It has been SO HOT this week. Seriously. So hot. It's been kind of stormy during the nights, but during the day there's hardly a breeze. It's a really oppressive heat up here because it's so dang humid all the time. We went to the temple on Wednesday and when we came out it was like 100 degrees and 100% humidity and it was the worst thing in the world, but we still took a picture and only look like kind of sweaty and nasty.
So basically, perfect weather for loads of service again, right? I don't know what it is about July, but 'tis the season for everyone to move or do all their yardwork. We laid sod on Tuesday for a nonmember who is really good friends with someone in the ward, ripped siding off the garage of another member's coworker, individually wrapped a bunch of glass unicorns in tissue paper for convenient storage...been a good one.
Met a couple of interesting people this week. We dropped in on one of our less-active families (who are planning on moving soon, go figure) and had a chance to teach the restoration to their friend who is visiting from Texas. She's really sweet and has strong faith in God, but some bad experiences with her previous church kind of pulled her away from organized religion. She seemed really sincere though, so we got her information and referred her to the missionaries down there. So if any of you happen to know missionaries serving around Seminole, Texas, tell them to take good care of Laura for us!
We finally taught Paul, who we met on the 4th, and that was interesting. He's a pretty crafty guy, so his whole house is like customized with woodburned designs and pottery and all sorts of stuff like that, and he's landscaped his whole backyard and everything. He's a super nice guy - works with at-risk teenagers at a boys' and girls' ranch in Bismarck - but he has weird, weird views on spirituality and religion. We talked about prayer and he says he prays all the time, but he doesn't really believe that he prays to anyone when he prays? Like he just thinks that all people on the planet leave vibrations that effect the world around them, and so he thinks that Jesus Christ was a "vibration" that might have lived at one point, but he doesn't really see how he could be his savior or anything like that. We're meeting with him again and we'll see how it goes, but yeah. Gonna be an interesting one. He's into African drumming and chanting, also...
Otherwise, a lot of our lessons cancelled on us this week, which was disappointing. The most interesting thing was last night at like 9 when we called our potential investigator, Jarvis (or "Hevy," if you remember that story from a while ago). I don't know what was going on with him, but we somehow ended up being on the phone for like 20 minutes and he got really aggressive! He kept asking me to tell him all of the things I've done wrong because he didn't feel like someone "perfect" should be able to tell him how to repent. It was intense for a while, but then God intervened and we lost our connection. So we counted it as another lesson and made our goals for the week, which I guess was nice, but honestly I was fine being one short, I think.
We did have a really good meeting with the ward council, though! We planned really hard for it and taught them about member missionary work and told them we want to work with their auxiliaries to help strengthen the ward in their specific areas. We were hoping that the Bishop would invite us back every week, because it's way more efficient for us to be there every week, but we think that we managed to get everyone more on the same page about moving the work forward with the help of the ward. So not the perfect result, but progress is progress, right?
Thanks for the support! Love you tons!
