Some Good Ol' Fashioned Work

So this week was pretty much what the title makes it sound like. We spent the majority of this week doing the basics. Trying to talk to everyone we see. Visiting less active members and part member families. Stopping by potential investigators. And trying to work with the members. The reasoning for that is that we actually don't have really any solid investigators right now. Which means we are at square one...finding. And it seems like it is going to be hard because lots of people here are pretty content with how their lives are going. Which means we're just going to have to work all that much harder to find those who want to hear the gospel. I am really (no sarcasm, I'm being totally honest) excited about that. I've actually really been enjoying getting down to the nitty-gritty hard and hot aspect of missionary work.

Here are just a couple of the funny things from this week:

On Monday played a game called Scatterball, which is pretty much a free-for-all dodgeball, where you can only take 3 steps if you are holding a ball, and if the person that got you out gets out then you are back in, so lots of the times if you are out you'll offer to hold on to a ball for someone, or they'll ask you to hold one so they can walk around, and in return they may get a specific person out for you. It was a really fun intense game.

Went on exchanges this week with Elder Mardesich. He was actually Elder Spencer's MTC companion and is now our district leader. So I was in his area and that was a lot of fun. We still were in major finding mode, but it was nice to also get the chance to do that in another area. One really funny thing that happened is I had remembered from last year when I was in Santa Fe Hills, that the one or two times I had been in the apartment Discovery Hills lived in (where Elder Mardesich is) that they had an electronic typewriter. So after nightly planning the night I was there, I looked around and sure enough I found it! And then I got it to start working! Then Elder Mardesich said I could have it. And thus I got a "Smith Corona Series H" electronic typewriter! I used it for a couple days this week to type up my journal entries, but then we found out it was pretty much out of ink. So now I'm back to pens. And since this thing looks like it's from the 90's they don't really carry the ink in normal stores. It now just kind of sits off to the side in our apartment as decoration and we'll probably use it if we can find another ink tape cartridge. It was still pretty fun for the few days though!

But yeah, other than that this week has just been lots of stopping by people and meeting some really cool people. We were able to stop by a few of our potential investigators and we might be having some return appointments soon (that is when people aren't off vacationing for the summer). We are really looking forward to that. And in the meantime we're going to keep on trucking and working hard to do the best that we can!

Spiritual thought for the week! I was studying Bishop Gérald Caussé's talk from this last General Conference entitled ,"Is It Still Wonderful to You?" and I wanted to share a couple snippets from his talk. "...is the gospel still wonderful to you? Can you yet see, hear, feel, and marvel? Or have your spiritual sensors gone into standby mode? Whatever your personal situation, I invite you to do three things...First, never tire of discovering or rediscovering the truths of the gospel...Second, anchor your faith in the plain and simple truths of the gospel...Finally, I invite you to seek and cherish the companionship of the Holy Ghost." It's a wonderful talk about how we can stay excited about the Gospel and never tire of the things that are taught. Many times the things that are stressed most are the basic principles of the Gospel, not because we don't understand them, but because they are the things we overlook in our quest to find things that are more exciting. But what if, instead, we made the simple, basic things exciting? How much better would we all be?

Talk to you again next week!

Love,

Elder Wixom