March 13, 2017

I apologize, this isn't the longest or most insightful spiritual thought I've ever done, but I can't blow the roof off every time right? I'm kidding!  That's incredibly prideful. But it's not as long as they usually are, short and sweet thoughts are always good too. D&C 82:10 I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise. This is just something kind of cool that I realized. The Lord makes covenants with us and he always keeps his side of the deal. He absolutely has to, he's perfect. If he didn't keep his side of the deal then he wouldn't be perfect, if he wasn't perfect he would cease to be God. But he is God and he is perfect so he will keep his end of the deal. So if we do our part of the deal, he absolutely has to give us the promised blessings. However, if we do not keep our end of the deal then we don't have his promise. Luckily for us he's merciful too and therefore through the Atonement, he can still bless us even though we usually don't fully live up to our end of the deal and it will still be done in justice. However, if we live it fully then there is no maybes about it, we will receive his end of the deal. Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Finally, after 7 1/2 months in the field we finally took someone's cigarettes. It's the guy I talked about last Saturday if any of you remember. We cut those suckers up and soaked them and threw 'em away. Thursday: Friday: Saturday: So today we had a lot of tracting planned and a lesson, but as we left the tube in my tire popped. After about half an hour of construction work on my bike and patching, I pumped it back up. Then it popped again. A hole popped through the patch itself. Walmart patches...We looked more and we found a tire tube in our garage, sweet! It didn't fit. Desperately, we called a member for a ride as we were about to be late to the lesson. Afterwards we got a ride again and went to Walmart so I could buy a tube. I bought it, installed it and all that good stuff. But here's the punchline. As I went to put the pump back with all the other bike stuff right after installing my new tube, I look down, and there in the open lies an unopened box containing a tube. In fact, it was the exact same box, tube, and size that I had just bought and opened two minutes earlier. There was one there the whole stinkin' time. Sunday: On Saturday we had our plans for tracting ruined since my tube exploded just as we left to go do so which threw our whole day upside down. Today we finally could go find some more people to teach. The first door we knocked on was Hispanic family and they let us right in. We were like YES!! We got to talking and getting to know the lady, her daughter started showing us all these paintings and puzzles, her husband coaches a soccer team, they offered us food. We thought, "Man, is this what it's like to be a Spanish missionary?" As time went on I started piecing some unusual things together...They let us right in, were a little too welcoming, they didn't even ask why we were there after our long conversation, she said she used to be catholic, but she was baptized at 11, and I know for a fact that Catholics are baptized at birth and it's almost unheard of an 11 year old Catholic baptism. I thought, "Either they're members, or more likely baptists who just got baptized." So I asked carefully worded questions to find out if they were in fact members without making a fool of myself. When she said she was baptized in the Mormon church at 11 we about pooped our pants. What the crap? We just spent about all our tracting time talking about Jesus and stuff with the mom while she was getting things together as if she were an investigator! I assumed they went to the Spanish branch. We pulled it off well as if we knew the whole time. We asked to share a spiritual thought before we left and the kids walked in. It was then that I realized how foolish I was. They're in our ward...We have like 50 people and they make up 8 of them! They sat in front of me today in Sacrament! The guy sat next to me in Elders quorum! That's how bad I am at recognizing faces!!!!! You don't know how hard it was to hold a straight face like we knew the whole time and not bust up laughing. So the day goes on with more unexpected occurrences and our tracting time is yet again gone with the wind. It went from a total of 7 tracting hours this weekend to nothing. But! Our appointment didn't show up and another person we planned on seeing "wasn't there" (she was, we're dropping her). It was 8:00 and we had nothing planned, tracting! The second door we knocked on we talked and taught the whole first lesson, got a number, and they want us to come by again! We told him we felt like we should go there and he got excited and said he'd missed church today and his girlfriend left to a prayer thing that he wanted to go to, but we were able to come give him the word. Then his girlfriend came back (we'll have to get them married) and she was cool with it too. After only two doors! Finding someone like that would usually take a good 5 hours. Now we just have to shelter them from anti, they go to a rather large baptist church and pastors aren't fond of us taking their paychecks. Ok not all of them are like that, but when you get to the roots of it... And daylights saving is AMAZING!!! People don't get mad at us when we're knocking at their door at 8:00 and we don't bike in the pitch dark for three hours.