Hurricanes

 

    There's been a lot of commotion happening here in Alabama. The month of August is usually known for it's craziness with storms and natural disasters. Recently we had Hurricane Ida happening and, for safety precautions, our mission president evacuated 3 zones further up north. Where I'm staying at, we didn't really feel much of it. But, you can definitely expect that we'll be cranking out some service very soon here. Hurricane Sally cleanup last year was quite memorable, I would absolutely love to do it again. We may have our Zone Conference this next week canceled, who knows. The other commotion is the new Delta variant of COVID, we had 2 zones that were playing it very safe since there was a lot of increased cases in that area. I wonder if we'll all be locked in again before the end of my mission? Who knows. I would be a lot better at finding on social media than I was last time. Last time I just started at my hand and read books.

   It's actually been a little bit of a tough week. We have this woman named B that was very close to getting baptized. She's an older lady that finds a lot of comfort in learning about and attending our church. Unfortunately, she does have a boyfriend that she lives with so in order for it to be possible to get baptized, somebody has gotta move out or they gotta get married. Believe it or not, B actually moved out to live the Law of Chastity. She went to go live with her daughter. It was looking so good for her to get baptized, but last second she raised a lot of doubts with the certain commandments. She then moved back in with her boyfriend and now we are back at square one. She is still working with us, but we'll have to slow down quite a bit to help her understand the importance of it all. We also have a few other people that were on date for baptism that we cannot seem to get in contact with. They disappeared, they're never home. When this happens, it just means we gotta find more solid people. Luckily, we've been blessed with a lot of people recently that have very high potential. Out with the old, in with the new I guess. 

   I'll tell you real quick about J, this is one of the high potentials. He wanted Family History help and put in a request through our Family History Facebook page, and since he's in our area, we get to help him. We met him at our church building and started helping him out. He came SUPER prepared with all sorts of dates and other things to make it very simple. We were able to fill in so much of the man's tree and he was astounded on how much information FamilySearch had on his family. He was very excited about it all. Once we were done, we prayed with him and he said that our prayer touched his heart deeply. He felt the spirit super strong. We have another day to meet with him to continue, but this guy is very prepared to hear the gospel, I just know it. We'll bring it all up next time and it'll go fantastic. 

   I'm sure there's more to share, but I can't think of much for now. I've just been trying to maintain motivation and dedication to the work even though it's getting towards the end. Luckily Prattville is keeping me busy so there's a lot to do. 

Have a blessed day, 

Elder Batman 🦇 

No Subject

 

   I had an alright past couple of weeks, nothing too spectacular. We've been grinding out down here in Prattville and I think it's safe to say that we have a firm hold on this area for now. Our Zone has been popping off when it comes to numbers and it makes me super proud. Apparently we beat the record for people on date for baptism for this zone. That's what's up. I guess I can go over some notable experiences from the last couple of weeks. 

   I had exchanges with a greenie named Elder Hurd. He's a super cool dude. He requested to lead out in his area even though he's only been out for like a few weeks so we granted his request. I just let him do everything and helped out when I could. Since I've been out for an ancient amount of time, I was able to drop some premium mission knowledge on my man. He was super grateful for the pointers. He actually had no idea how to report things into area book, which is just the planning app we use as missionaries, so I rocked his world with a tutorial on all of that. The dude loves to fish, so a big portion of their finding is to go to the Walmart fishing section and talk to anybody that goes down that aisle. Weird, but it works for them. We tried it out and actually found a couple of people to teach miraculously. Then a guy brought up politics with us so we ran away. Anyway, that was basically the exchange. 

   Our mission president is making a big push for getting as many people to church as we possibly can, so the Assistants challenged our zone to get 30 people to church for 2 weeks in a row.  For reference, we only got 26 last week and that was because one area had 11 show up due to good member missionaries. If we get the 30 people 2 weeks in a row, they said we can have a Zone P-day which aren't allowed in our mission but they'll make an exception. In our area, we tried SO hard to get people to church. We had 8 people that said they would go, but unfortunately only 4 showed up. We even drove to people's houses before church started to wake them up and it still didn't work out as well as we wanted. Luckily, we had some members that were willing to give rides to some of our friends so that was pretty cash money. Sadly, with all the effort from the Zone, we were not able to hit the goal which I'm not surprised. It was a pretty crazy goal. It's okay, we still did very well. 

  Other that, not much else is going on that's too special. We teach a lot of lessons here, but we are in a car share with a set of Sister missionaries so every other day we don't have a vehicle. It's quite complicated, definitely makes a lot of problems but we do what we gotta do. My companion is the social media lead for the mission so we do much extra stuff for his responsibility. It kills a lot of time but it's real important so can't complain. 

   Well, that's kinda all I got. I'm getting close to the end of my mission which is fricken weird. I don't know what a 20 month old missionary is supposed to look like but hopefully I'm in the ballpark of that appearance. What can I say, I'm an artifact in this mission nowadays. Sooo old. 

Alright, have a blessed week guys. 

  

Elder Batman 🦇