Friday, April 8, 2011

Week 10 in the Mission Office

No pictures again this week, but David is getting more complete in his descriptions, especially when it comes to his investigators.  Oh, and he’s getting stronger—exercise is good!

Subject: Get a wardrobe over here immediately. Take the Amigos’ clothes!

Time is all out of whack here. I feel like I’ve been just about out for ten months for like three months. The months move slowly, but the days move fast. But the weeks no. And sometimes it changes. Really weird being out here.

So this week I had some cool times with my investigators. We have had seven dates for a little bit now, and with only a couple hours of working time every day it’s hard to juggle them. We’ve been trying to visit all of them at least every other day, and for the most part we’ve succeeded. The Diaz family is getting baptized next weekend because we won’t have their birth certificates ready until then, so they can’t get married until then. Marlene is progressing quite well, and she should be getting baptized on Sunday. Dennis has some issues with the Book of Mormon that I don’t think he’ll be over before his baptismal date, but if he is, that’s awesome, and he’ll get baptized next week. Adreana is still really positive, but she needs to actually come to church this week or her date for next Saturday falls. But the most interesting one is the Caminos family. The wife, Maria, is incredibly super awesomely ready to be baptized. It’s ridiculous. Manuel is married to someone who broke his heart right after he got married, so he doesn’t want to go through that again with Maria, especially because they also had been having a few issues. However, we had an awesome FHE with them in the house of the Stake President, which I think I mentioned in my last email, and it helped them a ton. They had had a written contract between the two of them that if they were still together in 2021 they would get married, but then we went to visit Maria after the FHE and she was super happy. She said that, while they still aren’t getting married yet, she and Manuel have seen a huge improvement in their home since we’ve been teaching them, and they want us to keep coming by, more often if possible. And now Manuel is saying that if things keep improving like this, he’ll totally get married. Wow. The spirit changes people. I don’t know if you knew that, but it does. Now we just have to help him overcome his smoking addiction, and they’ll be an eternal family forever!

Last week was a little rough, so sorry about that. On P-Day we spent most of the time stranded in a super far away part of San Salvador getting our licenses, and we almost didn’t get back in time to write. In the end, though, I passed two written tests and the driving test, along with another driving test proctored by President Lopez, and I can drive. Which, I didn’t realize before, I’ve really missed. Although, people here are crazy. Super horrible drivers.

Oh my gosh, conference was amazing. We were all just sitting there taking ridiculous amounts of notes, and it was awesome. We unanimously agreed that priesthood meeting this time was the best priesthood we’ve ever heard. I can’t, off the top of my head, remember any talk that I would say is my favorite, but there it is. And they seemed to talk a lot about not stalling and just getting married. That was interesting. A lot of Elders here were surprised by that and said it changed their outlook on getting married. They used to want to just hang around for a few years before finding that super perfect wife, but the prophet kind of machettied that a bit, so it changed. Honestly, I think I was going to get married pretty soon off the mission, as a few people have already predicted, but nonetheless it was cool. And that’s kind of far off, so how can I apply that to missionary work?

I’d kind of forgotten that it’s only the things that I write here that you find out about my mission, so I’ve got to get better at writing the good stuff. In my defense, though, you guys kind of leave out juicy tidbits (yeah, I said tidbits) from time to time. Somebody mentioned that I am doing an exercise program, which is true, and me and Elder Oliverson are actually being really faithful to it. Our goal is 100 pushups, and having that goal is really helping. We started out with only being able to do 25, and we have our progress test tomorrow, so I’m not quite sure how many straight I could do now, but I’d be willing to estimate around 45 or 50. This morning we did five sets, with about a minute of rest in between, of 23, 28, 23, 23, and maxing, which for me ended up being 33. And all that in just a couple weeks. We started with sets like 12, 17, 13, 13, and max or something like that. So there’s a paragraph about my body. In case you wanted to know.

Also, I definitely started recreating the system I was using, which was sorely out dated, and I’ve been having fun with that. I learned how to use Microsoft Access, which I now quite enjoy, and I have to say, I’ve kind of outdone myself. I’ll have to send a copy of this to you all when I finish so you can admire my genius.

More than that, I have to take some more pictures and stuff. I had just thought of something to write to y’all, but then I just forgot due to some general secretary stuff I had to do just now. By the way, you might not have known, but I have access to everyone’s membership numbers, which is what you use if you lose your email password, so I technically can login to anyone’s email. Now that’s power. “Tell me about it. Every time I hear that name I shudder.”

Alright, I have to get a couple more emails off (one to President), so this is farewell for now. I am quite enjoying getting your emails every week, so keep that up. This week I got an email from the Arrington family, Condie family, De Rurange family, and Leybas family. That’s almost 100%!

In conclusion, always, no wait, never, no, always keep a trash bag in your car, because if it gets full you can just throw it out the window.

Elder David Arrington

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