirts and ties the whole time. Now we're supposed to go around in our proselyting clothes all the time but nobody ever does, so it was nice to wander around in jeans and a T-shirt. Speaking of which can you send me a couple of my T-shirts? I don't care which ones, the ones I brought the MTC were lost in mysterious ways. I even lost my Scotland shirt there, I was devastated, that was my favorite shirt. I'm still convinced that someone stole it. And could you send me another pair of my jeans? That would be nice, the ones I brought are the baggy beaten pair for service that I still haven't done yet. We're supposed to get in like 4 hours of service a week but we haven't done any. I don't know why, I still don't know how things work in the mission.

Today we're to have exchanges, exchanges are dumb. I don't know why we do them, it's just when you spend a day with another missionary, so I have to pack a few things and I'm going to spend this evening through tomorrow morning with one of the Zone Leaders down in this place called Glenloch. It's a dumb idea of you ask me, lots of inconvenience when it comes to plans and whatnot. We just did one a few days ago and I went on an exchange with Elder Pitts, which was pretty pointless, we didn't do much. At not only is it inconvenient that but the Zone Leaders are english missionaries! So whatever it is that we will be doing tonight and tomorrow won't involve me teaching hispanics. How am I going to learn spanish when I keep going on these dumb exchanges with english missionaries all the time? Lame... Whatever...

Well I still got 30 minutes what else could I share? Oh I know, how about something more spiritual? We have one investigator name Rey De Paz, he's a nice guy and his family is really nice too. He reads a lot from the Book of Mormon and every time we go over he has a billion questions. Well on Wednesday we went with the ward mission leader. And as usual he had lots of questions about things he had read. I didn't say much, or anything at all, I was just trying to figure out what was going on. But after an hour or so the discussion got rather heated. From what I can tell they were talking about interpretations of scriptures and that Rey thought that a certain scripture meant something inconsistent with our doctrine and blah blah blah. So like I said the discussion was rather heated and I was wondering what we should do. We as missionaries are not there to discuss doctrinal issues with people, we're to teach them a few simple things and help them build their faith and lead them to baptism. Anyway I think the spirit was nudging me to say something about how the discussion at hand wasn't important. I was thinking of what to say and then how to say it in spanish when Elder Astin bore his testimony about the truth of the Book of Mormon and something else that I didn't quite get. It was a powerful testimony, and in the pause that followed I decided to pitch in. In my best broken spanish I told Rey that there are a lot things in the scriptures that we don't understand right away, there are things in life we don't understand. I then turned to 1st Nephi, the part where the angel shows Nephi all that stuff about Lehi's dream. I shared with him the scripture where the Angel asks Nephi if he knows about the condescension of God, and Nephi replies that he knows that God loves his children but he didn't know the meaning of all things. Then I said that I am like Nephi, I don't the meaning of all things, Heck, I don't know much about anything at all. But if there is one I do know, it's that God loves us, that's why he created his plan for us and even though I may not understand everything in scriptures very well the knowledge that God loves us is all that I need to know. I told him that and felt the spirit really strong, I think Rey did too, we ended there and he said the closing prayer and again I felt the spirit rather strong, he started crying in the middle of the prayer he was saying. So I guess we did good, we made a return appointment an parted on good terms.

Whoah out of time.
--Elder Rice