Week 29 4-9-2018

Hi guys,

So I feel like as a whole these weekly updates are going to continue to get shorter and shorter. The reason for this is that the mission life is rather repetitive. You knock, you teach, you leave. (But mostly knocking.)

Although I do a lot less knocking than most missionaries; a lot of missionaries will just pick a street and act like door-to-door salesmen for the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. In some areas and cultures this works well; in ours, it doesn't. Every missionary has a different style and perspective, so I'm not going to say that random door knocking (tracting) is bad, but I try to do it as little as possible. It's not only ineffective, but it can also be extremely demoralizing and even dangerous. 

So I try to knock the doors of people we already know about. For example, we might stop by a member or a person who's talked to missionaries in the past, to check up on them. We also might give them an uplifting message or maybe even a challenge depending on the situation. Then we check with them to see if we can help them in any way, and before we leave we ask them if they can refer us anyone who would be open to hearing our message.

One of the people we are teaching right now is a ten-year old whose family is coming back to church after a long time. We've been trying to help him with his scripture reading. He's been doing a pretty good job so far. Elder Roper and I decided that we should make him a chart so he can keep track of his reading. So we printed one off on some craft paper and got some stickers that he can use to keep track with. But neither of us trust him with a piece of paper, so we decided that we should laminate it. But as you might expect we don't have a laminator, and we're really cheap so we didn't want to have it done professionally. Both of us are well aware that you can do some crazy stuff with an iron to laminate, but it looked like a lot of effort and we don't have an iron in our apartment. (Sorry you had to hear that mom.) 

So what we ended up doing is a ratchet packing tape lamination. Each of us did one, and each of us thinks ours looks better than the others. It's a really stupid and cheap thing to do, but I'm very proud of my packing tape laminated Book of Mormon Reading chart. If we don't end up using mine I might send it home for my mom to hang on the fridge.

Stay safe and don't suck on hard candies while running. 

From the last samurai,

Eli