Well, like I said in my last letter, My P-day last week was moved to Thursday because of a leadership conference. The conference kind of blew my mind. First off, we got to start the day with a McPfile. It's my mission presidents classic breakfast item. A pancake, a fried egg, a pancake, a fried egg, a pancake, a fried egg, and a pancake. Stacked on top of each other. I can barely eat one, but apparently the mission record is 8 in one sitting. By some skinny guy.
The whole mission conference was all about learning the 8 lessons from the MTC Simplified Curriculum. Fairly soon, they will stop teaching Lessons 1,2,3,4 and 5 in the MTC and focus only on these 8 lessons that don't focus on what to teach, but how to teach. So basically, all the young men out there better start reading their Preach My Gospels and learning the doctrine that it contains. It would not be a bad idea to have a youth activity where you get an RM to teach the youth lessons 1,2,3,4, and 5 and how to teach them. Because they are going to get out of the MTC, into an investigators home, the trainer will start the lesson and look at the greenie. And if the greenie doesn't know what's going on, it's bad news bears. Or just an embarrassing awkward situation.
Haha, funny story from the mission. Now kids, in a mission, you must ALWAYS stay with your companion. So when you go to an investigators house on a Sunday morning to wake them up for church, you do NOT take off their screen, break into their house and go wake up the 23 year old female investigator. If you must do this, you do NOT leave your companion outside, because then it's very easy for the 23 year old female investigator to start making up stories about what did or didn't happen. Yep. Some people's kids.
On one of the nights, we went over to that family from Liberia's house, to try and teach a lesson. Unfortunately for me, Glee was on. Doubly unfortunately, the episode happened to be on Britney Spears. Triply unfortunately, the family doesn't really get the whole "turn off the TV when the missionaries come over". Quadrupely unfortunately, they served us more food. Right after dinner. Cold deep fried dumpling thingies. So here I am, trying to stay consecrated, throwing up in my mouth, and praying for the power to go out.
We went to go and teach a lesson to a potential investigator: Steve. Steve is an alcoholic and wants to change, so we set up an appointment for one of the evenings. When we got there, Steve had knocked back 3 40's of Malt Liquor and was for all intents and purposes, Slammed. So we tried to teach him a little bit, we told him the story of Alma the Younger, (redemption/change/power of the atonement) but I really didn't think he got anything out of it. We rescheduled after about 10 minutes, and when we went back to reteach him, Steve had left for Rehab. The interesting thing, was that he completely remembered the night before. We'll get him next month.
We also went and got our haircuts this week. We have interviews on Tuesday, and so we want to look good. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond our control conspired against us and we were forced to get cut on Friday after District Meeting. We go to the "paul mitchell School" because the haircuts are free. Unfortunately for us, Friday is "dance day" at the paul mitchell school, so in the middle of my haircut, 30-40 attractive women got up and started dancing to Flo Rida, which started loudly blasting from the speakers. I took off my glasses, and thanked my lucky stars because I was facing away, but the straight guy (he had a girlfriend) that was cutting my hair said "oh you'll want to see this"....Uhhhhhhh.....not really... but I closed my eyes so it was all good.
I suppose after that little episode, it's no wonder the rest of our week kinda stank. One of our investigators is going to another church, 2 lost their baptism date, One won't be able to stop smoking so he lost his date, and it's just disappointing...
BUT
On Sunday, some guy wandered into the church. He was excommunicated 20 years ago and really feels like it's time to, in his words, "come home". He has some things to work on, but it just goes to show that the Lord does have a pretty big hand in missionary work. Just when you hit the lowest points, you get picked right back up.
My thoughts on this years General Conference:
Great, really awesome! I loved how after 2 years of laying down the Law, Jeffrey R. Holland chose to love me instead of chastise me. I loved Boyd K. Packer's throw down on California ("Let's Vote on it!") And that guy that cried about the dead cow. I really liked the emphasis on following the prophet, and though I really dislike the primary song "Follow the Prophet" because it makes us sound like a cult, I thought the message was very appropriate. When 2 GA's repeat the same 14 points, it's probably something that you should write down. My favorite part though, was the MTC Choir. Although I unfortunately didn't get to see Ross, after having been a missionary for a 1.5 months now, I have a pretty good handle on how to tell what a missionary is going to be like. They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but with Missionaries, you can. And I did some judging.
Any-who, there is no such thing as righteous pride, so I better stop judging.
This morning, at 7:00 am we did this thing called "The Incline". 1.02 miles long, 2000 feet elevation, 41-66% grade. I managed to do it in 50 minutes and 30 seconds. the rest of the district finished in about 62 minutes. I threw up about 6 or 7 times on the way up which was very fun. I'm glad I did it. Next time, I'm aiming for 45 minutes. I've included pictures.
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