Monday, July 26, 2021

Beach Baptism

 


   Woah what a last couple of weeks it has been. I've had a lot of stuff happen since I've got to this area, I think it's safe to say we have (for the most part) successfully defeated the white wash. The first week we were so lost since there wasn't many notes written down for the people the old Elders were teaching so we had to start basically from scratch. Our goal was to try and put as many people on date for baptism as possible to see if they are solid people or not, and right now we have 3 people on date. Let me give you some details of lit things that have been going on. 

   
   We had Zone Conference and since I'm still a Zone Leader, I had to give a training in front of everybody. Our Zone has been struggling with putting people on baptismal date, so our entire training was based on that. We challenged them all to attempt to put 2 people on date in 1 week and now our numbers for baptismal dates is the highest it has been. Zone Conference made me feel super old in the mission. The mission president kept telling stories that he's told in the past and I had heard them all and it seems like I was the only one who had. I'm actually the oldest missionary in my zone currently which is kinda weird since I ain't THAT old. It was super intense though, President seperated the Elders and the Sisters into different rooms and wrecked us about the Law of Chastity. We have a lot of new missionaries so he wanted to scare them to make sure they don't get sent home for stupid reasons. Immediately after Zone Conference, we had interviews and it was super awesome because President just hyped me up the whole time. He said he was super proud of who I have become. He says that I know what my potential is and that I am living in a way to achieve it. That was very nice to hear for sure. 

   In my interview with President, I asked him if I could make a special request to go to one of my old area's baptisms and he said he'd let me choose. It was 3 hours away in Pensacola, but we made that long haul. The baptism of Jared and Scarlett was such a memorable experience. They requested to be baptized in the ocean and that's exactly what happened. If you don't remember who these two people are getting baptized, they were apart of the solar summer sales team that wanted to learn more about our church. Both of them had to give up so much to be ready to be baptized, but them and Nate all held eachother accountable. The thing that made me the happiest about all of this was that Nate, a less active YSA, was able to become worthy to baptize Jared. It was so surreal. He also had to drop a lot of bad habits, but he did it and was about to perform the ordinance. Since it was a baptism of people doing summer sales, a lot of other summer sales people showed up so there was like 60 people at this beach baptism. Many of them were nonmembers and thought it was super cool. I perceive this is going to be a missionary referral machine pretty soon here. Definitely one of the highlights of my mission was being apart of this baptism. It doesn't get much better than this.

   That's basically the last couple of weeks. We've been finding a lot of new people to teach, but the biggest success we are seeing is with the Part-Member families. There's A LOT of them in our ward, many of them are ready and willing. We'll see how that turns out. 

Love y'all, Have a blessed one. 
Elder Jackson Batman 🦇 










   


Monday, July 12, 2021

Prattville

 


   Well, I got transferred again after only 1 month in the Pensacola Area. I was pretty ticked to hear the news, not going to lie. It's frustrating after you learn an area and all the people you served there, you even set people up for baptism, but then you just get ripped out. Jared and Scarlett are set up for the 24th for their baptisms and they told me to beg my mission president so I could make the long drive and be in attendance. We'll see how lenient the mission president will be. Any who, I'm now serving in Prattville! My last companion, Elder Johnson, served in this area for 7 and a half months so I was able to get a lot of inside info on the area before I even got here which was sick. I did get white washed into Prattville as Zone Leader 1 (white washed just means they take out a whole companionship out of an area and add a completely new one), but I am serving with another Zone Leader which is always nice. His name is Elder Boswell and he's from Independence, Missouri. He was just in my other last area, Daphne, serving with my old companion, Elder Hulet so that's sweet. 

   Whitewashing is annoying because we know nothing about any of the members and it doesn't help that the last Elders in the area wrote little-to-nothing down for notes to help us out with the people they were teaching. Basically just going in completely blind. Ohhhh yeah, and just to add salt to the wound some more, we are in a car share with a set of sister missionaries and we can't get in the car with them because it's against the rules! 😁 We basically just switch off the car every single day and do a lot of walking on our car free days. But, on the flip side, they had a lot of people they were teaching so our pool is pretty big. We just have no idea who the frick the people are. 
   I figure I should tell some sort of story from my new area so here it goes; there's a part-member family in this area that was taught a while ago in the past. The husband, Shaun, is the nonmember and we randomly called him up and asked if we could come over and share a spiritual thought and get to know him better. He said, "You know, it has been a while... Sure!" We pull up, the dude has like 6 dogs that we had to run through to get to the spot we were going to sit down and talk at. He put the dogs away and we just got to know the guy and learn his past experiences with missionaries. He's a scary guy, retired military, gives you a death scare that brings the chills fast. Anyway, we got to talking and he said he's had some rough experiences with certain members in the past that's kinda hindered his progression, but eventually we got to the topic of having the 5 discussions and he said he had never had them in an organized manner like that before. He said he'd love to hear them and they'd probably fill in a lot of blanks that he has with the doctrine. He grew to like us a lot through that discussion and if we get to him, we get to his 9 year old daughter. Heaps of potential there.
   Oh, I'll say one more thing. There's a woman in this ward named, we'll call her Debbie, that really really loves missionaries I think. The reason I'm assuming that is because she's called us 27 times since we've arrived 3 days ago. She always wants missionaries to come visit her so she'll just keep calling until that happens. It's always at the most unfortunate times when she calls, like mid-lesson we are bearing testimony. It's just something people deal with in the Prattville area. 😂
   Alright I'll shut up. Have a blessed one. 
-Elder Jackson Batman 🦇