To Do Good in This Generation: The Week of the Overgrown Child

April 18, 2016

This week I'm including a lot of random stories of things that will help explain the title better. We knocked on a door of a referral we received, and we were told that he wasn't home. We asked if we could come in and wait there for him and they let us in. The guy that let us in was in his 20s, and there were his 2 younger brothers there as well, probably about 7 and 4. They were playing with play doh, so we started making things with them and then saying the words in Spanish in English. It was fun to see him laugh as we put on poorly made glasses, mustaches, hats, and held a turtle for him. So we spent 30 minutes playing with Play Doh. When the guy got home that we were looking for, he told us that he wasn't interested but that he had just told the other missionaries that he had a Mormon coworker.

For personal study for 2 days, I read the Book of Mormon Stories book. It's a children's book, but it was a nice change of pace. The nostalgia was also pretty incredible. I'm going to read the other editions this week as well just to get a good overview of all of the scriptures and the timeline. Another day we knocked on a door looking for someone, we didn't get an answer at the door, but there was a guy outside getting ready to fly his drone. He had a crowd of little kids watching in anticipation. He told us after we knocked the door that he lived there and we were looking for his daughter, he went in, came back out, and said "she's eating right now" without a further explanation. We decided to wait and see if she would come and talk to us, and he started flying his drone. Apparently those are more difficult to fly than it seems, because he brought it up, back down, and then underneath a car. He tried to get it out (instead of shutting it down, which is what I would have done), and instead it just flew up to hit the bottom of the car. We could hear the propellers being torn to shreds as we heard the screaming and laughing of the kids. We figured it wouldn't be the best time to ask him more about his daughter, so we left. $1000 drone --> gone.

Another referral we were given was for a 13 year old kid. We knocked on the door, and the dad answered. His son wasn't there, we asked the typical questions, and he invited us in. He then started spouting off about basically every known conspiracy theory mixed with the book of revelation and with the Old Testament and some other crazy stuff. I knew that there was no chance of actually teaching him anything when my companion said, "well none of us are perfect, we're all human" and he responded with, "yeah...well, most of us are human. Other than the reptilian hybrids that are the descendants of the fallen angels that mixed with humans and live underground. Did you hear about the earthquakes recently? The government was bombing them". Ok then. Also the Illuminati started our church and has infiltrated in everything, crop dusting is really just nanoparticles reprogramming our brains, Lily was the first woman on Earth, not Eve, and the only safe place is Paraguay, but the Illuminati lives there, so really it's not safe either.

Other random stories: the other elders screamed like girls when a wasp flew by their open window as we were talking with them from our car, one elder told the story of how he was kissed on his mission by a Down Syndrome girl that told him to come closer and then put him in a headlock, and a mom who caused her son to hit his own loose tooth out on accident when she went to bite his face. I don't have time to explain. Some sister missionaries also got me a late birthday gift that included a book on ferrets, a book about love and marriage, a chocolate bunny, and a plastic ring.

GOOD THINGS: We had an awesome lesson with the Flores family. We talked again about the Book of Mormon, our personal conversions, and how they can have that for themselves. We left them with Enos to read, and we have a lesson on Wednesday. All they need to do is read with sincerity and they'll get an answer in due time... Elder Segovia and I will be staying together in Longmont.