Malo! That's Hi!, in Samoan...
This week has been pretty good. Well, ok... its been great! haha
New companion Elder Dorsey is pretty cool. He is from Pocatello, Idaho and it
turns out he knew one of my good friends who was from there as well. Small
world. Its been great working with him so far. Hopefully, he doesn’t get
transferred next week. That would be kind of weird. I have pretty much had to
take over the area again. Elder Dorsey wasn’t too happy that he was pulled out
of his last area on a moments notice. He has only been out four months and that
was his first area. I kind of understand, but Frederick is much better. He will
realize that soon.
The mission is definitely a learning experience. We pretty much
tell people that we can help them with anything and then when they give us the
job we figure out how to do it. This week we visited a guy.
He asked us if he would vacuum his car and help him out with some stuff in his
house. Of course, we said yes. So we got there and I grabbed the vacuum and got
to work. Then he comes out of his apartment with a very large pair of clearly
used underwear and some armor-all and insisted that Elder Dorsey clean the
dashboard. Never in my life have I been so glad I started working first. haha
But we did it. It was one of the "I can’t believe this is actually
happening" moments. Missionaries truly do see it all... Sometimes we see
way too much. When I finished vacuuming I took pictures... haha
We have just barely contacted a media referral. She was raised in an lds home until right before she was baptized. Then
things kinda’ went bad and her parents split up and they went less active. Now
she is a single mom and looking for religion. She recognizes the need for
spiritual things in her life and in her son’s life. Her grandma, also lds,
insisted that she get in contact with the church and so she did. She is pretty
awesome. She already has a great testimony of the importance of prayer and knows
there is a God. She has never read the Bible or Book of Mormon. She knows who
Christ is and what he did for us but she doesn’t know any of the stories or a
ton of the details. She knows a lot about lds way of life though, since her
extended family is all lds. We have met with her twice. She came to church on
Sunday. Her son is six and he was a little wild in sacrament. I was really
hoping that she would have a chance to focus and feel the spirit there but her
son was really distracting. It was neat though because she started telling him
why the sacrament was important. Then she kinda’ realized that she didn’t know
how to explain it very well. It was a good opportunity to explain the atonement
and sacrament quickly and briefly in simple terms. I think that was a benefit
to both of them. After the sacrament her son persisted in his six year old
wildness. Luckily, a Sister helped out and offered him a coloring book.
Problem solved.
Good news is that we went over
to her house later that day and answered any questions that she had and then
had some great faith building spiritual experience sharing discussion. She
wants to come back to church this week.
The weather is really nice here. One of the mildest summers in a
long time from what we hear. Feels like September or October more than August.
It has been nice. I have heard that Utah is in a heat wave.
We have not been able to meet with Professor lately. Although, we did
meet some of his students at the Frederick Rescue Mission. We volunteer there
every Friday. They were pretty cool and knew who Professor was. And they will definitely
tell him hey saw us. They couldn’t believe we were from the west. They insisted
that they get a picture with the people from Utah. I was thinking "No. You’re
missing the point. You don’t want a picture with some one from Utah, you want a
picture with missionaries..." hahaha Some people...
Oriole night was really fun! I think I saw maybe four plays the
entire night, but it was great to hang out with all of the other missionaries.
Baseball is definitely not my thing. We all had a blast though. All of the
missionaries were in one big section. There were about 270 of us there. It was
crazy. We were on the jumbo-tron a lot. Pretty neat.
We are looking forward to another great week here. We a have a
lot of things going well in this area. I hope you guys are having a great time
at home. I am sure you are staying busy. I have got to go now…I will talk to you guys next week.
Love you guys,
Elder Hinkle
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