Week 35, 5-21-18

All right hello, what's up people,

Four years ago today I was in the CICU recovering from my second
open-heart surgery. I'm not only healthier than ever before,
but I am blessed to be working as a full-time missionary.
No matter how hard your trial is, you are brave enough
to push through and as a result become stronger.

So this week started off with a bang. On Monday night the, 14^th, we got a tornado warning. Fairfax city was third on the danger zone list. (for those who don't know we live right in the middle of Fairfax.) So that was real fun. We ended up being stuck inside all night. We made use of our time by baking some of our cookie dough. But as some of you may know I have a case of astraphobia, aka I'm scared of thunder. It may sound childish, and irrational, but hey that is why it's called an irrational fear. And also in my defense, the most common irrational fear is of spiders, and they kill far fewer people per year then storms. Even black widows and brown recluses won't be able to kill a nice, normal healthy adult.

Side note more people are struck by lightning per year then killed by sharks. (I don't even know why I bothered to put that in. It's not like Hannah, my best friend in the world, even reads this.)

But anyhow, even with the thunder, the storm was pretty fun. But the rain didn't stop. I'm not kidding when I say it rained almost all week. From Monday night to Sunday morning; it didn't stop. Most the time it was pretty light, but it did get heavy a few times, and once again it didn't stop!

On a completely different subject, our mission president gave us a goal that as a mission we will have 50 baptisms in June. To help achieve this goal he challenged us as a mission to find 300 new investigators last week. (For someone to qualify as an "investigator" they have to have an interest in learning from the missionaries, you have to have taught them at least one principle of the gospel, leave them with a comment/homework, and have a follow-up appointment with them.)

The Wakefield and Fairfax areas are not easy areas to be a missionary in; there generally aren't too many people to teach, and it's extremely difficult to find more people who are interested in learning from the missionaries here. Elder Roper and I literally didn't find one new investigator last transfer. And unfortunately, that includes last week. As a mission, we got really close to our goal and found around 250 new investigators, but Elder Roper and I were unable to contribute to that.

But at the start of this week, our mission president made a new challenge. This time the challenge was that every companionship would find one new investigator every day this week. Seeing as we hadn't found an investigator for so long it seemed like an extremely high expectation for us to try and achieve. But Elder Roper and I felt like we needed to give it our all. So we prayed and worked hard to find one new investigator every day. Unfortunately, we did not reach our goal. However, we did get four new investigators in one week, and that's more than our area has had in months. 

It kind of reminds me of that one part in the movie Money Ball. When they talk about that one batter who fell while running toward first base, so he thought he was a failure, but when he looked up he saw that he hit a home run without knowing it. If you've seen the movie you might know what I'm talking about. It felt applicable to me.

Stay safe and say no to spoilers. 

From the health inspector that Mr. Crabs and SpongeBob almost killed with the green crabby patty in that one episode. - Eli