Oxford Comma

                                              View from the beach!

                                The hardships of missionary life.....lobster for dinner.... again!!!  haha

 

 

To paraphrase Vampire Weekend lead-singer Ezra Koenig,

'Who really cares about an oxford comma?'

Now, from my basic understanding of the term 'Oxford Comma', it is a type of comma used in a sentence where it really isn't a necessary punctuation in a given sentence, therefore, becomes something that shouldn't be something to worry about. I may be horribly wrong here, but again, I'm on an island in the Atlantic, I can't promise that I'm up to the times on everything.

My point being, many times, we worry too much about things that really don't matter in our lives, and sometimes, they bother us more than they should. My boy Ezra goes on to say, 'Why would you lie about something dumb like that?'  Thinking about this, a quote from General Conference this past week framed something on similar lines, saying 'sometimes, the stuff you can count, doesn't matter, but the stuff you can't count, really does' (again, paraphrasing, but bear with me) This week, we sorta felt screwed over by the whole world, and it started to get us frustrated. It seems that we know everyone in Maio, and that they're either all Catholic, Nazarene, or they just wanna hear the good word of God. Over the weekend, all the people here in Vila seemed to disappear and go inside, because of it being Easter Weekend, which happens to be a BIG deal here. Just little things seemed to be getting us frustrated: we were told Nelson went to Praia for the week, our investigator Leiza, who was supposed to be baptized this coming Saturday, may or may not have moved to Praia, all of our investigators had headaches because they were partying and couldn't come to General Conference, this list could go on and on! However, with this, sometimes we've just gotta remember the important things first, rather than putting little things like an 'oxford comma' in the way. Something Elder Stone and I talked about one night is that, as missionaries, we don't exist in a work of quotas; we aren't physically required to get a certain number f baptisms, or to get a certain amount of people to church, or whatever! We are truly in the work of our Heavenly Father, and with that, we are simply doing His work; we need not worry about the stuff that we think counts, but do that which He counts.

With that said, this week truly was an eventful one, and even though it was frustrating, it was pretty funny at times. All this really started on April Fools, as we thought it would be great to make our one day of pranking a good one. Despite our inner most desires, our goal to prank someone was ill-concieved, and was met as such: all our jokes fell flat. The one we really wanted to get was a prank on the lady who seels us our little 50 escudo drinks we get every day, as, on the 31st of March, we told her it would be my birthday the next day, and that we wanted free drinks. She said if we had a party and brought cake, she'd do it. We got SUPER excited at the thought of it, and we were sure we'd get her, so we made this cake mix we had sitting in the kitchen, and brought a piece to her the next day, but upon seeing it, she told us that it was a suitable birthday cake. Even though it wasn't my birthday, I was pretty chapped; I woulda been STOKED to have that cake for my birthday! Defeated, we left the store with our paid-for drinks, and sat down to take our break, as such is regularly scheduled.

Later that day, we went to pass by Nelson, who told us he would DEFINITELY be there, and as we passed by, found out from his mom that he'd left for Praia on the boat that day, and wouldn't be returning til that Saturday, just about 4 days later; MAN that made us mad. There brightest light on our April Fools was when we walked into our apartment to find the other two Elders, who no longer live with us, had tee-pee'd us. It definitely made our day.

More on the actual WORK side, this week, we were only able to teach one real lesson to Chano and Milcialtia, but man, it was a good one. We recognized that they have been a little slow to act on our commitments, so we decided to talk to them about the role of Christ in our lives, in hopes it would spark a desire in them; and MAN, did it ever. As we talked about the Savior, Milcialita ended up teaching basically all the points and thoughts we wanted to talk to them about. At one point, Milcialita brought up a specific story of Christ I wanted to talk about, and used it exactly as I had wanted to apply it, it was freaking COOL! This week, as we meet with them, we're really gunna push to have them focusing not only toward getting baptized, but getting them to live the Law of Chastity through getting married. We've got big hopes for them.

Also, we continued to progress with Louisa this week, who was our one investigator to show up to General Conference. She really struggles with a LOT of the Word of Wisdom, so we've been going by her house just about every day to see how she's doing with them, and at this point, she's just about straight up stopped drinking coffee, and she's getting better with drinking and smoking. She really is super cool, and we've invited her to be baptized on the 25th of April. fingers crossed that we can have her prepared by then!!

A funny story from this week, one day, after our District Meeting, Elder Stone and I returned to the house to get some money to pay for lunch, and as I was taking a pee break, I heard Elder Stone scream, and shout, 'THERE'S A BIRD IN THE HOUSE!', and, to our shock, we found a very little bird flying around in one of our back rooms. We have film footage of the whole incident which may or may not surface on the internet, but after about ten minutes of running around, screaming, and throwing balls, we managed to get the bird to fly out and continue its simple life as a bird. That definitely made for a good story as we met the other Elders for lunch...

Anyways, this has been our week here in Maio! Hope all is well at home, or abroad, on the land, or the sea!

Stay thirsty my friends!

Elder Massey