Last Monday night we visited a member family. Their grandma lives with them and she's about 90 years old and hilarious. She started telling us that "evil spirits" have been bothering her the last few nights. She said "One of them came in dressed in all black. His face was white and he was missing an eye! He came in and shook my walker and grabbed my foot and moved it over here and when I woke up my body was all purple. I think they sucked my blood..." That was about when we all lost it. It sounded pretty scary until they became vampire spirits. So anyways, we gave her a blessing and went home. We stopped by again Tuesday and asked her how it all went the night before. She said "they came in the house again, but I left them a note by my bed and when they saw it they left me alone." I would love to know what that note said.
More weird things people said to us this week. There's this 58 year old recent convert in our area. While we were at her house this week, she told us "I'm still waiting for a Mormon boy to marry so I can get sealed in the temple. But not you guys, you´re still really young..."
We were with another member family and the mom asked us why we hadn't come over to wash our clothes in their washing machine that week. We told her that we had taken them with another family, but they ended up washing it who knows where and didn't get it back to us until Tuesday, so we had to wash our clothes from Monday by hand and wear it again on Tuesday. And she asks us "Did you wash your clothes naked?" Why are you asking me that?!
This time from the sister missionaries. I get a call from them during language study one day, which is normal because they usually call me with questions about English. But what I wasn´t expecting is that they would ask me "Elder, how do you say 'you're pregnant' in English?"
Another one from the sisters. In the middle of weekly planning on Thursday, I get another call from them. "Elder, we have a question. Are we allowed to have sleep-overs as missionaries?" When they called me as district leader, never in my life did I think I would have to answer that one. (To clarify, they wanted to have a sleep over with the other sister missionaries in the zone. I said no.)
Saturday just got out of control. In the morning, a member took us to an old lady's house to teach her. We had already contacted her in the street the week before, but she didn't remember us at all. But she let us in. The member that went with us brought her 1 year old grandson, and he was wandering around the room during the lesson. It turns out that he found a mostly empty beer can, and the next thing we know we look over and he's drinking the rest! It was SO funny! He had his two little hands around the can and the beer was running down both sides of his cheeks. His grandma grabbed him, took away the beer, and tried to give him his bottle of milk but he just chucked it out the door. Who ever said just once won't hurt? Anyways, we weren't in the lesson very long before we realized that the old lady was more there than here and wasn't really going to listen to us, so we decided to invite her to say the closing prayer however she wanted and that turned out to be a mistake. Her prayer was easily longer than the lesson! It just went on and on and on and on...she was saying "thank you God that I could wake up today. Look! I can move my hand (while wiggling her hand in the air), my foot (doing the same thing with her foot..." I was holding it in pretty good until I noticed that Elder V had already lost it. But later I felt bad because I'm sure Heavenly Father loved that prayer and was really glad to hear her. To top it all of, the prayer finally ended and a rat had appeared behind her! That was another ordeal.
In the afternoon, we had a lesson with M, who we had visited a couple weeks ago. Her mom was there who didn't seem to like us so we told M that we weren't going to be able to teach her the message we wanted to share that day and put another appointment for a day when her mom wouldn't be there. It was hysterical. After that experience, we were thinking "What is going on?!" I was a little scared to see what would happen next. I think since there's not a whole lot going on in our area this week, Heavenly Father gave us all these things to laugh about to keep us sane.
But we actually ended the day with a really good experience. We went to teach an older less active couple, the V family. We had been trying to visit them for about 3 transfers now but one thing or another had always kept that from happening. But everything worked out so that we made it over Saturday night and taught them the restoration. It was a really great experience and they committed to come to church and read the Book of Mormon. It was a good way to end the madness.
C is still doing great, but we had to postpone his baptism because he is going to have surgery soon. He has an open wound in his stomach and it makes it really uncomfortable for him to go to church, so he told us that he wants us to still visit him but that he would feel better about being baptized afterwards. So pray for him so that he can stay excited through the whole process. We are going to try to take a lot of different members to visit him so that he knows the whole ward and so that they are all involved in his conversion process.
J went to the woods to pray but we haven't had time to really sit down and talk to him about it. We're going to go over there in a few minutes. I hope it goes well.
We're hoping to find lots of new investigators this week because we got a lot of referrals last week. Also, we have a conference with Elder Daniel Johnson of the Seventy on Wednesday, so that should be pretty sweet.
The stake presidency met with President Wagner to make plans about T. They've decided that started on the 21st, Elder B and I are going to go every Saturday and Sunday to teach the investigators we found the other day and to find more people. Once there is enough work to do, they'll send their own set of missionaries there. I'm pretty excited about that.
I had a bunch of pictures I wanted to send, but this computer is not getting along well with my camera. We'll try again next week.
That's great news for BYU! Sweet! And my companion is fine, his pills work really well. We've been able to work without problems this week. What the tornado? The weather's been pretty nutsy here too. It's rained almost non-stop all week.
Congrats Emily on making drama council, and Izak for scoring goals, and Micah for almost scoring goals. And tell the Zanzibarbarian that he's a pompeeface. As if he didn't already know. Gwen, ¿dónde estás? Te voy a hablar en español hasta que me escribas. Castigada. Te amo.
That's all for this crazy week. Hopefully you've been entertained. I sure was. But anyways, the mission is great. Keep being the great people you are! See you soon!
Elder Pew
