To Do Good in This Generation: Thrift store bargains

February 3, 2015

I don't have a ton of time, so I'll try to keep this short (I failed). This might (will) be all over the place.

At dinner there were some peppers on the table, and everyone but me had had one. They all said (honestly) that they weren't that spicy and encouraged me to try one. Mine might have registered on the Richter scale. They asked me if I was ok and all I could really say was "I'm ok, please give me some milk right now". It was not a good experience. They all tried a part of mine and agreed that it was a lot hotter than theirs were.

Later that same night, their granddaughter who is about 3 was messing around with me, playing games, jumping on my back, etc. She was standing with one foot on two different chairs at the table, she jumped up, and then fell straight through onto the ground. She wasn't hurt, but she was embarrassed, and so she went under the table and started to cry. We had to go, but I asked her if I could have a hug first. She came out from under the table with red eyes and blotchy cheeks and gave me the cutest hug ever. She is so adorable. I'll take a picture of her next time we're over there. She's basically all the female affection I get, so maybe that was why I liked that hug so much.

I saw a Lamborghini this week. In Greeley. I've never seen so nice of a car in so ghetto of a city. Unfortunately, it was when we were driving, so I didn't have enough time to take a picture.

We came to the realization this week that the entire world hates Monday the most out of the days of the week except missionaries, which for the most part is their favorite. Just another sign of us being a peculiar people.

There were a lot of highlights this week, but one of them was definitely getting a suit jacket for $.25 and a full suit including a vest for $2.00. I searched the entire store to try and find matching pants for the first suit jacket but to no avail. I'll keep looking in thrift stores for the second piece of my new score and hope that I don't get any diseases from them. I'll definitely be dry cleaning them first.

We found out that the mission boundaries are going to be expanding in April to include Casper and Riverton Wyoming, the furthest of which is a good 7 hours from the mission office, and they do have Spanish work there, so I may be getting banished at some point on my mission.

The work this week was a little difficult. Freddy's family is giving him an incredibly difficult time with getting baptized. At first, his dad said he didn't want him to get baptized. They had a family talk, and his dad said he could if he found out everything about our church first but his mom still couldn't even though she wanted to. Then his dad found out that we teach English class to the Spanish members and nonmembers and said that we don't sound like a "real church", like his church (Catholic), but that we sound like an institution. What kind of church would want to help educate its members and help in the community anyway? Then he said that Freddy could only get baptized, but that was it, he couldn't go to church or anything like that after. If that's not hypocritical, then I don't know what is. If you're going to be in a church, you live it more than one day of your life, more than 1 day in 7, more than a few hours a day. You live it, always.

After that it changed to he can get baptized but he'll have to "pay the price", which he never went into detail about and just left it up to Freddy's imagination (all of this we have found out through phone calls since when we went over to talk to them as a family only Freddy was home and we haven't seen him in a few days). The final straw was today when Freddy's mom told him that she thought it was a sign from God that his dad was upset and that she wasn't going to go to his baptism. That was incredibly discouraging, to hear her go from wanting to get baptized herself to now not supporting her son and even telling him that she doesn't believe in his decision. We are currently trying to set up a time to have everyone there so that we can just have all of it out in the open and talk about why they hate us and all of that. The language barrier is probably a good thing for me right now, since I would probably just end up telling them how I feel about their irrationality instead of saying what I should to help make everything better and smooth things out.

Well I think I've vented sufficiently about that. Freddy still has a baptismal date for this Saturday at 4, and I'm really hoping that it goes through. I'll keep you all posted.