Hello and happy Tuesday
This week went by stupid fast. Faster than most.
I don't really have much to say. We're just out here grinding. Our focus is still meeting with all the members in the ward. This ward so far has been the most open and excited about finding us people to teach which has been really cool. We haven't begun teaching any of them yet which has taken longer than I thought, but we'll hopefully meet with some of them soon. But this area literally feels like a gold mine of potential! It's so awesome. I hope to be able to tell you more about the people when we actually start teaching them. Here are some pictures of us out and about
One of the people I have the most hopes for is a kid and his mom. They both know the ward and the kid gets invited to YM activities all the time. He has some social anxiety but really likes missionaries and the mom really thinks we would be a good thing for him. They're both so awesome, he's just been busy with college applications. She said we'd meet soon though. That's one of our potentials, and there are many more that are open to meeting with us, we just haven't been able to make it happen yet.
We had a rather tragic Halloween yesterday. We had a dinner lesson for 5:30, but it was a 40 minute bike ride away on pretty fast and narrow roads. Our plan was to bike there a little bit at a time and make visits along the way to members, potentials, and previously taught people along the way. After a while we got a call from the other Elders we share an apartment with. It was about 4:50 and they said they locked themselves out of the apartment. Normally, we would just wait until the day was over, but they locked another set of Elders bikes in our apartment. The reason behind that is another long story that I feel the need to explain really quickly.
Basically the night before the other Elders in our district locked themselves out of their apartment and so they spent the night with us. I don't know what they did for most of the morning, but basically they waited a lot of the day to get another set of keys from the Mission office.
So, anyway, they needed to get their bikes out of the apartment, but we were about 20 minutes away. We were also another 15 minutes away from our lesson in the opposite direction. They had the car and the car keys so they could come to us (I still don't know why they didn't get the apartment keys but they had the car keys). We waited until about 5:15 and then called again. They said they actually just decided to drop the other Elders off to their area because they also had a lesson at 5:30 and said we were good to go to ours. I was like bro, why didn't you tell us that? They essentially just made us late for our lesson for no reason. So, we hustled and biked to our appointment. It was uphill on the narrow roads and we also went on some of those trails in between neighborhoods. This one was a lot worse though because it was very sandy. Biking in deep sand is not good. It took us longer than we thought to get to the appointment and we were just completely dead after that bike ride. I get more wrecked by the humidity than Elder Reinhart. The mom came in and I was completely drenched in sweat. She asked me if I was okay and Elder Reinhart thought that was really funny. I think most members think that when I show up to their house after a bike ride, but she was the first one to say it. We cooled down over dinner, had a decent lesson and were back on the road. It was dusk and we were not looking forward to the 40 minute bike ride back. Or so we thought.
The first 15 minutes were ok. Since it was downhill we were able to go pretty quick and the cars weren't too bad. After a while we finally had a little room to bike to the side of the road. When it appeared I tried to make the transition, but the curb was a little higher than I thought. I ate it pretty hard. It wasn't too bad and I wasn't hurt. Just a little dirty and with a broken front light. So I now had to bike behind Elder Reinharts light. It was a little hard to see, but I managed. I think I rode over some horse poop piles though. They are all over. A few minutes later we were biking on a little trail and my bike chain fell off. It got stuck on something and it was pretty hard to try and fix it without getting oil on our shirts. Took a while but we eventually fixed it.
The last leg of the bike ride was through the neighborhoods around the church. This is where a lot of the trick or treaters were. There were a lot of punk teenagers and kids going around making noise. There was also a green laser following us for a while from someone. We eventually made it though. It had been an hour long bike ride from the appointment. We were feeling pretty defeated at that point. Especially in our legs. We were both like "Do you just want to go home?". It was only about 7:30-8 so it was a little early to go home, but I felt justified in doing so. We went home, took a nice cold shower and did some laundry, cleaning, and resting before our temple trip the next morning.
We went to the temple this morning and it was nice.
For my spiritual thought I wanted to share my vision for the rest of my mission. I made a few points this week of what I would like my mission to be like
- Love the Lord and God's Children. Become a greater witness of Jesus Christ
- Be fully consecrated to the will of God. Put off the Natural man daily
- Be filled with the Holy Ghosts power and influence
- Be full of Charity, Joy and Thanksgiving
I've had some variations of this throughout my mission, but I felt like it was important to really create a vision of what I want my mission to be. It's been pretty cool to do through my interview with my Mission President as well as reading my Patriarchal blessing. I have some weekly goals as well of what I would like to do to accomplish my goals. Having goals is good and makes life more filling. I just invite you to make serious goals and consider this quote from M. Russell Ballard
“I am so thoroughly convinced that if we don’t set goals in our life and learn how to master the techniques of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our life only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potential. When one learns to master the principles of setting a goal, he will then be able to make a great difference in the results he attains in this life.”
Anyway, this email is long so I'll cut it here. I love this work and I love all of you!
- Elder Wride
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