What’s up people on my weekly! Hope you all are doing well! Man this week was freaking nutso. So I’m just gonna start writing and hope I can remember stuff. Should be a party! Hope you enjoy! Everyone in the mission here gives me crap for spending so much time on writing my emails but I don’t care because it’s lit. My companion hasn’t written a weekly email for a year haha. So that’s cool. But yea boy let’s dive into this email!
Trunky Spray
“We’ll bam you”
Elder Pugsley Goofed
Soy Tonto
Tik Tok Exposure
Dominos and Sketchy Peeps
Scavenger Hunt
Cops and Brownies
Concluding Remarks
TRUNKY SPRAY
Okay so trunky spray has been a scary part of my week. So like I mentioned a while ago, this apartment was a sisters apartment for a long time, so we’re finding a bunch of interesting items and such. We found some perfume the sisters had left, and upon our discovery, we changed the name to “trunky spray”. The missionary term “trunky” is what us missionaries refer to those who are quite homesick, meaning that they want to pack their "trunk" and go home, thus being, "trunky". Anyways, we labeled it "trunky spray", because I guess Elders want to go home when they smell perfume.
My first encounter with the spray was when good ‘ol Elder McNeil stopped by here a few weeks ago. He ran into my room and started squirting the spray all over my bed. I was outraged, and was able to pin him down and spray him with it as well so he would smell like a girl all day.
I haven’t had too many problems with the trunky spray, until this week. Elder Powell sprayed me with it and I was super annoyed, so while he was in the bathroom before we went to bed, I sprayed his entire pillow with loads of it. After we said goodnight and he laid down, I waited in great anticipation for him to rage at me. But, there was just silence. And then, he gave a big ‘ol sniff. There was a lot of sniffing for the next 15 minutes haha and I was dying. He secretly likes the trunky spray!
After I sprayed his pillow, I hid the spray in a place where I thought he would never find it.
The next day we were heading out so I went to grab my sweater from my closet. I opened my closet door and just got the biggest whiff of trunky spray. I was outraged. I confronted him and asked if he had sprayed all of my clothes with trunky spray. He was silent, but I could smell the guilt and fear from off of him. Then I became determined not to leave the apartment until I had located the trunky spray and destroyed it and it’s satanic influence. I spent a good 15-20 minutes looking, with no success. We were running late though, so I just went with some “toilet spray” the sisters left behind and sprayed his clothes with it. Still not sure if he knows I did that. But to this moment, I do not know where the trunky spray is, but when I find it, I will be sure to put it somewhere where it can do no more harm.
“WE’LL BAM YOU”
Haha okay so one of my sources of entertainment is this giant facebook group with a ton of missionaries. It’s basically just a group that helps us missionaries receive and send referrals. Everyday people post in there looking for people who speak foreign languages and are serving in foreign areas. But ya anyways me and Elder Pugsley always tag each other on those posts just because it’s funny. People will be like “Anyone speak Swahili?” and then we’ll tag each other haha. Apparently we’ve created a problem because they recently updated the rules for the group, one of them saying that “if you say you are serving somewhere where you aren’t, or can speak something that you don’t we’ll bam you from this group!”. I think they meant to say “ban” but someone goofed and wrote “bam”. So I’ve stopped tagging Elder Pugsley in fear that I will get “bammed”. I don’t want to find out what that entails.
ELDER PUGSLEY GOOFED
This was SO funny. So last night we had a huge zoom call with the entire mission. I privately messaged Elder Pugsley to ask how his kid (trainee) is doing, and he accidentally responded with “bueno” to the whole mission. Me and Elder Powell were crying. It was so funny. I’ll attach a screenshot.
SOY TONTO
So every night we say goodnight and Elder Powell will say “love you Elder”. Except I wanted to shake things up, so the other night I told him he needed to say it in spanish. He doesn’t know any spanish haha, so I told him that to say “I love you” in spanish you say “soy tonto" which in english is “I am dumb”. So the past two nights he’s like “soy tonto” and I respond with “yo se”. Except last night he said “soy tonto caca”. Not sure what he meant to say but it was really funny.
TIK TOK EXPOSURE
We were at someones house to pick of some egg nog bread and on the way out I was saying bye to all the kids. This one girl on the couch had her homework opened, but her phone on top of her homework with Tik Tok opened. I had no idea she was trying to hide the fact that she was on tik tok from her grandma, until on the way out I was saying bye to everyone and when I got to her I was like “enjoy the tik tok”. There was a moment of silence, and then the grandma looked at her and was like “you’re on Tik Tok?”. She was like “uhhhhh no” and then the grandma got pretty upset and said certain words and then the girl tried to hurry and uninstall it and yea. I had totally just created a family issue haha and then were like “okayyy bye” and left.
