May in the Mission Field

May 9, 2013
I am out in the field. I am in the Chatsworth area (porn capital of the world) and my companion is great, we were meant to be; when I saw her it was like love at first sight. We went out street contacting for a while and talked with two people that we plan on meeting up with and teaching. This area is like starting from scratch, there are no investigators. Much of the work we will do is working with the less active members. We have a car and a blackberry phone and a nice apartment. We also have bikes, but we’ll see if we actually use them. We had a member feed us dinner and she is amazing. She is 84 years old and invests in property. She does all the maintenance on the apartments that she rents out and even finished putting in a sprinkler system in her yard without any help. One of her grandfathers played ball in the street with Joseph Smith’s children; she has a fascinating family history. We have an interesting neighbor; he is on social security, drinks beer, smokes all day and is huge flirt. We got his mail for him (he has a bad back and can’t move around very easily) and we slipped a Plan of Salvation pamphlet into his mail. He is really funny.

May 20, 2013
The work is moving along; we have two more investigators and one potential that we are teaching/working with. Our first investigator is Jennette, she is from El Salvador and we met her my first day working in the field and she is really receptive. Our other investigator is John, he has had a hard life, but is now ready to receive the message of the gospel. Our potential is Robert. He has quite a story…he has an ex-girlfriend who is cursing him and sending devils/demons after him and he is kind of freaking out. He has been given a Book of Mormon and has asked for a Bible to read. He goes down to Mexico every once in a while to see a witch doctor to cure him of the curses, but when he gets back his ex-girlfriend curses him again. We are going to teach him the Gospel, with a focus on faith, baptism, the Holy Ghost and the Priesthood.
I like working with investigators more than the less active members because I like teaching the lessons; in most cases the less actives already know the lessons and they chose to leave for some reason or another. We had stake conference this week and I was able to sing in the choir, we sung “This is the Christ” one of my favorite songs. The stake president gave a talk on how members should be helping more by working with the less actives so that the missionaries could work on finding new people, which is what I think it should be.

May 25, 2013
An update on the work, the ward is very unsupportive of missionary work except for a few members. We have four investigators right now: Jennette and her son Francisco (from El Salvador), Nancy (a member’s mom who is here until June/July), and John (a recovering meth addict). We have other possible investigators: a lesbian, a bar tender, and one who says he has been on a spiritual journey to look for something that’s missing because the Jehovah’s Witness can’t answer his questions who is from Israel. As soon as we started talking with him he went off about how great God is and that people are too obsessed with the world these days. The work is moving along and it will get better over time, but at least there’s more than less actives for us to work with. One less active that we see is Flora, she is 94 years old and in a rest home and the only reason she is considered less active is because she can’t go to church because it is hard to get up and move around. Other than that she is very spiritual and active in doing what she is supposed to. The bishop feels that she should make more of an effort to come to church so that she can get the sacrament; he doesn’t think that they should take her the sacrament every week (this is frustrating for me because I feel that she should be given the sacrament if she is worthy; I guess the bishop has his own ideas and I don’t know what they are.)