Tuesday, June 7, 2011

6 June 2011

So. This Saturday was the baptism day of I and C.

Awesome. Almost.

Both of them had their interviews and passed and everything was super awesome. But then on Saturday we go to find I, like a half hour before her baptism and after frantically searching around for a while we found her walking with E, her friend, and we were like I lets goooo! she said that she wasn´t gonna get baptized, no way. Turns out that her son told her that if she got baptized with los mormones that she could forget about him. This son is like the only one she has left who talks to her, her husband died and she is rather alone. Translation, she absolutely refuses to get baptized. We have worked so hard with her trying to help her get there and now her heathen son ruins it. We want to try to talk to him but we haven´t had the chance yet.

But there is still C right? False, the black bear. He had family members get sick so we have to push it farther back, bummer. But he does want to have it this Saturday, his mom wanted to wait more so his dad could reactivate and baptize him, but C says that he prayed about it and said that he knows it has to be now. Not sure what is going to happen, but this kid is on fire. He picked me to baptize him. Obviously it would be cooler to get his dad to, but we are afraid that he has word of wisdom issues. Either way, if we don´t get a baptism this week I am going to be really bummed. But the church is true.

In other news, D and S are way cool, they came to church again this week and had an interview with the bishop and he was able to explain to them how the church welfare program works and help them out quite a bit. This week we want to get them a date to get married so they can get baptized sometime soon. They gave us lunch today, we felt terrible, but they insisted and said they really want to share the little that they have. They are really poor, he has found a couple small jobs, and has hope for a big 2 year contract at a construction company. I really hope he gets it.

We got a new ward mission leader, brother J M, he is amazing, he was the young mens president before, and he is a hard worker. He has just over a year in the church, Elder B, from my group, baptized him in his second change in the mission. Their whole family is great, and I know that he will do his job and make us do better at ours.

Also, we got an interesting call the the day, we are no longer allowed to use bikes, ever. So we walked our hoo ha´s off this week. We need to completely change our technique now so we can still get in the number of lessons we had. But every commandment comes from on high, right? Should be fun.

On Tuesday we were able to see the S family, they are doing well, but the parents work on Sundays so we are going to have to have some killer lessons with them to get them to want to change, but they remember their glory days with the church, it seems like every inactive family had glory days, and they all look back on them like something special, its our job to get them to relive those days and come back to the blessings.

Its going to be a good week, tell the green water pool swimmers that they are nasty. I can´t believe that A left already and that J is on his way out the door, go Perkins cousins!

It was a rough weekend but I learned a lot. How to handle offended people, how to keep your chin up, a little church doctrine about prayer, and a whole lot about trials. I was told in my PB that in my mission I would face problems and that I would gain strength from their solutions, that not all the mission would be easy, but overall I would be filled with joy. I have been thinking about that a lot lately, and Saturday I tried to think of that joy I have felt, and even though we were walking to the chapel to tell a bunch of members that there wasn´t going to be a baptism, I couldn´t help from smiling. I love it out here, I have had so much fun being a servant of the Lord, failing, succeeding (a little), and overall helping his children. Its true, dang it.

I really love you family.
Thank you for being so great
Elder Barry

1 comment:

David B. Farstead said...

Three months into my mission in Argentina they said no more bikes too. Our Area President asked someone if they have ever talked to the Mormon missionaries and they said he tried to once, but they were speeding along so fast on their bikes that he could never stop them to talk to them. So we walked everywhere. We actually found a lot more investegators by walking and just talking to people on the street.