DOMINOS & SKETCHY PEEPS
This week has been especially awesome because I have decided to stop being lazy and just talk to everyone. So, it started off with us in the dominos drive thru. Due to lots of study, fasting, and prayer, my testimony has gotten super internalized. I know now, more than ever before, that this work is true. Since I assuredly know that, I have no reason to be scared to talk to everyone. So we were in the Dominos drive thru, and after we paid and ordered I was like “Hey man, so we have come all the way from…”. I didn’t want to say Utah, because that turns people off I feel like and there’s a lot of stereotype around it, so instead of saying saying “Utah” I said “...them Rocky Mountains.”. It was pretty funny. Elder Powell got a good giggle after that. But I was like “yea we’ve come all the way from dem rocky mountains and are wanting to share a message of peace and hope with people. Can we share this message with you sometime?”.
He said that he had other customers to help haha but that he’d talk to us when he brought our pizza out to our car. So 20 minutes later, he came out and said “what’s up?”. Me and me and Elder Powell just popped off haha. We taught him a brief restoration, gave him a Book of Mormon, and invited him to meet with us again soon. We’re gonna meet with him this week and play pool and talk about the Gospel. It was so great.
After that experience, I decided to talk to everyone when I can. We were driving home a few days later, and saw some guys, who were all dressed in black and looked pretty sketch. I was driving so I pulled over to this one guy and asked if he wanted to hear a message of peace and hope. He said not right then but we could come to his house tomorrow. We gave him a BOM and when he saw it he smiled and said that he just got out of prison and had found Jesus. It was hype! So we’re gonna meet with him again soon.
Right after we talked to this guy, we saw another guy dressed in dark with his hood on walking in the alley way. I pulled over and did the same thing to him. Got his number and are gonna talk to him later this week.
Point is, everybody here on earth chose this plan and chose to come to earth. All of us are children of God and are all loved equally by him. We need to give everybody a fair chance at hearing this Gospel.
There were a couple different times this week where we’d offer to teach someone, and some said no haha, and that’s okay! My purpose is an invitation. Every time someone tells me “no”, I am fulfilling my purpose just as much as I am being told “yes”. So this week was awesome especially for all of these cool interactions we’ve had with people on the street.
SCAVENGER HUNT
Man this story is big time funny. So this past wednesday me and Elder Powell held a youth activity over zoom. There’s not much we can do over zoom, so we did a scavenger hunt. Basically how the game worked is we would say an item, and then everybody would scamper and try to find it in wherever they were located, and then the first one to show us the item we asked for on their screen got a point and would get to pick the next item that everyone else would look for. Anyways, we were playing, and some kid got a point so he got to pick the next item. Then for the next item he goes, “coffee cream!”. We all just kinda sat there, because this is a youth activity and nobody should have coffee haha, except this one kid who bolted out of his room and came back with some coffee stuff. We just looked at him and were like “uhhhh good job” but yea. On one of my turns to pick an item, I picked a “journal”, so everybody went off and grabbed their journals. Except most everybody got back at the same time, and I didn’t know who I should give the point to. So I told the kids to read a journal entry and depending on how good it was I would give them more points. It was super funny haha. I mostly said it as a joke but got some interesting journal entries. We played the game for like an hour or so, and by the end of it, it was total chaos. Me and Elder Powell lost motivation with keeping track of points accurately, and if somebody on our list didn’t have a lot of points we would just give them some. But the whole process was intense because I had promised to make and take brownies to the winner, so everybody was trying to win. But we had kept track of points super badly so everybody was neck and neck. Finally at the end of the hour, I was like “alright, who wants more points”. Many hands went up, so I went around and asked each person how many points they wanted. I negotiated pretty well. My conversation with one kid was
“okay, how many points do you want”.
“Ten”
“That’s too high. How bout three?”
“Six”
“We’ll give you two”
Man anyways, I was laughing super hard the whole way through. Then at the very end the points were super wacked up so I had everybody vote for who should get the brownies. Luckily, we eventually came to a unanimous decision.
COPS & BROWNIES
So after we promised the winner of the scavenger hunt brownies, we went to take them over a few nights later. We parked at what we thought was the right house, but it wasn’t, so we just left our car there and went walking around to find the right house. Long story short….
The person who's house we parked at called the cops on us for “suspicious activity” and the cops somehow got our address so we were pulling into our driveway and a bunch of lights went on and some cops came to our door expecting something to go down and then they saw that we were missionaries with a bunch of brownies and I was like “want some brownies?” and one cop said no because he’s trying to lay off the sweets and then the cops left.
