We'll Harvest this Field from Sunrise to Sunset!

Monday, October 26, 2015

Too Many Meetings

Dear family and friends,

What a busy week.  Tuesday was probably our most normal day this week.
We were able to do a lot of tracting, And we even tracted into
someone. His name is Matt and when he answered the door he seemed
really interested and he set an appointment for Saturday, but when we
went back on Saturday to visit him he didn't answer the door. It was a
little disappointing. We think he may have just forgotten so we will
be going back later to see if we can contact him then.

On Wednesday we had district meeting which is about an hour away and
about 3 to 4 hours long. Most of our appointments canceled that day so
we got a lot of tracting, however no one really seemed interested. The
best thing about this is that I got a lot of walking in and maybe I'll
lose some fat. I've already gained about seven or 8 pounds since I've
been on my mission... I guess I better start taking those morning
workouts seriously haha.

Thursday was definitely the strangest day of this week. I've been
feeling pretty sick this week and it hadn't been getting any better.
When I woke up on Thursday I was congested had a headache and was
feeling sick to the stomach. Elder Hatton wasn't feeling well either.
We realized that if we were going to get work done anytime soon I
needed to get better and Elder-Hatton needed to stay healthy. It's
hard to stay in the house for a full day when you're on a mission,
especially when you have to cancel plans. We had to cancel our service
activity at the old folks home which made me really sad. I slept for a
few hours in the morning which was probably the biggest help, we
studied for the rest of the time. We also had to cancel our dinner
appointment which really stinks because we didn't get "Real
home-cooked food" that night.

It would've been nice to get right back into work on Friday but we had
another meeting. This meeting was further away. Gillette is an hour
and a half away but we also had to pick up another companionship.
Picking up the other companionship added about an hour, round trip, to
the travel and the presidency conducting the interviews was late. We
were gone from 11:00 that morning till 6:30 that night. We spent the
rest of the night by visiting an investigator named Christene, doing
some online proselyting and tracting. We were only able to visit
Christene on her porch for a few minutes and not teach her because she
is a single mom and the member couple that was coming with us canceled
last minute.

Saturday was a little better than the rest of the week. We started out
the day trying to visit Matt Who we had tracted into earlier that
week. He didn't seem to be home so we ran back to the apartment to
grab my inhaler before we went and visited our investigator named
Pete. Pete is a really interesting old man. He is about 80 years
old, used to live in Germany, requires oxygen at all times and he
smokes which is why we needed to grab my inhaler. Visiting Pete 
goes something like this: we walk up to his door and try to walk in because
that's what he's asked us to do. It's locked but he hears us rattle
the door and he yells for us to "come in." We try to tell him through
the door that the door is locked, but because he is quite deaf he just
yells at us to "come in" again. We yell a little louder and tell him
that the door is locked and we can't get in. Depending on the day, we
have this exchange for a minute or two. Eventually we hear him
grunting and grumbling as he makes his way to the door. When he opens
the door we see A very old man standing in the doorway wearing naught
but his shorts. He always has a very big smile on his face because he
loves the missionaries. Because of his age it's very difficult to
teach him the lessons. We always just read the Book of Mormon with
him, Or rather, yell the Book of Mormon to him because it's the most
we can do that he'll understand. When we're done reading with him he
tells the stories of how he came to America when he was 15 years old.
Something we didn't notice the first time, is the plaques on his wall
signed by Ronald Regan and George Bush. He has four of them and they
all say thank you but not what they're thankful for and he's too
humble to tell us why he has them.

For the rest of the day we simply drove around with rakes and offered
to help people rake their leaves. We call this service tracting and we
were able to meet an elderly man named Ted, who told us stories about
when he was in the army while we raked.

This is one of my favorite things about the mission, meeting new
people. I love the friendship that can be developed in such a short
amount of time.

OK, well I'm out of time, but you guys got pretty much my whole week
in this letter. Don't be expecting this every week, we had a little
extra time this week. :)

I love you all, be safe, and pray always!

Love,
Elder Thomas

Preparation day! 

 We got ZUCCHINI BREAD! We love it when we get real food :)

Some "tag photography"


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