Not much to say about today. District class was pretty cool. I was teaching an example of horseback riding, specifically jumping, and applying a couple of the principles to missionary work. It was way better than it sounds. Afterwards we made GIANT quesadillas, too giant honestly. Also we taught the English class today and played the backpack game. Thank you Seminary for giving me every single fun idea and object lesson for missionary use. The rest of the day was just, eh.
May 31, 2017
Today we worked with the map of the ward members. Super boring, but we got updated lists with messed up printing that we had to decipher. Then we updated the map with stickers so that was our entire day and I found out that I don’t like that type of missionary work. I hope that I NEVER have to go to the offices. I want to be out on the streets, under the shade of a tree of course. In the afternoon we had a really great lesson with V. She had lots of worries and doubts about how to know the truth. She feels committed to the Catholic Church and feels that it is impossible to change and learn this new different thing. The whole lesson was about prayer and then I shared this example about learning how to play a new musical instrument. It is hard to make the switch and it takes a lot of time and diligent effort to gain the mastery. But, after many lessons, practicing and drilling the same passages over and over, one day the melodious music of the gospel will flow. I don’t know if it helped, but I just pray that she felt the Spirit.
Wow, it is already June, weird! Today was also weird. As a mission we are reading the Book of Mormon again but in depth with a personally made index/topical guide of 13 subjects. We started today, but due to the fact that the zone leaders wanted everyone in the zone to have the instructions printed out, we had to spend the morning getting the papers to our district. Long story short, we got a little lost and waited for a while outside of a giant mall in a super touristy part of Puerto Vallarta. We blended in with all the other white people. This one lady asked us, “Why the ties?”
We had a cooking class from the Relief Society and we learned how to make pupas (A pupusa is a traditional Salvadoran dish of a thick corn tortilla stuffed with a savory filling, typically accompanied by curtido spicy coleslaw.) What was especially great about the class was that a contact that we made a couple of weeks ago, showed up. That NEVER happens. We both kind of flipped out. Usually you have to work really hard to get people to come to church or any church activities.
June 2, 2017
Well not much happened today. We walked and talked to people and managed to find 2 new people to teach. They are interesting. One actually approached us and asked us a bunch of questions. The questions were mostly about our rules and such, but his question of “Why are we keeping all these rules and being missionaries when we could be studying or working?” That lead to a religious discussion. When we met with him today, it is pretty clear that he is agnostic if not atheistic. He has a ton of questions that I have never had to answer before. He asked about our lives, music, what we like to do, what motivates us, etc. He is a tattoo artist and asked if we thought he was “of the devil” because of his smoking and plethora of other bad habits. Of course he doesn’t view them as bad but rather as a means of self expression. But he still is curious about the why. All I can say is, shout out and thank you to my sister Maddie for teaching me about her music. My companion is really into poetry and this investigator loves to write, so they had some great discussions. It was one of the weirdest lessons that I have ever taught. We went from that lesson to teaching JM who has had a hard life but has a strong desire to follow Christ. I think he had been to jail a few times and he has been shot a couple of times. He is hard to understand so mostly we just listen to him and try to figure out how to teach him.
June 3, 2017
Well we were going to eat breakfast with and investigator but they cancelled sadly, so instead we did the end of the transfer cleaning today, then studied, and ate in the house. I am getting good at cooking really cheap meals. After breakfast we walked around for a couple of hours searching for less active members to update the ward lists. We didn’t find a single one of them. We did find a rich active member though who gave us a bunch of fruit! Then we taught the lady who came to the cooking class. She has many mormon friends and housed a young member of the church who recently left to serve a mission. It seems that a lifetime of events prepares a person for the gospel sometimes. Later in the day, we went out with our ward mission leader to teach R. The mission leader was super hard core and implied that our investigator was going to hell for his bad habits. I mean, his technique is pretty harsh but the guy has like 300 baptisms so maybe that kind of teaching works??? I don’t know, not really my style though.
June 4, 2017
Testimony meeting! It was a pretty good meeting actually. There were no awkward pauses like usual and there were all around solid testimonies. There were close to 40 Americans here today. Its because we meet at 11 so the tourist have time to get off the boats and come to church. I did butcher the first hymn though. I forgot how repeats work, haha. Then in gospel principles class, we got WAY too into the Abrahamic covenant. The teacher actually started explain about garments. Uhhh! It was weird for everyone there. Apart from that, it was a good day. I ate 3 hamburgers and we set a baptism date for JM.
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