Thursday, August 22, 2013

Long Days, Primary Teaching, Barriers, Extra P-day Time, and Too Much Finding: August 19. 2013

Hey people of my past existence,

This week was long, hard, and seemed like rejection was at every turn, but we kept the faith and our spirits up.

We had a service opportunity on p-day to help set up a booth in the carnival since Sister Hartman recruited us to help out. It was weird putting a bunch of PVC pipes together and other things. The game we set up was a dime toss for cups; it was a fund raiser for the Special Olympics so Elder Swann thought there would be a bunch of special people around it, but there weren’t. We spent a lot of time setting it up and helping run it but we saved the time we used on our P-day to use on a different day. 

We have been teaching this lady and it’s been getting kind of weird teaching her. She will half listen to what we have to teach, especially like the gospel topics, and randomly she’ll say interesting things.  For example, while we are on the topic of baptism she will say that her church is having a picnic and she might get baptized into it. She also asked if missionaries could go see her daughter for the sole purpose of getting the church to move them out of where they are living and provide them a free house to live in that they just happen to have with a swing set.  This is a fantasy, especially if she doesn’t want to actually change her life to accept the gospel. 

We also got to take some youth out on splits with us. This time we took Aspen.  Unfortunately, the day just fell through but we did get to see S. Howdyshell and all her puppies. We also got to take Joe Michael and Delilah out on their first splits with us to go teach Robert about baptism. It was a good lesson but Robert is very distracted all the time and has trouble listening, although he thinks he can learn everything on his own. Which is difficult for a 9-year-old. We brought B. Aidukaitis with us to help teach him and we are slowly making headway with the little guy. We have to teach so simply with him, like on the Primary level, so he can understand. 

Our District meeting was mainly about eternal life and stuff like that - how to obtain it and also to help our investigators obtain it. The Spanish Elders and us used our 3 saved-up hours of p-day time after the District meeting to play a fun game called soccer tennis which is kicking a ball over tennis nets to the other side.  When the ball stops bouncing on the other side then you get a point. 

We have a lot of time on our hands to try to find people so we go to see potentials in the area book most of the time to help things move along. We found one lady that was kind of interested but she’s more of an old lady so we’ll see what happens. We also got in contact with a referral the Spanish Elders gave us a long time ago.  The referral had actually read half of the Book of Mormon so it was pretty cool to finally get a hold of him.

We have hit barriers with our three baptismal dates. Matthew and Madison's mom has now refused to let them get baptized due to misunderstandings that Madison brought up to her about the other life and them being together as a family. It’s been crazy. Robert can't be baptized until he can fully know what baptism means and what he has to do after baptism to stay strong to the covenant he made. We are working on it. 
In Sacrament meeting I gave a talk on the importance of families and how a mission has improved me to prepare for my own. They told me I was going to be speaking for a while but someone from the stake high council showed up to give a talk as well, so I had less time to talk, but it was okay. We had dinner at Joe’s house since she saw how empty our dinner calendar was.  I burned my lips on a tortilla with hot sauce on it. It was crazy.

Well, love you all and have a fun week of school coming back. 
Elder McClure


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