Interesting week (3/3/08)

This continues my series of mission letters. For a few weeks there, the Sundays when I post these had the same date as the letters themselves, but 2008's Leap Day threw that off.

I'll start with the ugly this week and if I have time I'll get to the good.

Last week we stopped by an inactive member. He was really nice--if not really believing or keeping the commandments--and let us in and said we could come back sometime maybe if we were in the area.

Saturday I went on an exchange with an Elder T. and we drove by a house where news vans were taking pictures of flowers on the lawn. Elder T. said the windows were boarded up. I didn't look because I was driving, and I didn't pay complete attention to where we were. Well, it turned out that the inactive member was stabbed a few days after we had met  with him, as well as the girl he was dating. I've heard they think alcohol and drugs were involved. The murderer (who has been caught) tried to burn the house down to hide the evidence but didn't succeed.[1] I think the dad, who lives about sixty miles away, is the only active one in their family. They're not having an LDS funeral.

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When I was on the week-long exchange with Elder R. we taught a lesson to an investigator, Kristy, and her less-active boyfriend, Doug, with the Elders' Quorum president there. When we got there he had already started his own lesson about the scriptures so we didn't have an opportunity to teach what we had planned. As we left Elder R. remarked about how he hated when members talked the whole time.

We've been meeting with a less-active man, Richard S., who married a non-member, and last Sunday our bishop asked us to prepare a lesson that would motivate him to invite his wife to hear the lessons.

The Elders' Quorum President told our ward mission leader that it seemed we didn't have anything planned at that lesson we had with Doug and Kristy--but he was the one who prevented us from teaching us what we had planned!

We prayed and thought to know what to teach Richard, and we decided on the MMTC (Member Missionary Training Center), a four-week lesson designed by previous missionaries to motivate members to do missionary work. The bishop was there and he seemed like  everything was fine.

Yesterday (Sunday), however, at ward council the bishop chewed us out  for not planning an appropriate lesson for Richard, followed by the Elders' Quorum President telling us we need to plan and pray about our lessons. It's just so frustrating that they think we don't plan when we totally do. The bishop thinking we taught the wrong lesson is one thing  but thinking we didn't plan, as well as the Elders' Quorum President thinking we didn't plan when he's the one who prevented us from teaching our lessons, made us quite upset yesterday.[2]

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OK, I've vented  and I don't have time to write about good stuff. I'll try to do that in my snail mail. (Sorry I didn't send a paper letter this past week--I wrote back to Tammy two months after they wrote me.)[3]

--Elder Melville

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[1] See this post, including this article and this article.

[2] I remember my companion remarking that that attitude was why that ward hadn’t had any baptisms in years.

[3] My cousin’s family sent me a letter while I was in the MTC. People care about you when you’re in the MTC, then they forget all about you. In the last year, I’ve been filing the letters I received on my mission, and I still have this one.