Right To Bear Arms

 

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 🦇 

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 🦇 

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 🦇 

   

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 🦇 

Tropical Storm Clean Up

 

   I just want to get right into things. Do you remember Nate and Jared, the dudes our age that we are teaching? Well there's been a lot that has come from that. Jared decided to go visit home for 10 days in Michigan so before he left we definitely prepared him by talking about opposition potentially from family and friends about what he is doing. He mentioned that right before he left for summer sales, his parents told him, "Just don't come back a Mormon." Anyway, while he was gone, we got a call from another one of the members doing Summer Sales saying that her friend Scarlett wants to be taught. Scarlett spoke with Jared and since he said he loved the lessons, she was mad curious. Well, we go over to teach Scarlett with Nate present, but they want us to go down to the girl's apartment. We head down, open the door, and it's 4 college aged attractive girls sitting there. One of them said "We all wanna hear what y'all have to teach." Elder Johnson and I just looked at eachother in disbelief. But yeah, we taught them the Restoration and they loved it. 2 of them are Catholic born so it's definitely new information, but there is a ton of potential. Scarlett herself is basically asking us to be baptized since she just loves the people in our church. And hey, it's not everyday you get to teach a group of people your age on your mission. And now, when Jared gets back, we plan to put both Jared and Scarlett on baptismal date at the same time. Maybe even have Nate himself baptize them, idk. 👀 

   A huge tropical storm hit Florida recently and for some areas they got wrecked. Well, when the storm initially hit, we had really fast winds and bad downpour in our area, so our mission president had us stay inside for the whole day which was rough. Yeah yeah, I stayed 9 months inside for quarantine, but this is a little different since we were already used to being able to go outside. Back then, we had no choice but to stare at the wall. But anyway, on Saturday our Stake President and Mission President reached out to us saying that we need to organize all the missionaries in the Zone to help out with tropical storm clean up for Sunday morning. There wasn't enough time to organize for Saturday, so they went with Sunday with general seventy approval. Brewton got it the absolute worst and needed the most help. Sooo, we sent us a few other companionships up there and it was pretty bad. I guess I didn't mention, but there was a few tornadoes that came about with this tropical storm and because of that, some of these houses we saw were completely deleted. We did service from 9:00 AM-3:00PM which means we missed church. 😔 It dumped rain on us, and since the south is used to that, no one stopped working even though we were drenched. We did get word that we will probably go up again next week because there were homes that were way worse than the ones we were working on that needed help. You're going to be seeing a lot of pictures of me in a white/yellow shirt so stay tuned. 

   Lastly I'll just mention these two guys we found this week. They were boxing in their garage, these two philipino guys. I was on exchanges with my old companion, Elder Rasmussen, and we just walked up to them. They were so kind and welcoming to us! One of the dudes said that he was a good friend of Manny Pacquiao and has actually sparred with him in the ring a few times. They immediately started asking questions about our faith since they remember seeing people like us in the Philippines. We were able to testify who we truly believe Jesus Christ is and that brought them a lot of comfort knowing we were on the same page. They invited us back and it seems super hopeful. 

That's kinda all I got. We did go to Fort Pickins on pday which is an old war base. That was alright I guess. Anyway, til next week. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇 

 

Aliens

 

   I, once again, apologize for not writing last week. Sometimes I just get lazy and that's how it is. But these last 3 weeks have been one for the books so let me tell you a few stories:

   The first person I baptized in the mission named Kristina came up and visited me in my area. She lives in Foley which is not that far from where I'm at. Her and her husband took us to lunch and I was so proud to hear all of her progress she's made in the gospel. She's almost done with the whole Book of Mormon, she was sealed in the temple in March, and now she's a ward missionary. She goes out with the missionaries all the time. The Foley Ward is a lot of old people so she has been, as she put it, "getting them off their butts" and putting them to work. Oh, and since she is an Uber driver and loves to talk about the church, she's given us 4 different referalls of people interested in the gospel because she drives through Pensacola all the time. I was smiling the whole time, felt like a proud dad. 

   We talked to 2 different Atheists at different times will street contacting outside. Both of them went off asking our views on Aliens, who created God, how does science relate to the gospel, what if an Alien told me God wasn't real and he had perfect evidence. It was wild. On both occasions they actually enjoyed our answers and allowed us to come back to talk about the Plan Of Salvation. Who knows what'll happen. 

We had a craaaaazy experience happen with a member in our ward. His name is Nate and he's around my age. He's here in Pensacola for Summer Sales selling Solar so he's originally from Utah. He wanted to get closer with God and the church so asked us to drop him off a Book of Mormon. Nate mentioned that he has a coworker/friend that was interested in learning more about the church so we scheduled a time to come over and talk with them. The friend's name is Jared and when we got to this Solar HQ, it was super nice. Very fancy. Summer Sales is filled with returned missionary so this guy has been hearing a ton about who we are. We taught him the full Restoration and he had a lot of questions. We gave him a Book of Mormon and told him to read and pray about it. When we left, him and Nate continued to talk about the gospel for 2 more hours. Jared was having a bad attitude towards the Book of Mormon because he wasn't fully grasping the idea of more scripture quite yet. He was going off on a rant about it. Well, Nate gave him challenge, "Open up to a random page and read the first verse you see. Let's see if it speaks to you." Jared did and he opened up to Ether 2:8 which says, "And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared, that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them." Jared was shook, it said his name in the verse he opened up to and he started going crazy. The spirit slapped him. He, now more than ever, wanted to read this book and find out if it's true. Then, Nate himself wanted to try this challenge, so he opened up to a verse and it was spot on to his current life predicament. They both were in tears. The way we found about this is Nate called us when he was visited home in Utah. When he finished the story, his father hopped on the phone, in tears, and thanked us for what we were doing. He said he's never seen his son like this ever and was so happy. We'll be meeting with them Tuesday and they have a ton of questions written down for us to answer. So stoked for that. 

I'll just leave it at that for now. We're heading to the beach today so I'm excited for that. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