Week Five

Hey guys

This week had been a lot better than last week. I know it is going to continually get better and I am starting to focus on the work. The days seem so short and it's crazy to think that I've been out for more than a month and I've been in Minnesota for almost two weeks. The hardest part about being here is probably all the rejection. There are so many Catholic and Lutheran people here and they won't even give us a chance to talk to them at all. One guy just opened the door and said he has been Catholic all his life so he knows he won't convert. Another guy just opened the door and then looked at our name tags then just said no then shut the door. I do understand kind of what they are thinking just like if someone talked to me about what they believe, but I think I would at least listen to them because I know what I believe is true, because I have asked God and prayed about it. Sometimes when we talk to people we ask them if they have prayed about it and they usually say no. I do love this place, but it is getting hard to find people that are willing to listen to us. We had a guy in our area book that we were going to visit and they never got his name so he was just in there as nice guy haha but when we went and knocked on the door this lady answered the door with her kids and when we asked if her husband was home she said no. Then her kid said that he was home so the mom said no he just left. The kid told us that he was right over there, pointing inside the house, so the mom just got mad at him and us and just closed the door. Now I wanted to say some mean things to her, but I didn't cause ya know I'm a missionary. It was hard to understand why she would lie to us right in front of her kids, setting that example for them. I would have much rather have just told us that they weren't interested. There have been a lot of people that are nicer about it and it always makes me feel better about it.

There are some people like Molly that are willing. It's was really cool how we met her. After our study we were getting ready to go to Belle Plain to go visit some potential investigators. We were all ready and we got in the car and my Tiwi wouldn't work. Tiwi is just this thing in all missionaries car that makes sure we are good drivers. They make sure we don't go to fast or turn too sharp or go over bumps to fast. It sends the information to the mission office or something and if Tiwi gets mad at us too much then we get in trouble. I have been super good at it I promise. Whenever you get in the car you have to sign in using a Tiwi card. So when I went to sign in it wouldn't say driver logged in and I had already started driving and so we pulled into the Catholic Church across the street from our apartment so Tiwi wouldn't get mad at us. This has happened once before and all we had to do is just reset the Tiwi. It's kind of hard to do because you there is a tiny hole that you have to push in to reset it and all we had was a staple. It would never work so we walked back to the apartment and got a thumbtack and it eventually worked. This took a while to fix so we got to Belle Plain a lot later. When we got to the little apartments to check out the potentials in our area book they told us to go away through the door and as we were leaving there was Molly outside the door. We just asked her if we could share a card with her and we started talking about the restoration and the Book of Mormon and she asked about heaven so we went into the Plan of Salvation and she asked for a Book of Mormon and told us to come back. I could tell how much she wanted to know and how much she liked what we were saying. Sadly though when we went back she wasn't there and a kid in the hall said she was at the state fair so it kind of scares me a little bit that she maybe lied to us. Our area is so big and we have limited miles to it is hard to be able to talk to all our investigators regularly. Every time we try to set up an actual lesson they just tell us they are so busy that they don't know. So we always just have to stop by when we are in the area. There is a guy named Dennis that I haven't met yet but he agreed to be baptized but doesn't have a date set and we can never catch him home. We tried giving our card to his mom but nobody ever seems to want to call us.

Just to let you guys know, I'm gonna be super buff when I get home. Elder Moore and I have been working out a lot and this morning I had like 50 grams of protein in my breakfast so ya know. I had like 3 eggs and some Sausage on a bagel that has 15 grams of protein with some milk (that was Elder Moore's ideas). Elder Moore is pretty strong but he said that he wasn't that strong when he left on his mission and that he was going to get me ripped haha.

So the bed bug situation is finally over. When I got here the bed bugs were all dead by some exterminator dudes. I guess they just made our whole apartment really hot or something. So when I got here we didn't have a bedroom and we just had some mattresses in our living room. Then we got some new mattresses and box springs from the mission office but we had to bring down the old ones and put them outside. So we cleaned up our room and vacuumed and all that and then brought our new stuff up. I haven't seen any bed bugs so I think we're good. We had to wait a day or so with the old mattresses and box springs outside until the Assistants to the President came and got them with their awesome truck. So now we have a nice air conditioned bedroom.
The humidity here is going to kill me, it's making me sweat when I'm not even doing anything and the mosquitoes are super bad here. I'm pretty sure the thick darkness that gathered around Joseph Smith were just mosquitoes sent from Satan because I'm pretty sure that's who created them. It makes me excited for winter even though it's gonna be super cold but I have always liked winter. It has started to cool off which is super nice.

This week we have been study the trinity and how to teach against it because a lot of the people we try to teach try to argue with us about it. Elder Moore has this paper with a bunch of scriptures in the bible saying that they are not the same person. I have a picture of it so I'll put it in my pictures if you want to study it out for yourself haha. I am feeling a lot better and not feeling quite as homesick sothis week has been so much better. I love you guys and I'll talk to you next week,
Elder Bullock

Downtime at McD's

Mom got her "tag" picture