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