Week 30

Hey y'all!! How's it going? It's been a good week this week. It was the last week of the transfer and as always, transfer calls happened! Both Elder Hardy and I are staying in the Allen 1st, 4th, and 6th wards, but I’ve been made the district leader! I was way surprised as we thought Elder Nate (who was our district leader) was going to die out here in Allen (note: When I say "Die", it's mission lingo for "finishing his mission". I'll add a glossary of Missionary Terms at the end). The Lord works in mysterious ways, however, and it will be exciting to see what happens.
This week we were able to meet with Lawson again and we had to tell him about the Law of Chastity because Jen is living with him. He took it fairly well I think (I'm not sure I wasn't there because we were on exchanges with Elder Nate and his companion Elder Seegmiller) but he said it was going to be hard for him. We were a little bummed, but he said he still wanted to meet with us and try to figure it out. However, he is not ready for baptism and will not be getting baptized this weekend. Hopefully he will sometime in the coming month, but we will see what happens. I think he's really liking church, though, because we play football with the 6th ward Elders Quorum (the ward Lawson's in) every other Saturday and he came a couple days ago and had a great time. We are excited for him.
We started teaching a girl named Sydney, who is 11 and part of a part-member family. He brother Cody (15) has been baptized already and her mom Jenny is a member, but her dad Phillip is not. She also has a little brother Cory who's 7. She is a really sweet girl who picked up on everything we taught pretty easily. We'll be seeing her again on Tuesday and will hopefully be able to teach Phillip as well. Sydney had already expressed the desire to be baptized as well, so hopefully we'll be able to set that up this week!
Wednesday we were able to go to the temple and we went with a kid named Jared Hawkins, who goes into the MTC Wednesday to prepare for the Arizona Mesa mission! He's a really cool kid and we were able to get him out teaching with us a couple times before he left. The temple was really nice (I haven't been since June...I needed it) and it really helped me get charged for the week. We taught some lessons to people that have been struggling a bit with their testimonies as well and had a really good time with them.
Friday should have been really good (we had five appointments with potential investigators set up) but only 2 of them went through; however, the ones that did go through were really good. We met first with a lady named Beth and had a really good lesson with her. The Spirit was really strong and she understood everything we were teaching. We talked about baptism and she said when she comes to know of herself these things are true, she'll be baptized! It was so cool! We then had an appointment with a girl named Sandra (another 11-year-old) and taught her the first lesson up to the Apostasy and she was on top of it! It was really cool and things are really starting to look up here.
Saturday was a combination of good and bad. In the morning we played football and had a great time there and later that afternoon we had a blitz (see glossary of missionary terms) and that went really well, but the evening wasn't so great. The past couple of weeks we have found out how ineffective trying to find people in the 4th ward is when we're trying to tract during the day. So we figured we'd come back and try tracting in the evening! Great idea, right? WRONG. We didn't get in AYWHERE and most people were definitely NOT happy to see us, especially because they were either eating dinner, had just gotten home, or we were simply interrupting their evening. Ugh. Long story short, we learned our lesson: NEVER go tracting at night.
Sunday was good up until about 7 PM. While there weren't any non-members at church, it was a good block of meetings. That evening, we also went to a baptism! We have been working with a part-member family for a while and they have an 8-year-old daughter who wanted to be baptized, so while it wasn't a convert baptism, it was still great nonetheless. After that, though, all of our plans had fallen through, and both Elder Hardy and I did not feel good at all. It was a pretty miserable night.
Well, that's all for this week. Enjoy this glossary!
Glossary of Missionary Terms:
Apostate: implies a missionary who is not completely obedient to the rules; the level of rule breaking depends on the context, i.e. He's a way apostate (breaks lots of rules) compared to He's only a little apostate (keeps most of the rules). Virtually every missionary is apostate to some degree.
Greenie: A new missionary. A missionary usually keeps greenie status based on how long he's been out or how experienced he is, whichever is greater.
"Killing" a missionary: Sending a missionary home/being a missionary's last companion.
"Flip/freak/fetch": General exclamation common among missionaries. Interchangeable
Airbox: an empty mailbox
I can't seem to think of any more off the top of my head, but if I remember any more, I'll add them to the list.
Love,
Elder Grondel