Dear family and friends,
Have my last posts been successfully delivered? I sent two e-mails to both Dad and Garit and I've received no word from either of them that they received them so I'm a little confused. I'm assuming that they did since the "e-mail subdelivery system" didn't say that any of your e-mails had "permanent fatal errors", whatever that means. Apparently myldsmail.net has a bad history of not sending e-mails out. The system is improving though so hopefully this won't happen again. At least that is what Elder Bell and Elder Beard say.
So from now on I'll be sending this same e-mail to different people in the hopes that one of them will receive it and then that person can send it to Ryan (or Becca if something happens to Ryan) so that Ryan will put it up on my mission blog.
Speaking of Ryan is he still in Chile? I'm a little disconcerted from not hearing from him. What is he up to? Does anybody have a hold of him? In fact I haven't heard from Dad either since he didn't e-mail me. What's going on Dad? Will someone please tell me what's going on?
The reason why I didn't e-mail any of you yesterday is because yesterday is President's Day so the library was closed. I hope you didn't think that I don't love you because that is absolutely not true! Now that we got that out of the way I will proceed to tell you all how this past week went:
The highlight of this week for me was a big meeting of missionaries called specialized training. It's basically a zone conference, except longer since each of the zones that meet together have a special zone meeting that lasts for an hour. In that meeting Sister Beck gave a talk on "Finding the Lord's Elect". Basically we went over:
The possible reasons why we get discouraged when we go tracting.
How we should prepare ourselves before going tracting.
All the different ways we can go finding people.
I particularly enjoyed it because earlier in that week I was super discouraged about tracting. I really didn't like it and I wasn't enthusiastic about it since I felt like it didn't yield good results. The highlight of Sister Beck's talk was when President Beck interrupted her and gave an analogy that I hope I don't butcher in the re-telling.
President Beck held up a pencil in his hand with the sharp end pointing down. He then begin to push down on the pencil. As he was pushing down he was saying some of the things that you'd normally hear people say when they reject you and slam the door in your face. As he pushed down on the pencil the pencil went further and further down his fist until you couldn't see much of the pencil left.
As he did this he explained that when we're down and so discouraged that we don't want to go tracting anymore we're in Satan's grasp. Then he related the experience of Thomas Edison (the guy who made the light bulb) and then President Beck turned the pencil upside down on it's eraser. Then he pushed down on the eraser and it "pogo ed" up. He said that we too should "pogo" whenever someone slams the door in our face and never get discouraged.
I hope I didn't butcher the analogy for you. If you're confused just know that it worked really well for me and since then my tracting experience has gone so much better than before. We taught 26 other lessons this week. 26! That's more than twice the amount of other lessons we normally teach. TWICE! Plus we're getting more new investigators and more contacts in general.
The weather here in Suprise is being fickle right now. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's 50 degrees. Most of the time this week it's been pretty cold.
Here's an interesting story that happened last night: Elder Bell and I returned the bishop's volleyball to him (since we borrowed it for the zone activity yesterday. By the way my team got all the way to the finals) and after he took the ball we asked him if there was anything else we could do. He asked us to give him a blessing and he asked ME to give it. I would've thought he would ask Elder Bell to give it. I was surprised yet honored to give a blessing for Bishop Taylor.
Well that's all for now. If you receive this message successfully TELL ME! I need to know. Otherwise I get left in the dark and a little flustered. If you get this message please e-mail either Ryan or Becca and have them e-mail me.
I love you all,
Elder Boothe
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