CLOSING REMARKS
A lot of really funny stuff went down this week, as you can tell. But that’s not why it was great. It was awesome because we taught so many people the Gospel of Jesus Christ this week. No better feeling than that! Last night we had a lesson with a really good guy named Charles. I think I mentioned him last week. He’s really great, but doesn’t seem to process what we’re teaching him. He’s been meeting with the missionaries for 20 years. He loves to sit down and talk, but just hasn’t progressed. I know it’s the Book of Mormon that he needs to read in order to develop that testimony, and it just hasn’t happened. We sat down with him and I said “did you read the Book of Mormon chapter we left with you?”. He said emphatically, “No! Are you gonna send me to the principal's office?”. We just kinda sat there awkwardly and were like “okay we’ll read it together” so we opened up the Book of Mormon and read the first three chapters of Nephi with him. He didn’t really seem to pay much attention at all which made me kinda sad. He wouldn’t read it with us so we asked him to follow along, but he just closed his book and listened. Then at the end of the lesson I invited him to be baptized if he came to know the Book of Mormon was true. He said he would do that if he knew it was true. I asked him if he would read 2 Nephi 31. He said “probably not”. Then I was like “pretty please?”. Then I kinda went on a little rant saying that I would be the happiest man alive if he would read the Book of Mormon. A couple more times I said “please” and “pretty please”. He seemed to be flattered somewhat. Then when we left he texted us saying “I read some of it. Call me.”. I was so happy! We talked for a second about baptism and he had some questions. I told him that I about fell off my chair when I saw his text and he laughed. It was pretty awesome. But basically he’s starting to read the Book of Mormon which is awesome. Only took 20 years. So we had some great lessons this week. We also did some yardwork for this sweet old lady named Janet. We went to lunch with her last week if you remember. Anyways after we raked her leaves she wanted to go see the yard but needed help walking so I walked her across her lawn. Elder Powell was walking behind me and came in clutch by snapping a picture. It was dope haha. I love the people here. Debra, isn’t doing as well. She just processes things very slowly and its hard to teach her. We took her off date for baptism which was sad, but we felt it was the right thing to do. If we really wanted to push her, we could make it happen this week, but that doesn’t feel right. I don’t just want a baptism, I want a convert baptism, and I don’t yet feel like she’s understanding the Gospel in the way that she should before getting baptized, so we’ll see what happens with that. But there are so many people we are visiting with, it’s kinda nuts. I don’t have time to talk about all of them, but just know I am super busy and that so many people are waiting to hear the gospel.
I want you guys to know the power of prayer. It is so real! In the past when I've wanted something, I don’t get the Lord involved. That is extremely idiotic. The Lord should be involved in all that we do, and if we really believe in this Gospel and really care about receiving an answers to questions we have, why wouldn’t we go to him first? Why ask anyone besides the one person who has the answer? So every night this week I have been praying for things that I really want, and they are being fulfilled. I just want you guys to know that prayer is the primary way to receiving comfort and answers.
I think of 1 Nephi 15. Laman and Lemuel don’t understand the teachings of Lehi, and Nephi’s response to them in verse 8 is “Have ye inquired of the Lord?”
For all you guys who are having doubts, problems, trials, questions, I’d ask the same thing. Have ye inquired of the Lord? Have you taken the time to ask the one person who knows how to help you perfectly? That’s what I have been doing lately, and it’s brought so many blessings. If you need help, ask the Lord, and if it really is something that’s truly important to you, you will turn to the Lord. When things get hard, we have two options. To go toward or away from the Savior. The way we choose to go says a lot about ourselves. Decisions determine destiny.
As for this Gospel, it’s either true, or it is not. The Book of Mormon is either the word of God as it claims to be, or it is not. Joseph Smith was either a prophet, or he wasn't. There is no middle ground. We all need to go and figure this stuff out for ourselves. It really is true, though, and that is a promise. I have no doubts about that. It’s an awesome feeling. And remember that the church doesn’t want or require you to believe anything that isn’t true.
So yea guys, just remember that this is all true and do what it takes to get that testimony. If you really want it, you will get it. But it’s by the small and simple things that it happens, like reading and praying every day. Start simple, and big progress will be made.
I can’t say enough how true this Gospel is, but I can promise you guys it’s legit. Make the Gospel of Jesus Christ the primary influence in your life, and you will become everything that the Lord has destined you to become.
I’m gonna dip now, but thanks for reading this if you did. Hope you are now inspired haha. Have a good week! Send me an email if you so desire ♂️
And sorry if I don’t get the chance to respond, but know that I love you guys and I read them haha. Oh, also I wanted a spikeball pro and a ukulele from my parents for Christmas, but they said no haha. So this week I blew a fat ton of money on my own uke and a spikeball pro. Super hyped! I’ll let you guys know how that goes. Also for all you missionaries out there, we got celestial tiwi this week. Picture attached below. It was a essing
Adios hermanas!
No comments:
Post a Comment