Hey guys, I'll just start by saying that we've had a wonderful week. It's been action-packed, a lot of work going on, finding a ton of people...it's just been great. Things are boppin' here in Daphne. I'd first like to tell you a crazy story that happened with us dropping off Elder Olsen so that he could go to his original assignment in Ethiopia. I don't know if you remember, but the first time we tried to do this, he tested positive for COVID right before he was supposed to leave. Because of that, we had to quarantine and all of his hopes and dreams of going to Africa were looking not so great. Just to monitor it, the mission told us to get a weekly COVID test so that we could see when the disease has left his body. Well, we were preparing to go get a new test for the week and we had met this guy who was in the Spanish branch that went to the same church building we went to. He worked at one of the clinics and told Elder Olsen that if he came down to his clinic, he'd help him out so that his insurance would go through and all that jazz. We get a test, it comes up negative. I have no idea if that guy did us a solid and printed out a false test. Who knows. We all went bonkers, maybe just maybe he might be able to go to Africa. So, he packs all his bags and we drive to Birmingham which is like a 4 and a half hour drive from our area. Elder Olsen has to get another COVID test right before he gets on the plane to really make sure he's negative. We do that and guess what... it comes up positive. We were about to blow a fuse until the lady said "no stress, just go blow your nose and maybe go get a nasal spray and we'll retest you." We went ahead and did that, said a lot of prayers, he got retested and it came back NEGATIVE. Boom. We dropped him off at the airport and he is now in the sacred land of Ethiopia living it up. I guess you could say Satan did not want him to go, but Heavenly Father made a way so he could.
On to other things, our mission recently release new standards of excellence for every missionary. Basically, these are numbers that we expected to hit in order to be meeting this 'standard'. Anyway, the numbers are very high. We recently had a seventy come speak to our mission and his whole message was about "raising our vision", or "you can do more if you believe you can" and it seems that our mission president really wants to raise our vision so he gave us crazy numbers. Well, our mission has done a lot more praying than usual to meet these goals and we've seen insane success. Our area in Daphne was able to accomplish those numbers. Quick story, and you'll love this one: We needed to put one more person on date for baptism in order to hit the standard but it was the last day and we didn't have a ton of time. Well, we called a random person in our books that requesting missionaries like a year ago and she actually responded to us! She began by calling us out and asking us to explain to her why we did polygamy, what's up with the magic underwear, and why do you care so much about missionary work to get into heaven. We just straight up called her and cleared those things up and she was at peace with our responses. We invited her to church and she said she'd actually be there. And guess what? She actually showed up! It was fast and testimony meeting which can be either really good or really bad for someone who is investigating the church. Fortunate for us, this testimony meeting was amazing. The woman was sitting next to a member family that met her when they were walking in, and the members explained so much to her and answered all of her questions. Any who, the testimony meeting was just about to end, the bishop already stood up and was about to thank the congregation UNTIL the woman stood up last second and walked up to go bear her testimony. I was so terrified what she was going to say. But, she bore the sweetest testimony and thanked us, the missionaries, for inviting her here. In her own words: "thanks to Mr. Batman and his trusty sidekick for getting me here..." and I was dying laughing. She said that she felt God's presence in our church, she then talked about how she knows God hears our prayers and then she concluded. We had a short lesson with her afterwards to answer any other questions she had about the service, and she basically just wanted us to give her a copy of the Book of Mormon so she could read the whole thing. We talked about it, gave her the book and that was that. Later that day, she texted us and said "I'd like to become apart of your ward family. How do I do that?" We put her on baptismal date through text for the 15th of May. Absolutely crazy miracle, and now she's diving right into the Book of Mormon.
Alright, I got one more funny story then I'll shut up. I'll summarize because my fingers hurt. We were teaching this guy and it was going real well. We were about to put him on date until his friend who lived with him came out and wanted to speak with us and learn what we teach. We said okay and we restarted our lesson with him present. We begin by talking about the nature of who God is, how He loves us perfectly and all of that wonderful stuff. Well, I guess that was the wrong point to start on because this guy went off on about a 45 minute long dissertation on what he believes God is. This guy must've been high or on some sort of illegal drug because he was speaking utter nonsense that had both of my companion's and I's face going dumb. Keep in mind, this dude was saying the F-word every other sentence. He said A LOT of wack things, but the craziest thing he probably said was when I tried to explain to him agency, the ability to choose for ourselves given by God, and he said that was completely false. Well actually, he definitely used a different set of words but anyway... he goes on and says "Nah man, choice has been gone since God and his concubines Lilith and Eve went into the waterfall..." it was something like that. He was straight NUTS. We ran out of time so we just said that we'd come back and tell him more about what we believe about God, and he was polite and said that he wouldn't talk so much next time. Sooo funny. Those are the stories you remember.
Well, there's surely was more to this week but I don't want to make this too long. The baptism went really well for Willie, we didn't do squat since we had members fulfilling every role in the baptismal service. Those are always the best baptisms when all the missionaries have to do is show up. It was an unforgettable experience, super spiritual. But yeah, that's my week.
Have a blessed day,
Elder Jackson Q. Batman 🦇
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