August 30, 2010

Its been another crazy week in the mission field. There is always so much that goes on. I wish I could share everything!! First off I'll start with a crazy story because you know how crazy I am and this will make you laugh. So..each month, each companionship is given a specific amount of miles they can use on their car for the month. Well this month has been crazy because we had to go up to Bellevue a couple times, we had transfers, and we had to go to Renton several times for exchanges. So..we hit our limit the other day so we have been doing a lot of walking and trying to catch rides from members. On Saturday we did a lot of walking! It was a little scary though because we were walking on the side of crazy streets but we were safe. We probably walked about 5-6 miles in a couple hours and then we were fortunate to get rides from members. The craziest part is that on Sunday we walked to church and it was about 2.5 miles. It wasn't too bad except for the fact that we had to be at the church at 7:30 for PEC. We left our apartment at 6:50 and got at the church at 7:40. Along the way, there were about 4 men who were heading to the same meeting as us stop and ask if we wanted a ride but we can't ride with just men. So we kept on walking. haha It was quite an adventure!!! Now I can say I'm a real missionary! The walking wasn't too bad its just a little dangerous in parts of our area but its our own fault for not watching our miles. When I was walking, I was thinking about you dad!

Early in the week, we stopped by a potential investigator's house. Her name is Silvia and she is an older lady. She let us come in and we started teaching her about the restoration. The lesson was going pretty good but then Silvia's daughter, who is probably in her late 30's/early 40's, walked in. She looked at us weird and wouldn't talk to us when we said hi. She said a couple things to Silvia and then she went into the other room. After she left, we started teaching again. Well about 5 minutes later, the daughter comes in and asks us "Are you mormons?" I said yes we were. Then she told us to get out of her house. I said ok and we picked up and left. As we were walking out, the daughter said it was nothing against us personally but she doesn't believe in Joseph Smith's teachings. It was a really hard situation for us! We just wanted to cry after that. We didn't even know what to think! The rest of that day was a little rough because we didn't meet a lot of happy people but we made it through the day and learned from our experiences. Some days are just tough and drain you physically and mentally but I've learned that you gotta keep pushing forward because things will get better!

The same day we met with Silvia, we had a funny experience in the evening. We were tracting and we came to this house. From a distance I could see a sign on the door that looked like no soliciting and a list of other things. Usually we go to no soliciting houses anyways but if there is a list, then we don't bother. So I said lets just go to the next door. Well then someone started talking to use from the window saying things to us like "Why are you walking away? Are we not good enough?" Well after a minute I finally realized it was a member! It was pretty funny! Members like giving us a hard time :)