"..."my mom's pretending she's not home!" It was hilarious."

Hello all! 

So first off, this is moves week...already! Elder Winn and I are staying, as expected. However, an extra set of elders is being assigned to Liff ward as well. A trio, including Elder Farnsworth (the elder who I left SLC with), and elder Gomez-Castillo! So they will be part of my district. And Perth is no longer under my stewardship, because there is another set of elders in Perth as well, and they will form their own district. 

So yeah, exciting things are happening. I'm not so sure about having two sets of missionaries in our ward. It means less dinner appointments and less investigator appointments for us, and almost every night we struggle to come up with meaningful activities to do during the next day, so now it will be even harder. But I guess it will be sort of fun. We'll see.

Last week we did a bit of tracting in this neighbourhood near our flat. Pretty classy neighbourhood, well at least compared to some of the places we go. 

At one house there was this super cute wee girl, she answered the door and said, "my mom's pretending she's not home!" It was hilarious. The mom came to the door after that of course, we found out her mom is a member of Bingham ward. Then the little girl followed us around on her bike for the next five houses or so. Real funny. Then we met this lady who I thought was totally prepared to hear the gospel. Non religious, but wonders if there is more. HOPES there is more, and was intrigued by the thought of eternal families. 

When we returned the next day, her husband answered and said that they are atheists. But I want to go by sometime when she is only home and find out if she is interested. We get a lot of that, "No, she's not interested." Agency, people!

On Tuesday we taught our friend Mark again. So hard to stay on-topic. But he's making progress. We started teaching a new guy called Brian. He's had a bit of a rough past, but seems to want to change. 

Cool story we heard from Lee Thomson (ward mission leader). Apparently these two Scottish rappers went down to London to try and make it, but were shut down. Then they decided to put on American accents, and come up with a whole back story as to where they are from, and they made it big! (In England) Just recently after several years of performing and recording, they announced that they're not American, but Scottish. Apparently there is going to be a movie made about it. Cool story, eh?

On Wednesday I experienced a good Ward Council argument! I was just a bystander, but it was still pretty awkward. Our bishop said this to us afterward, "I guess it's a good thing that people love the ward so much that they will get angry at someone else for it...that's the only good thing I could come up with about that." Haha, our bishop is pretty laid back, but still a great bishop.

As I am getting used to, we met a lot of people in the street or while tracting who had good potential, but then they were not there when we showed up for a return appointment. I am trying to master the art of "teach now, not later" where you just start teaching there and then so the person will feel the spirit and have a greater desire to meet with you in the future. It's a genius idea, but it's hard!

We decided to try talking to people on the Dundee University campus, since this was the first week of classes. People seemed a lot more open and friendly than the usual street contacting, but they were in a rush. I really want to try again, maybe at a time when the students are just walking around campus not going to class. It made me a bit trunky [thinking of home] though, I want to go back to that good ol college life! But this life is better.

Part of training a new missionary we're supposed to do an extra hour of companion study together, including watching The District clips, reading Preach My Gospel together, and doing role-plays. I haven't been putting a very high priority on it for most of the time, but lately I've felt like we need to do more so when we have something going on that causes us to miss the extra hour, we'll do it later in the day when we have nothing going on. Sometimes it's frustrating staying at home instead of going out and doing work, but Elder Tinsley our fearless zone leader told me that the training is THE MOST productive thing you can do, and it will affect the rest of a missionary's mission. 

So yeah, we've been doing a lot more. That's maybe why this week feels like it's been a bit slow and uneventful,. other than a few cool stories here and there. Well, that's about it for me. We are probably gonna go Kebabtize Elder Winn now!

Love,

Elder S. Burt

 

Photos: 

Logan Crescent! 

Our district! zig zag from top left: Elders Tinsley, Donaldson, Lesuma, Winn, Burt, Allison.

This painting is in a member's house...I asked to take a picture of it because I thought the signature said "Burty", but apparently it's Bunty. It looks like Burty though.