Forgive me for my slothfulness in writing emails on the schedule that I set. There's not really much of an excuse besides that I didn't really feel like it, but now I sorta do so here it goes. The last 3 weeks have been decently eventful. I think for this email specifically, I'm just going to highlights a few things that have happened in the form of bullet points. So...
-Yesterday at church, us and the Prattville Sister missionaries were able to fill an entire row of investigators attending church. It felt pretty cool. We basically just took all these people and marched them right to the front and had a couple of members sit by them. One of them is a single father named David and his son who is 8 years old named Jace. Prime age right there, that's what we like to see. They are looking hard for another church even though they were baptized not even 2 weeks ago in a different church. They've had bad feelings about the church they were attending and they see it as no coincidence that we randomly contacted them as soon as they were looking. Something super cool that happened at church is that we also had a guy named John there who is looking into our beliefs. We coincidentally had John and David sit by eachother, but it turns out that those two graduated highschool together in the same class. Bonkers man, you can't make this stuff up. After the service, they dapped eachother up and said ''I'll catch you next Sunday Bro.'' Music to my ears.
-In the span of a 30 minute period, I had two different guns pointed at me. It's not as bad as it sounds, allow me to explain. We were trying to go visit a person who was taught years ago, but they live all the way in Timbuktu (meaning the middle of nowhere) and the address was super faulty. Well, we ended up pulling into the wrong lot of land and this guy who owns the land has like 15 dogs that ran at our car. They were riding our tires, so we drove super slow trying to figure out how to turn around. Then, the man came out with a shotgun and pointed it right at me, but then he explained that he was just trying to scare his dogs away so I could turn away. Seems like a really weird way to handle that, but whatever. I only was a little scared. The other situation was not so crazy, he just had no idea who we were and thought we were trying to sue him or something since we are so professionally dress. Both guys in both situations were super chill after they realized who we were. So yeah, that was something.
-We went on exchanges with another set of Elders and I was with this one missionary just walking around a neighborhood trying to talk to as many people as we saw. In that little walk, we talked to around 15 people and every single person turned us away in pretty harsh ways. This one guy actually turned his back to us as soon as he saw us and continued to have a conversation telling us he doesn't want to talk and for us to get away. I guess he thought he'd turn to stone if he looked me dead in the eye or something, I don't know. The reason I'm saying this is that the mission isn't always sunshine and rainbows, miracles happening right and left. It's a tough life sometimes. But wait, it does get better. The Elder I was with and I set a goal to find 4 people to teach on that exchange but only managed to find 1. BUT, later that day with my actual companion, we were blessed with 5 people to teach. So, the lesson here is sometimes you gotta go through some trash, and I mean straight garbage, to find some treasure.
Anywho, that's all I wanna write right now. The mission is quite the journey, and sadly it's getting close to the ending credits. I plan to make it count and not be that missionary that becomes a couch slug his last transfer. We'll see.
Have a blessed one,
Elder Jackson Batman 🦇
