...because the creatures are less likely to tell you to go away.
I wish I could say that we've gotten three new investigators and everyone's progressing really well, but that's not quite how things are shaping up here in Mandan. We've just been doing a whole lot of tracting and have met a whole lot of people that don't want to talk to us very much. My personal favorite rejection came last night, though. We knocked on a door and someone yelled, "Back door!" So we went towards the back door (which was a challenge because everyone in ND has like five doors for some reason) and as we were standing there on the sidewalk, the woman was like, "Whatever you're peddling, we don't want any!" We had no idea where she was. So then we were just standing in the middle of the sidewalk yelling this tracting approach at this house because we had no idea where the person actually was. It was a good time. She wasn't interested in talking to us, if you couldn't discern that.
On the plus side, we've met lot of nice dogs (and a few no-so-nice ones). My favorite dog story (because let's be real, I have more dog stories than people stories right now): We were walking up to this door and this big old German shepherd stands up and starts booking it towards us. We just kind of stopped because we weren't sure if we were about to get murdered, but luckily she was super friendly. Her owner was nice, too, even though she didn't have that much interest in talking religion with us.
The weather's pretty nice, though! But for a couple rainy days, it's been pretty warm. Everything is starting to bloom around here and there's bunnies running everywhere. Turns out lilacs are a big thing in North Dakota. There's three or four different colors and they're huge, so it smells like lilacs just about everywhere we go. I'll try to get pictures sometime without creeping too hard on people's houses.
There have been a lot of discouraging things this past week, and our numbers are the worst they've been since I got here. The super great less-active lady we talked to last week texted us and told us she was going to stay with her church and she didn't want us to come back, which was super sad. We had a lot of appointments fall through, as well. There's a line in Preach My Gospel that I've been thinking about lately, though. It talks about how your success is measured by your commitment, not just your numbers, because you don't have that much control over whether or not people meet with you. It's all down to their agency. But you do choose how hard you work and how committed you are. I'm trying to remind myself that God wouldn't let me mess up someone else's salvation because I'm not tracting well enough or I'm not experienced enough to do the work right now. I'm trying to remember that I'm where I need to be when I need to be here, and even if I don't ever know why, all I can do is work and trust. So we're going to try to work harder this week because we'll feel way better about our numbers if we know that we did all we could. That's hard when you haven't seen success for your work, but sometimes that means you just need to do more work first.
So the work continues! We have zone conference tomorrow, so we've got some sisters staying with us tonight. Should be fun!
Have a great week! God loves you, and so do I :D
Sister Myers
