Week #5 - July 28, 2008 - Tales of a Brand New Missionary

Hey there friends and foes!

My first week is out of the way. It's crazy nice weather here. My companion's really cool (Elder Singleton...he's from Canada) and things are going well. The only thing that I'm really trying to get used to is tracting. (Going door to door) Not a whole lot of success here, so tracting is pretty common. I can't say I'm too fond of it yet. However, I have a much greater appreciation for nice people. It's pretty surprising how rude people feel they need to be. They could just as easily say something like "I really appreciate what you do, but we're not really interested. Have a nice day though!" Which some people do say, but very very few. Most will either tell us to quit wasting time, that we're going to hell, or to stay away from their house. We came up to one girl's house who looked mid-thirties/early forties who as soon as we got there said "Um...NO THANK YOU" (in the most annoyed-teenage girl persona she could muster) and then she said "And we will be getting a 'no soliciting' sign for our door to keep people like you away from our house. We're not afraid to call the cops."

We did get to teach a couple of people though, and the lessons were amazing. One girl in her early forties named Kara talked to us for about an hour. She's a hairdresser. She was pretty friendly and open with anything I had to say, which made me feel very at ease. I guess my companion had talked to her a few times before, so she's familiar with everything and is keeping commitments so she's doing well. We did a lot of Q&A this time and it was awesome. Lots of really good questions, and if I do say so myself, lots of really good answers. The Spirit was definitely helping out a lot. It's pretty cool when you finally understand what they mean when they constantly tell you in the MTC to let the Spirit work through you and not rely on your own knowledge.

I played the piano a few times. One elder took a video of me playing "All of Me" when he found out I could play and showed everyone.

One thing that's way nice though is I was eating at an Italian family's house (They love me - Balagna is a pretty good last name to have around here) called the Muzzio's, who said to tell Mom and Chief that they'd take care of me. The meal was pretty amazing. Anyway, I was talking to them and we got on the topic of hobbies, then singing, then Michael Buble, then a five year investigator two doors down who was WAY into Michael Buble and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin etc who apparently sings exactly like all of them. He's almost sixty and he has all of this karaoke type stuff and he sings for a lot of gathering dealies. Anyway, the Muzzio's think I'm the one who'll have that magic touch when it comes to finally getting him to join the church, and they said anything's allowed when it means a potential baptism (meaning singing some Frank songs with him). Haha, so who knows. Either way it'll be fun to talk to him, but as for getting him baptized, who knows. It would be really cool though.

I did have two baptisms on Saturday- a guy named Robert and girl named Bianca. Given that I did nothing to get them to that point, it was still pretty cool and Robert asked me to talk on the Holy Ghost at his baptism. I got to know him two days before and he was really cool. I think he's 26. So, that was really neat. I saved a couple of programs from it. The one even has my name in it! It's been a while since I'd actually seen a baptism, so it was a way cool experience.

I got a free tie from an elder who's going home in a few months. He said that I was way cool and he wanted to be my godfather, so he let me pick one of his ties and then he wrote his and my name inside the back. What a nice fella. Kind of an ugly tie though. I didn't want to take a nice one.

We tracted into a man named Michelon. He was awesome. We kinda felt like just asking if he needed help with anything rather than introduce the church right off hand, and it turned out he and his wife were moving a ton of stuff and needed help. So, we helped and then sat down and touched a bit on the restoration and then Alma 32 about faith- and he said that the night before he had been praying for help and praying to have his faith strengthened and basically said that we were sent from God. Kinda nice to hear that after you've been told you're going to hell. So that was really cool and we're meeting with him again on Wednesday.
Anywho, gotta wrap things up but thanks for all the email and what not- the pictures are always nice!
Love- Elder Al