1/24 of the way done!

Hello!

On Saturday, I hit my 1 month, which was an interesting moment. I basically realized that I still have quite a while to go haha.

So this week was an interesting one, we are being forced to make tough decisions and facing some disappointment.

For P-day last week we kinda just hung around, as our plans fell through unfortunately. We were going to do this hike called "the incline" but the other elders in the district were not up to it. It's basically a trail that just goes straight up the mountain at a steep angle.

The guy that came to church last week who's car broke down has been dropped. Unfortunately, I didn't notice it, but my comp mentioned afterwards that the guy smelled quite a bit like marijuana. It would explain why he didn't feel the spirit during the First Vision. He gave us his number, and we've tried calling it but he never answers. It is an unfortunate occurrence. Lesson, don't go to church high. I thought it was funny that the Sunday school lesson was Word of Wisdom, and it never mentioned illegal drugs.

One interesting thing about Colorado Springs, is that there is a medicinal marijuana store on just about every single street corner. I am not even exaggerating. You will see these green crosses everywhere at "alternative medicine" shops. It's quite funny to see actually.

We picked up this new investigator named Chris. He is an interesting fellow. He is about 60 or so years old, talks really slowly, and is a really nice guy. However, recent events have caused us to question his accountability. A.K.A, he was literally falling out of his chair in the adult session of stake conference, falling asleep. Like, I would be showing him a scripture, he would have his finger on the page, and then slowly his finger would slide off as he fell asleep. THEN, as soon as stk. conf. ended, he leapt to his feet and immediately started hitting on several women who were standing by themselves. It was 9:00 when it ended so we had to get going, but Chris wanted us to introduce him to people. So we don't know what to do about him, as it seems his primary motivation for coming to church is to find a mate.

One cool thing that happened this week was that I actually knew stuff my companion didn't. I was the one doing the talking for once! We were tracting, and saw this guy walking down the sidewalk with no shirt on and copious amounts of chest hair. He seemed about 30 or so, and kind of stopped as if he was waiting for us. He talked about how he liked that we helped people find religion etc. and somehow the conversation drifted into philosophy, and existentialism. My time had come:
Guy: Ya, it's like existentialism.
Me: Oh, you would be referring to the writings of the late Jean-Paul Sartre? or possibly Kirkegaard?

The guy did a double take at me, thinking, "who is this kid?" and I laughed a bit inside. He was speechless.

One thing that bugs me about all the religions in the area is that pretty much everyone here believes that we are saved by grace, and not works. This is possibly the easiest of all their apostate doctrines to disprove, and yet it's obvious that nobody here has even read the bible. We were tracting, and a woman opened the door, and I asked if she would like to hear a message about Jesus Christ, and how he has restored a prophet on the earth today. She did the old "I would just put my trust in Jesus if I were you" line, and my companion kind of gave her a funny look. He asked if she believed that peter and paul were prophets. She started talking about how the book of Revelation was written before the time of Jesus, and I almost burst out laughing. Nobody here actually knows whats up. If they did, they would probably be Mormon. Would make my job easier haha.

I got the treat of being at a stake conference presided over by President McConkie, which was awe-inspiring. I walked out of that thing feeling like I knew absolutely nothing about the scriptures. He was so funny, he called 3 people from the congregation up to the pulpit, turned to a scripture and got them to try and interpret the scripture. After they did this, he would tell them how wrong they were and go into history and context. Great quote: "A scriptural text without context is a pretext"; meaning, if you don't have context for a scripture you can make it say whatever you want. Which is what the "saved by grace" people do with Romans 3. They don't know the context, and ergo they fail.

There was a ward talent show, and some 60 year old lady sang "New Attitude" karaoke. I laughed.

Well that's all for this week. I've included some pictures so you can see how I look all decked out in nametags and stuff.

Peaaace.