It sounds like everyone had a sweet week! Lindsay said it was snowing... and I forgot that snow still fell in other parts of the world.
Rodney you're mission is so different from mine! Wow! Great work rolling with the punches and adapting to the new style of missionary work. I hope you kill it in Ethiopia, and I hope you're new language call comes quickly so you can be even more conducive to the communication of the spirit. . If you speak like Yoda, you can have all of the wisdom of Yoda.
In light of Yoda's wisdom: this week Elder Olsen and I started working together, and we meet a family which quickly accepted us into their home to talk. People like to talk, they don't like to be asked to change their lives. We invited them to come to church on Sunday and they said they'd sure try. Elder Olsen pulled out his pen, gave it to their young man and told him to try and drop the pen. So he let it fall to the ground. Elder Olsen got all frustrated and said, "No, no, you dropped the pen, and I asked you to try and drop the pen." The boy looked at him quizzically and sort of held the pen awkwardly with a quivering hand until it slipped out of his fingers and hit the ground again. Elder Olsen goes, "No, you dropped it, just try and drop it." The boy picked up the pen again and was left with a frustrated face trying to make sense of what was expected of him. Elder Olsen then concluded, "see, there is doing and there is not doing, there is no try."
So back to Yoda, "Do or not do, there is no try."Elder Olsen served in my south zone district with me! He's the best! I think he's feeling some pressure being put on him right now because he can't rely on me to get everything done for him. We've been out the same amount of time, but he's been in the same area the last 6 months and has been on cruise mode a little bit. His Spanish is coming and he's dropping some of the 25 pounds he put on in his last car area. I think we're going to get a lot better together. I can tell he hates me for making him get up 45 minutes early to come run with me, haha. The same day we did a really hard bike day and now he can barely walk. I, in turn, really feel like I need to be on my A game so we don't poorly use any of the time in our transition. I few times this week I felt like Spanish was coming out of my mouth that I hadn't really practiced yet, and at times when I didn't know I could use it, and no one looked at me weird so it must have made sense. That was a definite blessing.
Mom sent me an awesome package! With cookies! Oh, they were so tasty. She also sent me an awesome talk with a few quotes I really liked. The talk was about the strength we can receive through the grace of Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice. One thing I wrote down because I felt like I was in the depths of humility this week was, "There is so much more satisfaction saying that the Lord did it through me than there is in saying I did it all by myself." So it is with missionary work. The success comes through the grace of God, and upon our being humble to his will that success can come through us.
We had 7 souls at church yesterday! "Darrel" and "Patsy" came, as did Juan and "Hermalda" with their daughter "Ella" and 2 grandsons! Their grandsons, "Tad" and "Amilio" are awesome. We had our first official lesson with them this last week and it was not what I'd expected. They're twins, one with ADHD and the other with Autism. We taught CPR cups:
In short format we place 3 cups upside down on the floor in triangle formation and tell them to create a formation using 3 butter knives that each touch one cup and that together can hold up a few Books of Mormon. It's possible if you layer the blades on top of each other in a specific way.
We use the cups to show that C-church P-prayer and R-Reading the scriptures consistently together every day and every week provides us the spiritual foundation we need to support that trials that come into our lives and families; and then of course CPR is used to keep people from dieing so it also keeps us from spiritual death - which is the process of distancing ourself from God. I asked them, what do you know about CPR and got the answer, "Circulatory pelvic respiration... blalalalala for 30 seconds from the autistic one as he rattled off a medical dictionary definition including a procedures list and maneuver cautions. Power to the autistic. That was impressive.
We had to teach really simply with breaks every 15 seconds to accommodate outbursts of energy that crescendo-ed as it jumps from one twin to the other.
The mission goal is to have 6 investigators with baptismal dates every week. We have 2.
I love you and I miss you!
Stay Salty!
Elder Tyler Meidell
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