Yes, David is no longer a teenager. He’s gone and turned 20 years old in the mission field! All seems well in the office as we learn more about his new assignment…
Subject for this week: “You see, me? I don’t run into walls. It hurts.”
I will now attempt to answer any and all questions from you all. But I won’t get to them all, mostly because I don’t remember them all. Tough luck.
P-Day is now officially on Friday because the office needs to be open on Monday. I don’t know why it is okay to be closed on Friday, but it is.
My companion is Elder Vazquez, and he’s sweet. I don’t actually have many investigators to teach at this point, that are progressing at least, but we’ve got some referrals that seem really positive. And yes, I will miss being able to proselyte as much, but this office experience is already proving to be really fun, really cushy, and really get-machettied-by-president-a-lot. I guess those are all good.
Okay, I’ve already forgotten the rest of the questions. Sarah keeps bugging me about getting my new address out, so here we go: it’s the same. The way mail works is that it all gets sent to the post office, where it is now my job to pick up every Thursday. I sort it, and the zone leaders come by on Tuesday to pick it up, and then pass it out on Wednesday. Clearly, I have the advantage and get things early. Which reminds me, I did get a very nice letter from Grandma and Grandpa Arrington, Kaci McNeil, and Aunt Shawn/Uncle Mike. So thanks. And although they didn’t come until yesterday, I did get a package from the family and from Julie. So a BIG thank you for that. However, I haven’t been able to open them yet. I put them in the car and then found out I was going on interchanges, so I haven’t been back home yet. After we go bowling today as a zone I’ll head home and open them, though.
The big news this week is that I have insider information on something big. This big news has been common knowledge in the office for months and is just now starting to be circulated amongst the non-office missionaries. And I’m sure you’ll all have a million questions for me about it. Here we go. The mission boundaries are changing. When the new mission president gets here in July we are losing the Los Heroes, Lourdes, and La Libertad areas to the East mission, and we are moving the mission headquarters (president’s house, office, our house) to Santa Ana. That’s lame. That means the El Salvador temple will no longer be in our area. Stupid. I think that will also make us the El Salvador Santa Ana Mission. But not until July.
This week was pretty good, and pretty simple. The weekend was short because we have weekly planning all morning on Saturday and church at 1 on Sunday (fasting was a nightmare). And then Monday we were back in the office preparing for the ZLs to come pick up their zones’ stuff. Crazy times. My work there is kind of repetitive sometimes, but it’s more fun than that. And the people I work with are really fun. And we can order fast food delivery. Did I mention that before?
I can’t really think of anything super exciting that we did in the office. I called Elders to tell them some orders were in for various things, I created a small updated phone list that all of us in the office use, I updated the president’s wall in the office and in his house (the board that shows where all the Elders are in the mission), I did the mail run, we got a new printer, etc. I feel like I’ll have less to talk about now that I’m there.
I do have one crazy story for you all, though. Just last night I was in La Cima with Elder Ballard, one of our ZLs, and we went to go teach this family that was getting ready for baptism. It was a mom and her daughter, and they’ve been through a lot. They used to go to some other church but the pastor sexually abused this girl and she’s pretty messed up from it. But we got to this house and it felt strange. The girl was crying really hard about how she wants to get married to this guy she knows and have lots of kids with him, but that he doesn’t want to. Okay. Then she suddenly stopped crying and like went to sleep for seriously two minutes. When she woke up she seemed really dark and serious and she told us that she got an answer that she should not be baptized. Her story was that she went into the bathroom one day and just started feeling really strange and she heard some kind of voice say she shouldn’t be baptized. And she took that as an answer from God. We showed her a little bit about how that’s probably not from God, and then she kind of laid down for a minute again and then was really happy all of the sudden. Then out of nowhere she started sobbing again and talking about how her cousin wants to sexually abuse her and all this really, really weird stuff. And then back to the super serious I-don’t-think-I-should-get-baptized part. The whole time, by the way, we’re also trying to talk to the mom, who really wants to be baptized in the chapel that’s being built next to the temple. We were trying really hard to explain to her that she can’t because she doesn’t live there, and it won’t be opened until August anyway (by the way, the temple opens August 21). Also the whole time, their stupid little white dog was barking a lot and then quieted down but (I’m not even joking) it started trying to hump me and Elder Ballard’s legs and arms and just wouldn’t leave us alone. In the end, we left with the baptismal dates still somewhat in-tact, but we both seriously felt that that girl has some kind of demon. We were both thinking we should give her a blessing or something, but we didn’t. I think he and Elder Campos, his comp, are going to next time we head over. The mission is really weird.
Okay, that should suffice for now. I hope you all have a fantastic week, and that everyone is not sick, nor staying up all night with newborns. And a big thank you to Mom, Dad, Stacey, Julie, Sarah, President, Whatever bank we use, and myself for emails this week (one of my jobs is to email elders that got packages, so I got one from me saying that). And just a heads-up Julie, I did in fact get that last email, but I enjoyed reading it twice. You might want to think about shrinking your pictures down anyway, though, because they come out on my end stupidly big and I can’t see them.
I love you all! Thanks for all your support, and the birthday wishes!
Elder E. I’m-not-a-teenager-anymore David Arrington
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