So in a week's time my companion will be heading home and I
will be spending P-day in a temporary threesome with Elder H. and Elder M. [pronunciation].
Elder H. and I were in the MTC together. He has a tendency for threesomes. Last
transfer he killed off his companion and therefore was in a threesome here, and
in the MTC his companion had to take the bus with a Spanish elder (who has
since gone home),[1]
so he was in a threesome with me and my companion. Elder B. will leave
immediately after church to go to Spokane and fly out the next day. I will get
my new companion on Tuesday. Everyone has been telling me I would train, but we
had interviews on Thursday and I didn't get that vibe from President C., which
is a good thing. He told me not to worry about taking over the area, but I am
worried. I know it will be fine, though. It's just hard with Elder B. having
been here since November, and him being such a good missionary. Every door's
been knocked on, everyone on the ward list's been contacted, all the potential
and former investigators have been met--I'm not sure what I'll do.
I found something interesting in the scriptures this week.
In Zechariah 11:13 is a prophecy on the Savior. In the beginning of Matthew 27
that prophecy is fulfilled. However, in verse nine it says it is fulfilling the
prophecy of Jeremy, not Zechariah. This means one of two things. Either someone
goofed up at some point with who prophesied, or else Jeremiah prophesied the
same thing but we don't have it recorded today. I find the latter to be more
likely, as the JST still mentions Jeremy, and though I haven't read Zechariah
yet, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all had many similar prophecies to each
other. Either way, it is an indication of the incomplete nature of the Bible. I
don't know how so many people accept it as the complete, infallible
"Word."
The Fourth of July was OK. It was P-day. The other elders
played basketball for a while (I am completely incapable of anything involving
a ball, so I don't even try), and then we had dinner in the mansion of the
bishop of the other ward (we spent the day with two other elders), then went to
a park to meet some recent converts but they weren't there. We watched a few
fireworks from our house after we had come home and changed. Being out in the
night air dressed like that felt really good. I won't be able to do it again,
though, until 2010.
So I'm kind of all over the place today. This week on
exchanges we stopped by a part-member family whose records weren't here (they
might be now) and they fed us dinner.[2] I do think one day the
husband may be baptized, but not for a long while.
And my randomness has run out for now.
Love,
Elder Melville
[1]
When I was in the MTC, we saw an elder who looked like he was forty. It turned
out he was going to our mission as well, but he was speaking Spanish instead of
English. He was a 23-year-old convert from Mexico. After I had been in the
field for approximately four months, I went on an exchange with a Spanish
elder, and we visited a member where the Spanish elders lived. The member
talked about this Elder G., who had already returned home, and she said he had
lots of problems. He had returned home early because of back problems. “Back
problems” was often an excuse for other (sometimes bigger) problems.
[2]
This is one of the memorable moments of my mission. We had tracted into a man
one day who said his wife’s family were all Mormon, and he said we could come
back for dinner sometime. A few weeks later, on July 2, I was on exchanges in
my area, and I didn’t know exactly what to do. We had our dinner break, but
neither of us felt like eating dinner. I decided to go back to the house where
we were, and the wife answered and let us in. She happened to be making
spaghetti for dinner, and she invited us to stay. It was a tender mercy that we
hadn’t eaten dinner! It was a great visit, and a few months later she came to
church with her son, I think. This is what my journal says about the incident:
“We came home for dinner, but Sister K.’s relatives were upstairs, so we got
water and went downstairs. I was looking at the potentials sheets, enjoying the
cool and resting, so I didn’t eat dinner. . . . Then we saw Dan and Shawna, a
PMF we tracted into, and they fed us dinner. She doesn’t want her records here.
We’ll probably ask the members at the end of the street to work casually with
them.” Shawna’s records did move into the ward.
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