Keeping Busy in Columbus

How’s the new area? Great, lots of food in pantry and dedicated members

Being with Elder Mickel again?  It’s good, I already know him, that’s good

Predominately Spanish? Not as much as Lexington, there is a town called Schuyler 15 mins away that’s about 80% Hispanic

What was Sunday like? Good, got to say hi to everyone and there was a good attendance of 85 people, 15 more consistently and the building will get an expansion

Teaching pool big? yep

Get everything packed? yep

Have more belongings? yep

How about the bike? safe and sound

Elder Mickel run? Nope

More opportunities to teach in Spanish? Kinda, not until we get English missionaries here to share the load

Area smaller? not by much

Mode of transportation? still the Malibu

How long has comp been there? over 7 1/2 months

Ward or branch? branch

It’s been a busy week; lots of tracting, teaching and planning.  Weekly planning was essentially Elder Mickel going over everyone on the board with me, telling me who everyone is and I try to remember everything.  I’ll try to give you a sample of the week:

We went to Grandma K’s house; she’s the mother of one of the members here.  She’s about 80, very catholic but warming up to us and loves missionaries.  She insists that we call her grandma.  She gives us hugs when we come over.  When her daughter was baptized she didn’t talk to her for a week.  So she’s really opened up. 

We went to the S family’s for lunch one day.  They are a Hispanic family and fluent in English but prefer to speak in Spanish, they are active members.  We had ribs, fries, pan dolce, and corn on the cob – really good lunch. 

We had dinner at the G’s and had a great time.  They were inactive until just a couple weeks ago when Sister G got called to be 1st counselor in the YW presidency and they’re reactivated now.  I got to have some one on one time with her father who is a non-member.  When we left they gave us four bags of groceries, which was fantastic!

We went to Schuyler (a town of 8,000 almost completely Hispanic – there’s a lot of work to do there, it’s just a matter of getting the miles to do it) and went to the W’S for dinner.  Sister W is a convert of less than a year, she’s working on her doctorate in alternative education methods.  She’s a strong personality, out spoken, wonderful lady – we had some great food also.  The branch president and his wife showed up too.  Sister W was converted when her daughter was dating a member and took the discussions and wanted to be baptized, Sis. W threw a fit and didn’t want her to be baptized without knowing what her daughter was getting into.  She took the discussions and was converted.  Apparently she knows a lot and I can believe it, she’s a very smart woman and seems like she is really active in doing something, mostly with studying.

We had church.  The ward is really, really friendly.  I’m giving a talk next week.  We did a lesson in gospel principle on honesty – not the easiest topic because it’s hard to fill an hour with it but we had a good class discussion.  There were a lot of people there!

We saw G an investigator about our age, ready to be baptized for a while.  He had prayed to find the true church and the next day the missionaries knocked on his door – I believe one of those missionaries was Elder Vawdrey.  G has come a long way!  He was into partying, drinking and girls and things like that, but he’s come a long, long way.  He’s waiting at the moment, he really wants to be baptized but he’s on probation because he had a DUI and he has to wait until August until he can be baptized.  We had a good lesson.  We talked about the millennium.  He’s just going through the gospel principles book, wanting to learn everything.  He’s been an investigator for a year now.  We had some really deep discussion.  He wants to know as much as he can.  The discussion went deeper on that than I have my whole mission.

On regular p-day we weren’t able to do emails due to President Day.  We did eat in a bar though!  That was a first!  We went with Bro. C and Bro. D, to eat at a tavern because it has a good deal on hamburgers & fries on Monday and a less active member is one of the cooks.  Everyone was giving us weird looks as we walked in.

We had zone conference.  We headed out at 7am and drove 1.5 hrs to Grand Island.  It lasted longer than normal, till 4:30pm.  I got to meet all the district, they seem very chill. 

I’m really enjoying it here.  The apartment is very comfortable.  Everything here’s perfect.  We’ve got all the commodities we could need so it’s a great place to do the work.

The old district: Elders Levitt, Jackson, Evans, Madox, me, and Rasmussen in front