Another Week :)

Dear everyone,

 

This week was pretty good. I got kicked out of an apartment complex for the first time on my mission. That was really fun.... Not. Funny thing is, we weren't even tracting. We were having a lesson with a referral that requested a Bible. So after getting kicked out of the apartment that didn't have any signs posted except for 'no unauthorized vehicles' by a mega jerk guy on a little golf cart that totally interrupted our lesson and made us leave, we went over to another apartment complex down the street a ways where it is posted private property, no trespassing, no soliciting, and whatever else, but the management is cool with us being in there. We tried the address of a former investigator, and when someone answered the door, the smell of low grade marijuana was OVERPOWERING, like I almost gagged. We don't waste any time asking if so-and-so lives there, which they didn't, so we beat feet out of there. After we walked away, we just stood there taking deep breaths. We pretty much got buzzed just from those couple seconds of being on their doorstep. The sad part is that it was a little kid that answered the door, and living inside that toxic wasteland.

Then a couple of days later, we went tracting first thing in a complex that is really close to our apartment. So the first door we knock on, a lady answers, yells "No Soliciting!" and slams the door. Thing is, as missionaries we actually aren't soliciting, so we didn't think much of it. We get, no joke, three doors down, and a little golf cart drives up. We were thinking "Oh no, not again." So it's the property manager that is in the cart, and she asks us if we are Jehovah's Witnesses, so we said no, and she asks us what church we are from, and we tell her The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and she's like "Oh, the Mormons! How nice!" Then she proceeds to tell us that she knows that we aren't technically soliciting, but the residents take it that way, and she just got a complaint about us (By the first door we knocked on) so she asked us to not come through there anymore :( But she said that we could leave some literature at the front desk, and she would let people come and take it, so that was nice of her.

We're teaching an investigator that is in Michigan for the Summer visiting family with his son, but he lives in Arizona, and he was found and taught by the Elders is his area. So we're meeting with him and have been teaching him while he's here. The only thing that the missionaries in Arizona didn't teach him was tithing and fast offerings. Well, the Area Authority - Elder Dunnigan - signed up to have us over for dinner, so after talking with him a little, we decided to bring Bill (The investigator) along with and just teach him tithing and stuff there. It turned out to be an awesome lesson, and Elder and Sister Dunnigan game some wonderful testimonies of tithing and fasting. Bill was more than willing to commit to obeying that commandment. It was cool, he commented "well, you can't take money with you" so it wasn't a big deal to him at all. He is such a prepared person!

 

We had a lesson with Pamela (The lady we found last week) at the church with our Ward Mission Leader. It went pretty well. She is a very deep and logical thinker (She's a mechanical engineer for a reason) so she had a lot of tougher to answer questions. We asked her to start reading the Book of Mormon last week, and when we had the lesson with her we asked if and how much she was able to read. Most people say "Oh, I skimmed through it" which really means they didn't read, But she was like "Yeah, I was able to read some. I read Moroni." Our jaws just sort of dropped, and we were like "Wait, you read the whole book of Moroni?" She said "Yeah, it wasn't that much." I'm pretty sure that is the most one of my investigators has ever read in a week. It was pretty exciting. We never really got to teach her what we planned. We just answered a few of her questions in Moroni, like infant baptism, the Sacrament, stuff about prayer, and what a broken heart means ('cause he says that you can't get baptized unless you have a broken heart and stuff). It really shouldn't have been as hard to answer those questions as it was, but I think she really appreciated us trying. She really has a desire to know if this is true, and it's great, but it made be feel pretty inadequate after that lesson with my inability to provide very clear explanations. I'm taking my personal studies a little more seriously now, so that's good.

Sunday at church was pretty cool. Two RM's of less than a month gave the talks in Sacrament meeting. The first returned missionary gave a seriously boss talk about the Atonement. It was very inspiring. "The [Spirit] is strong with this one." :) The other RM gave a pretty good talk. It was sort of funny, so he mentions that he was asked to give a talk about a specific talk from the last General Conference, but I don't think he talked about it once. He mostly just shared mission stories. It was still good, but it was interesting to see the difference between the two talks. I guess now I know what to aim for when the time comes :)

 

Thanks for reading!

 

~Elder Roderer