I was very excited to read Alex's letter this week. Although when am I not excited? I waited around all day, seriously, and it NEVER came! I decided to wait until the next day and call the Mission Office and be one of those Moms. I had a rough day on Tuesday, imagining the worst. I got home from somewhere and went to look in the past emails for the phone number to the Office and there was the letter! Whew, I didn't have to make a fool of myself or of my son! I suppose this sort of thing happens but seriously they should not let it happen to kids who are on the other side of the world! So, there was no problem and he is still healthy and happy! Thank Goodness!
They changed our Pday to today. I go into more details in the audio (a very long one this week). Basically Monday was a holiday and so we couldn´t shop or do Internet or anything, so they changed it. Which meant we had to work 7 days in a row without doing not-missionary stuff, which made Monday rough.
In other news, it´s pretty cold nowadays. I wear gloves all day, and right now it´s really hard to type because my hands (especially the right - couldn´t tell you why) are cold and sluggish. I wear that scarf all day too, by the way. It´s by far the best one I´ve seen. I remember in the summer I looked at it and thought, "This is ridiculous. What am I going to do with this$" Kind of a similar feeling now for the short sleeve shirts I have.
The sector is still enormous, and I still am not sure what I´m doing a lot of the time. The numbers are pretty weak this week. The work here is so sword-edged - if something doesn´t quite happen, a bus doesn´t come, or a person can´t go out with us, we´re just toast that day. Sometimes we´re just paralyzed in the center of the city, where we have no one. In Chile a missionary can´t go into a house without a man of more than 16 years, so if there´s not someone where we want to go, we just can´t go. So we knock doors all day. It´s hard. The sector is just that way. I´ve tried to keep up hope that with work we can get up to the levels of missionaries in the city, or at least to the level of Melipilla. But we slam and crunch and work so hard I can barely get up in the morning, and when I type the numbers in at the end of the week, we´re still dragging along with a pair of lessons with members and four without. We should be at eight with, and six without. That´s the level we have to be working for, as far as I understand it. It says over and over again in Preach My Gospel that you shouldn´t blame the sector or other people for what´s happening - but I blame the sector. Getting a member out to a "campo" town requires three or four hours of their time, and 1500 pesos, which is like sixteen bucks for an American. How often would you do that$
It´s okay, though. The leaders, while extremely spread out, are stupendous. The trick is figuring out a way to do it and presenting it, and not just giving the problem and asking for them to figure it out. If it´s just a question of money or driving somewhere, they´ll do it easily.
Robbie Williams just came on the radio. "I don´t wanna die. But I ain´t keen on living either," he says. Kind of depressing, the song.
Anyway, I´m also wearing the socks. Of course, we have to have on dress socks, so I just put the dress socks over the good ones. I´ve even worn the long pioneer garments. They work, but they feel really, really strange. I think I´m going to look into getting some thing like that you put over underwear, but under pants. Could be good.
Our investigators who asked for their baptismal date are good still, but they had to go do some tests in the hospital (hope they studied, right$) so we haven´t been able to visit them. They wanted to watch that movie from the Church "Together Forever," so we gave it to our Branch President, a friend of theirs, who will go and watch it with them with his family (like I said, really good leaders). These are your "intellectual" investigators. They studied with every church under the sun (and above it, Tom Cruise) and were ultimately impressed by the Church as being "different" than all the others. (Interestingly enough, in Hebrew, the word kadosh means "holy", but also "different." Next time you hear "holy" think about how it would be if it was "different." "Holy is the Lord of Hosts." "The Lord desires a holy people." etc) Like I was saying, they were impressed, but were very cautious. Then all this medical stuff happened I´ve told you about, and now they´ve seen the need for "Together Forever"-ness.
I´m over time. Blast. My relationship with my companion is getting a lot better. Do you know what the secret is$ I stopped trying. Kind of a wierd thing there, I know. That was all I had to do, though - stop trying. It just happened.
affectionately($),
Elder A. Conrad Crist
Pictures. People in Chile love families. And members always ask for them.
How much Cocoa in brownies$ The recipe doesn´t say how much.
Coins - whatever size, but a variety
Josh Groban
O Magnum Mysterium (song)
Thanks for the pocket knife, it was very usefull today
I whacked the infection, no problem.
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