Friday, July 5, 2013

44th Epistle from Elder Kaleb Erickson serving in Brooklyn, NY


Changes and Frustration:     Written July 1, 2013

Those are the two words I would use to describe the week. It all got started last Tuesday when they swapped out most of the English district. The only change in the Spanish district was that Elder Kitchen left and we got Elder Goates. I'm really excited to have him here. He was in the MTC with me, so we're already good friends. He can sing like an angel, so hopefully we'll be able to throw together some cool songs for sacrament meeting.
With so many new missionaries, I was in charge of running the elliptical activities we do every day to find new people. The English district leader is also new, so I took over to help him get used to his area before he had to start running huge finding activities. The first activity of the week was on Thursday. We drew a big tree on a poster and wrote the question, "What do you love about your family?" Then we had a bunch of leaves cut out and we ask people walking by to write what they love about their family on the leaf and tape it to our tree. It was way successful the first time we did it. People like to stop by and see the tree we have and add a leaf. Then we get to talk to them about eternal families and invite them to church. Things got a bit chaotic at first because we had so many missionaries who had never done this before, but it ended up working out pretty well.
On Friday we tried having a free lemonade stand. Set up for it was really frustrating because of other people not doing their part. It just meant that we had to pick up the slack for the English district. But it was still an awesome idea that we are for sure going to be doing in the future.  It was a pretty hot day and people loved stopping by for a cup of free lemonade. Then when we hand them the cup, we give them a pass along card and invite them to church. It was probably one of the best activities we have done so far. We also tried doing more shoe shining at that event, but it started raining which put a damper on that event. It was funny though because even in the rain, people still wanted free lemonade. The power of free is not to be messed with.
Saturday we tried an activity that I'm not sure I like very much. We wrote on big poster paper "What would you like to ask God?" Then we went to a busy area and asked people to write down the questions they would ask God with the intent of explaining to them that they can get answers to these questions through prayer and scripture study and invite them to meet with us. But people are people and so they like to give us crap or claim that there's no way we could answer for God. I think we may need to fine-tune that activity a lot. I'm tired of crazy people coming to us all the time.
We also helped a new family move in on Saturday, that was a good time. It's a husband and wife moving in from another area in Brooklyn. They have a son on a mission right now. We're really excited to have some new faces in the ward.
We met with Efrain again this last week. He's still doing well and tells us that he wants to progress, but he's afraid of committing to baptism entirely. We're trying to help him through his fears and I asked him to pray about a baptismal date that he would like to set and bring it to church. It was a good idea and he said he would do it, but he didn't come to church yesterday and didn't answer the phone when I called him. So hopefully we can get back into contact with him soon.
On a lighter note, our ward correlator got us a list of former investigators and less actives to look up. This is the first time this has happened here in a while, so we're excited to have the ward involved in helping us reactivate people. And at ward council yesterday, we had a guy from the stake there, helping guide the ward leaders in how they can help the missionaries and what they need to do to run the ward effectively. It was awesome. That dude is a hero. Also, one of the missionaries from my district in the MTC, Elder Goates, is in my district now. I could not be happier about that. He is great.

So everything is going well for the most part. Just trying to work with ward leaders who apparently don't like missionaries very much. And trying to work with an English district who never comes through for me. Those are the frustrations of the week. On the upside, Coney Island for the fourth of July and movie night this Friday! Hopefully we can make some new things happen here!

Love you guys!
Elder Erickson

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