Fogg

 

Hello again, (I can't think how to start in an interesting way, 'tis sad)

This week was really interesting, we had a lot of fun.

Tuesday we had District Council as usual, and we helped at the food bank afterwards. I may have already said this in a previous email, but if so that's fine because it still applies: everytime we do service at the food bank I just wish I was eating the food rather than packaging it up!

Elder Clark and I left early because we had a lesson to get to. When we got to our lesson we were in good spirits (as usual, it's hard to put me in a bad mood, when things like Panda Bears®️ exist in this world). This is also one of the guys we got to watch conference, and this was our first meeting with him since that. We entered his apartment, not noticing the look of doom upon his face. We said "hi" and sat down..We had no idea what was about to transpire . . .

Wednesday was great, we did some street contacting. It was very cloudy, and as we walked around there was basically this constant mist coming from the sky! I've never actually seen the sky MIST us, but that's what it was doing. Because it would probably rain at any moment we weren't able to really find anyone to talk to as we walked around, but it was still really fun because fog and mist are the best things ever. It was just the perfect temperature too, felt like we were in a rainforest (minus the rainforest of course).

Thursday I wrote a video and we filmed that. We need to get people to church, so we made the video so we could share it with everyone we can in our area, both formers and inactive members. It was really fun to make. In the evening my comp and I decided we were going to make as many calls as possible so he did the logging and I did the calling, and in about an hour we got through around 80 people. :) 

Friday was a lot of fun, we stopped by a ton of people with the ward missionaries. We has some great conversations and got a few inactive people to church as a result. It's really fun to go out and stop by people with the ward missionaries, especially when we take the Lear. 

On Saturday we did some service for a member. We helped put up arches using fencing for their tomatoes to climb up. It was hard to do but it looked great when we were done. We also helped clean out their storm shelter which was really fun! I have never even SEEN a storm shelter in real life and so it was cool to go in it. Although I still firmly believe storms are more fun when you are IN them.

On Sunday we did the usual Sunday activities. I couldn't think of anything interesting we did on Sunday so I guess the question is: Has anyone ever tried a pogo stick?

. . . Okay, back to Tuesday hehe

So we said a prayer to start, and then the first thing he says is, "So don't take this the wrong way, but this is probably the last time we will meet." He then told gave us his Book of Mormon and told us to take it when we go (little stinker). We asked him why, and he told us that he watched Conference, and he doesn't agree with how prophets and Apostles are chosen. He believes the way our church does it is "of men" and only God can choose a prophet or Apostle. We weren't going to let some utter drivel (UD for short) like that slide unaddressed, so we explained how a new Apostle is chosen by prayer and revelation among the remaining Apostles and how because it is done like this it IS God who is making the decision. We even showed him the chapter in Acts where they replaced Judas' spot in the Twelve Apostles and showed him how they did it the exact same way we do it. He wasn't convinced even though he firmly believes in the Bible. And when we asked him how he thinks it should be done he couldn't even answer that. Little did we know there was more UD to come. He then proceeded to tell us that there will also always be one Apostle who's bad because among the original 12 there was Judas. So we asked if he thinks there should always be 11 Apostles then instead and he said no but gave us no explanation. It was some of the most ripe UD I have heard in my life. Not a single thing he said made the most remote sense haha--we could see it was useless to argue anymore, we didn't want to really get into a bashing session. If you can call disproving something that already doesn't make any sense at all bashing haha

Another thing he did is he asked us how old we were and when we said 19 he said "well I'm 55 so I can reason through things a bit better than you." We just about said "want to know how old President Nelson is though?" But we refrained. Before we left he also said some blood-boiling things about how Brigham Young was a horrible person and I almost snapped but I held my cool, we said a prayer with him, and withdrew.

It was sad to lose one of our best people we were teaching, but we quickly replaced the one we lost with 6 new people to teach, one of which flat out told us she would consider Baptism on our first lesson with her!

That was my week

-Elder Nielson