Elder Wride in California: Week 82 - General Conference + Friends Update

Hello dear brothers and sisters. Hope you all had a great weekend of General Conference.

General Conference is always good as a missionary. It is pretty much a holiday because weI don't have my notes and I don't remember everything, but here are some of my favorite talks:

- Elder Allen Haynie who talked about the need for living prophets. Funny and uplifting message

- Elder Braggs talk on Christlike poise. I thought the concept was cool, and I feel like it is one we have not really talked about in the church.

- Elder Mark Bassetts talk about the Fourth day. I think that's a true concept as well. Christ may come later, but He is never too late and He always keeps His promises.

- Elder Vern P. Stanfill: 'The Imperfect Harvest". This one hit a little more home for me, as I have felt pretty inadequate lately. Trying to avoid comparison too, because like he said, it never leads to anything good. It is not the same as emulation

- President Nelson about having charity towards others, and removing contention. Doing our best to be peacemakers. I think this is a good message that we members of the church should really do our best to emulate.

The first week of the transfer with Elder Yuvienco has been good. He and Elder Aguilar are similar in a lot of ways:

- They're obviously both Filipino and speak Tagalog.

- They also are heavily involved with the music of our mission. If you look on facebook, you will probably see their two faces the most. Yuvienco does a lot of singing and guitar, and Aguilar does the Cello. They're both pretty good and all the stuff you see on the facebook page is pretty much their own arrangements.

- They both like to have fun and joke around, but also are hard workers.

The work has felt a little bit slower this week. I guess with General Conference, and also Yuvienco has been doing a lot of work for a new arrangement of "How Great Thou Art" which they are going to try and post on the page before Easter I think. While he's editing we're basically stuck in the computer lab, so I try to do Facebook work, Areabook organizing, calls, or even practicing a little Piano. It's not as fun though because we're kinda just stuck inside.

A lot of our friends are also slipping through our fingers

- Annette, who is in the YSA is officially off-date for Baptism. She was supposed to be baptized already a month ago from today, but she's been busy and the YSA missionaries have had trouble reaching her. It's so sad because she was so very elect

- Our friends Cecilia and Joe said they're not interested. They don't think we need the Book of Mormon since we have the Bible.

- Having trouble reaching Rhonda, Joe, Liliana, and Chris

We have a lot of other friends or people that we are trying to work with. A lot of them are media referrals, meaning they just responded to an ad and said they want to learn more, but are also hard to reach. Overall, so many media referrals, when we initially contact them, say they're not interested. And we're like WhAt Do YoU mEaN? You literally have to click on a button that says "I understand missionaries will contact me and will try to share an uplifting message", AND fill out all of your contact information, and now you aren't interested anymore? I don't know what's up with people. Most of the time they either didn't know what they were filling out, and just were responding positively to something about Jesus, or someone else filled it out for them as a prank (That happens a lot).

However, we do meet people every week and this coming week we are hoping to meet with the following
- Beatriz, who is a referral from the Spanish Elders. She prefers English, and has been taught for many years. We are going over tomorrow and hopefully can figure out why she has been taught for so long without much progress.

- America is a lady we met tracting. She accepted a Book of Mormon and has agreed to meet, but keeps trying to get us to meet her at her church in El Cajon. We can't go out of our area that far, but even if we could, I have got a feeling she is setting us up for a bash with her Pastor. It is not the first time I have been set up. We asked if we could meet closer, or zoom if we can't meet in our area, but we'll see what happens.

- Josie, is another lady who we might be able to visit today. We had a good talk with her last week and gave her a Book of Mormon and everything. We're not sure how far she'll progress, because she has already got pretty set beliefs. But time will tell as to whether or not she will accept more truth.

That's a little run down on the current teaching pool. All good people, but their progression hasn't quite taken off.