Hello everyone! How are you! I love you!
First off- I went to the temple today and of course it was amazing as usual. I went seeking a stronger testimony in personal revelation and I am still thinking about what I learned today...
Anyway, a surprising (because Malibu moves at a completely different pace than the rest of LA....) amount of stuff has happened since the last time I wrote you guys!
First of we have been doing a lot of "dropping" (when you stop teaching people who are not keeping their commitments/not progressing, so you end up visiting them around every 2-3 weeks depending on the person and the area, instead of the ideal daily contact...)
We dropped this one lady from Iran. We hadn't been able to contact her in forever. When we first came into the area she said that if she found out that Jesus was the Savior and that our church was true she would be baptized. But now she has gone cold and says that all she needs is money because she is in a tight spot (we get that one a lot, even in this area...) She also refuses to believe that there could be one right religion and says that every single religion is good but she also said that nowadays religion and God are two completely separate things... Needless to say she doesn't make ANY sense...
We also dropped this guy named George Brown- if you could call it that since he is already a member, except very very very less active (he hasn't even been ordained a deacon and he never comes to church since his conversion in his adult years.) We were hoping to reactivate him in time for his wife to come home from an extended visit in El Salvador. She has expressed an interest in being baptized in the past (we read that in the area book/heard it from the members, because we have never met her) He is very nice but all he likes to do is debate/argue about stuff that really doesn't matter at all (which is saying something coming from me! Although I have been really working on that (not arguing really at all especially over things that don't matter/not ridiculing or nitpicking people''s opinions/statements no matter how insanely devoid of logic they might be) and I have gotten better, but still have a lot of room for improvement especially since I have come to this area because people are generally very well educated and very opinionated here). He is EXTREMELY doctrinally confused and we have spent a total of around 15 hours trying to straighten that out. But he isn't willing to come to church ever on a regular basis (we asked him) so we told him that we couldn't spend as much time with him. As a mission and personally we need to do better about dropping people- it is not that we don't do it, its just that the people don't always know WHY they were dropped- which is VERY helpful to furture missionaries so they don't think it was the past missionaries fault that they just "stopped coming by" according to the people.
The saddest one though had to have been Roland Villamil. He has been married to an active member convert to nearly 20 years but hasn't been baptized. So everyone (including Elder Cooley) under the sun has taught him on and off over the years. He doesn't come to church really ever- at the beginning we thought it was because of his very demanding job but that is not really the case we think anymore. He just isn't willing to admit that the church is true. We don't think that he wants it to be true because it would mean more work... We think deep down he knows that it is true. He always tries to come up with silly and VERY illogical (last week was our week to listen to peoples faulty logic with patience...) doubts- like the fact that the LDS church is not the fastest growing or biggest religion in the world or an article in an encyclopedia about the time that some early saints threw stones at migrating people who were coming back from a battle in the southwest). But it was very sad because of how abrupt it was. We had always had an amazing relationship (and still do) with the family and him as well (but I guess we don't anymore) but long story short our mini missionary (will write about that shortly...) got a text from the 16 year old daughter saying something along the lines of "I'm scared and embarrassed my dad said that if the elders come again he will go all ghetto on the bishop" It would have been really funny if it wasn't about our second most solid investigator dropping us. It was so bad that when we read the text, I looked over at Elder Bigler sitting next to me on the bench at church, and some tears were streaming down his cheek. Elder Bigler had had a slightly closer relationship with him and so I didn't have the heart to ask him about it later...
On a slightly brighter note- our Stake (the Santa Monica Stake) did the "mini missions" last week, which basically meant that some missionaries from our zone were chosen to have a youth 16-19 with us for the weekend. They slept over with us Friday night but not Saturday but were with us all weekend. They came to church with us and studied with us, the whole works. We thought that it wasn't a success for our missionary, almost as if we had scared him a way from going on a mission. It was a combination that he just wasn't mature enough at 16 to handle a mission much less talk to adults/old people at church to try to get appointments/a member present lesson set up for the following week or sitting through all the traveling we do in the car. So we were slightly surprised when he bore his testimony at the testimony meeting at the close of the weekend and said that he had had a great time, that his testimony had grown and that he was glad to learn that missionaries were not robots and that they were real people with real personalities- he said that we were really funny and entertaining especially in the car (we heard quite a few people say that they learned that missionaries were not in fact personality-less robots...) so I guess that was good, even though we felt, especially towards the end, like we were dragging him around. Not to compare myself or be prideful but I considered it one of many answers to my prayers about my insecurities feeling like I hadn't grown and that I am not a good missionary (Kenzie's letter and our phone conversation on Mother's day being the other two major events that answered my prayers). Anyway it just made me think where I was at at 16 and how far away I was from even the thought of going out with the missionaries for a day let alone the weekend and then looking at him and seeing how much more..... spiritual.... he was then I was at that age and then putting that into perspective with how I am now and how young he is and how much preparation he needed to be on a mission even if it will be so much less preparation then I needed... If that all makes sense. But again I feel bad typing this because I don't mean for it to be taken like I am judging him/being prideful....
So that is pretty much it although I still have a few more things I want to talk about but they can wait until next week....
if you guys are reading this..... (I assume everyone gets this every week but I have no idea...)
Kenzie- what is your home address in Arizona/where you will be staying over the summer I just assume it is there... Thank you so much for the letter! It was very long, thourough (I loved the table of contents!) I will try to get back to you ASAP of course but it might take a while for me to write a response because it was so long! (dont get me wrong that is a good thing!) Thanks for the quotes/scriptures/advice it helped a lot!!!
Sarah, Mallory and Cassi I will be writing to you as well very shortly....
fyi (I didnt have anytime to write a letter today for the first time in two months- which is bad because I promised myself I would write at least one letter to someone every week...)--
Love!
Elder Myers
