In One Ear

 

Never discount a missionary opportunity.....

 

As Matt Shultz sings on the opening track of Cage the Elephant's debut album, 'it goes in one ear, and right out the other'.

In our missionary work, we are constantly bringing forward the message Heavenly Father has given us to bring, and when we give it to our investigators, it becomes their job to decide whether or not to let that message go 'in one ear, and right out the other', or to let it stay, and dwell in them. As missionaries, we just gotta do our very best to make sure that message gets to as many ears as we can! Whether our investigators choose to listen to that guide of the Spirit or not, is ultimately their choice. I felt like that's been a bit of a theme this past week in our work.

Work wise, it's been a pretty regular week, though it's been a fun one for sure. I've been finding it tough to balance the amount of time in how much I work with my companion, Elder Mason, in training him, and in actually being out doing the work. We'll be spending so much time in the mornings studying and doing practices and stuff that I'll look at my watch or our phone and be like 'OH dang it we gotta get out there', and other days, we go out without getting enough practicing in! It's a very fine line I'm working on trying to figure it out, but let it be known, training is very fun. I'm enjoying it a lot. We've been working to make sure that what we study and work on doesn't 'go in one ear, and right out the other' ... hahaha

Elder Massey and his "son" Elder Mason from California

There were a few cool and fun experiences this week that definitely stood out. I've been working on getting better at talking to everyone again, kinda like I was doing last transfer, because I've been focusing so much on the existing investigators we have (some who let the message go 'in' and 'out') that I've been lacking on making sure we're always finding new people! We found two different people this week that I thought definitely stood out in cool-ness, that I like a lot. Both of them seemed to come when I questioned whether or not I should stop to talk to that person; I've found a lot of the time, I'll be passing by a house and think, 'hey, you should knock there' but my mind will tell me, 'nahhhh, you don't have enough time', but I almost always stop, think about it, and just do the dang contact, and 9 times out of 10, they turn out to be cool people. Funny how that one works...

One of these investigators we found is named Toni, he's 19 years old, and we found him in Tinteira. I was doubting whether or not to pass by this one house, and once I just decided to get it over with, I found out this guy lived there who I had contacted in the past, and was waiting for us to come by, but we never showed. I was pretty darn happy when we found that out. To add to it, he's never heard our message before, which is SUPER rare here in Fogo, cuz there's only so many people, that legit almost everyone has talked to the Elders before. We had a sweet lesson with him, and he seemed super willing to follow up with our invites. Hopefully we can find him again this week!

A bit of a funny story from this week, I had been planning with our young women's leader for a while now about havinh a youth activity in our ward, since we've been teaching so many youth, and this week, we finally got around to actually having the activity. Only problem was, is that when the activity was supposed to start, at 3, there was legit no one there. So we waited, and waited, and waited, and by about 5, we had 8 or so people there, none of whom were investigators. We ended up losing the entire afternoon to running this activity since it started so darn late, but we had a bunch of fun. I wanted to duplicate the Tree of LIfe activity we did at Moroni's Quest, but in classic Cape Verdean fashion, it came no where close. A lot of the youth were being used to be temptations, cuz they wanted to join in, so in the end, only like 6 people ended up going through the course we set up, and like 3 of them made it to the end. It ended up being super fun, but it was still just super average; I'm starting to realize that just slighly average is starting to describe a lot of standards of life here in Cape Verde... but it is what it is!

Hope all is well with all in the sound of this letter! Keep on being awesome!

Elder Massey

Honoring the start of hockey season.....