It's About Time

It's been another one of those weeks. It's been a lot better than last, but it's been a grind. This week brought a mid-transfer transfer, due to a lot of Cape Verdean visa-waiters, who had previously been serving here, getting visas to leave for Brazil. As people started coming in, it became our responsibility to cover just about ALL of the transfers. It made for a fun few days :) apologies in advance for a slight rant email about all the running around we did :P

Up to his neck in work.....

One thing this week taught us was how to be efficient with the time we have. We might not get all the time in the world to teach every day. One day, we had to run to the airport at 6pm so we could book an emergency flight for a visa renewal for an elder, another day we had to meet up with a mini coming in from in-land to get them on a boat, and other days we had to make up to 5 trips to the airport! With all that thrown in our way, Elder Penner and I had to sorta do our missionary work on the run.  

Enough selfies already....time to get to work!!

 

 

One day, we wanted to get a lesson in before a trip to the airport, we had to park the mission Hiace on the street and rip to an investigator's house to teach, and then rip back out. It would've been pretty easy to make excuses, but we worked hard to make sure we got our teaching time in.

Friday was a good running around day for us. It involved a 5:30am wake-up, and making two different trips to the airport to get missionaries there for early morning flights, and then having to round up another 6 missionaries and get them off to the Brazilian embassy, all by 8am. By the time we got through THAT, there was another missionary waiting for us at the airport. By the time 9am rolled around, it felt like it was well into the afternoon, but we hadn't even been able to study yet! It was a definite struggle. By the time we got out of the office to work at 5pm or so, our minds felt like mush. We caught ourselves just walking with no direction, stopping, and saying to each other, 'wait, where are we going again?'

Maybe we were looking for something to eat.....

 

. That sorta thing happens on far more regular of a basis than I care to admit :P By the time we got home that night, we fell asleep pretty darn fast. 

 

The drive to the airport

As I sorta talked about this week, we are really focusing on getting people to progress in our area, and we're trying to cut out all unnecessary or 'fluff' lessons. Though we might not have taught a ton this week, every single lesson we taught mattered to the person we taught. I love being able to say that, cuz I don't know how many weeks on my mission that that has been a reality. I'm really starting to feel like, even though not all of our investigators are the most golden people of all time, we are helping each of them in some way to know the Savior a little bit better. Be that in teaching someone the message of the restoration, telling them we can't come by any more if they won't make the commitment to come to church, or help them through the loss of a loved one, day by day I'm gaining a stronger testimony of how we are called as the Lord's servants to stand in his place.

A couple funny things from this past week: there's a drunk in our area, who we find ALL over the place, who has enough of a knowledge of the Book of Mormon, that he knows the names of the Nephites, Lamanites, Amulekites, and so on. He might even make up a few of those names when he starts rattling them off for us. Anyways, yesterday, we were walking around, and found him on the side of the road. Our usual go-to is just wave and keep on walking, but he came up to us and was like, 'elders! Come into my house, teach me!', to which Elder Penner responded, 'man, but you're drunk!'. Being very persistent, he kept telling us, 'just 5 minutes' (a tactic I've used quite frequently), to which I shrugged my shoulders and told him we could hang out with him for 5 minutes in his house. after a couple minutes of him showing us every book he had in his house, we were able to say, 'okay, it's been 5 minutes, gotta go!' and he let us go in peace :) rather fun actually.

 We taught a lesson yesterday to a less active guy, Toni, who told us he can't come to church cuz he doesn't feel good showing up to church in street clothes. We thought he looked rather good in what he had, and Elder Penner told him that his best was good enough for the Lord, and we taught him a lesson on faith and how it's about our personal relationship with God, not about anyone else's, and then at the end asked him if he would come to church, to which he just repeated his same argument. We were both like, 'did you not learn ANYTHING??'

 It was all good though :) 

Looking forward to another week, one without all the running around! 

Love y'all! 

Elder Massey

 

Glad to see they have time to clean!