Why Are We Afraid of the Dark?

I made it to Brazil! wink 

 Tuesday:

Tuesday was a monotonous day. Elder Bodily had a long list of people to contact on Facebook. Normally out of 50 or so people we contact, each on of us can find 2-3 interested people at least. Today however, I went through about 70 people and didn't find a single person interested in hearing a message. That was unusual and disappointing. Sadly, it was foreshadowing the pace for the week to a degree. But without a slow week here and there, we can't have a good week where we find more success; success is relative to the negative and positive experiences we have had in the past. We did however have lesson with the Vandanburg family which was awesome! They are a lot of fun to work with, and they wanted to know ways they could share the gospel with friends. We shared Ether 3-4 with them, and talked about the ways that the Lord helped the Brother of Jared overcome his trials and answer his prayers. 

Wednesday: 

We got to do service which is always good. There are a lot of great people, and I love getting to know them. Elder Bodily noticed one guy had a tattoo of the Earth Nation from Avatar the Last Airbender, so we talked to him about that; it was fun. When we were done after about 3 hours, they had a bunch of roll starters (froze raw dough) that they were going to throw away, so we took them and they were AMAZING. Such good rolls, nice and crunchy on the outside, but soft and moist in the inside. As well as that, they gave us some shirts that we could wear when we were working. They were perfect, because the name of the food kitchen is Bread of Life, which also happens to be a name for Christ whose message we are sharing, haha. Now we can rep. the gospel even when we aren't proselytizing. 

Thursday:

We had a lesson with Augosto, and it went really well! We talked about why he wasn't able to attend church, and he said he wanted to go next time. The calls with him are over audio, so we can't actually see each other while we're talking. I like to jump around when I'm teaching. Today we were in Alma, and I was reading random verses ahead and behind as they popped into my head. As I would go to a new verse, I could hear him flipping through to read along. I can't even describe how awesome that is; usually people just prefer that we read verses to them and don't even open their books unless we ask. But he is always willing to read when we ask him. With that, I of course made some celebratory cookies. Then I got a message from a guy named JR who is actually way outside of our area. But he has been researching religions and had been in contact with a friend of mine, Elder Minnick. He started off by asking me an interesting question, "Why are we afraid of the Dark?" He wanted me to answer, but he also wanted me to find scriptures and talks from modern prophets and apostles that answered this question. I was able search "afraid of the dark" in the gospel library app and find dozens of resources to share. When I shared the situation with the missionaries in my district, every single one of them sent me some talk or scripture to help. He doesn't know how many people care that he gets the answers to his questions, and neither do we. But there are legions of angels in heaven cheering for us behind the scenes, and I think that's awesome. He ended up grilling me for 2 1/2 hours about what I believed, and why I believe it, and whether or not I've ever had doubts. It ended with him downloading gospel library to learn for himself. So exciting! He asked if we could close with us saying a prayer, so we quickly called and said one together. I'm still in contact with him, and he's making progress answering his questions about life. From there, the big event of the day were exchanges with the Zone Leaders (we switch companions for the day to learn from someone new). It was a lot of fun, and very productive. I was with Elder Foster. It turns out he likes to read, so at the end, he and I got to nerd out a bit about Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, and Jack Reacher. 

Friday:

We started off with District counsel, then jumped straight into a technology training still at the church. Afterwards, we went home and worked on contacting interested people. It was a pretty discouraging contact session, but we got a message from a lady in our ward. She was going to bring us food, but didn't have time so she was gonna give us some money for food. When she got here she gave us $20 dollars! $40 is half of what we budget for every two weeks of groceries, haha. Looks like we are going to be able to eat out one of these days, and we are excited. 

Saturday:

We woke up to go to a park and do some pull ups, and on our way back we got a text from some sisters in our area. They had asked to borrow the car the day before, and we completely spaced it. So we hurried and met them at a high school parking lot to give them the car, then walked home. When we got back, we had some more Facebook time, and you guessed it, not a lot of success... Until I got a message from a lady named Gleisiane. She asked questions about a video I had posted about the plan of salvation, then asked if I had any other videos like that to send her. I showed her the area facebook page and talked to her about our message. It was a great pick me up. I always say that online missionary effort is better for the work, more challenging for the missionary. You are able to reach out to a lot more people, and finding/teaching is much easier, but at the same time it's less gratifying than sharing messages face to face. I do videos on Facebook but am never sure if anyone actually watches or cares about them, so it was so amazing to see that this woman appreciated them so much. It goes to show that you never know the effect you will have on people. Here I was wondering if anyone even wanted to see the videos I was sharing, and they brightened her day. By the same token, she was absently commenting about what she appreciated about them, and it helped to uplift me. If you're not sure whether doing something nice will have a good effect on someone, do it anyways. Better you do something nice that goes unnoticed than miss the opportunity to care for someone in need. After that session, we jogged about a mile back to the high school to pick up our car, came home and called some members of our congregation. We were finally able to get into contact with one guy; the only problem is that he's moved to California, haha. Oh well, we helped him get in contact with the missionaries down there, so it's a victory in my book. 

Sunday:

We had ward council with the Bishop and his clerks. It went really long, but we got some good coordination done. We had a message from the Zone Leaders in the Zone Chat asking every companionship to write and send a poem summarizing the week. I decided to take some initiative and start everyone off with this masterpiece of a haiku,

We had a good week,

We got ignored by people,

But we made cookies. 

Needless to say it was a hit. We got a call from the Sisters asking if we could help them figure out something on zoom for a primary lesson they were teaching, which reminded us that we had a primary lesson to teach in 5 minutes. So we rushed to figure out what the topic for this week was and gave it our best. All things considered, it went really well. We also made a video for some other sisters to post on the mission Facebook page. We then had some more work with members. Needless to say, I was pretty worn out and discouraged. I just said a prayer and talked about how tired and discouraged I was, and asked for help finding the energy and the desire to just do the things that day that I needed to do. I immediately felt refreshed; like I had jumped in a pool of cool water. Out of the people we called, 3/4's of them responded. Though we didn't set up times to talk, we had great conversations and got to know them a little bit. One of them was another guy who had moved without sending his information over, so we helped him with that. He let us know that next time he worked with someone who lived in Everett, he would send them our way, haha. We'll be waiting!

This is what I've been reduced to if I want to workout my chest.

Not letting go of the fact that my mom repeatedly said I'd only be eating taquitos all day every day.