This week was crazy busy, in a good way, but that means I don't have much time to write about it today. The week was so busy because we had service on Wednesday and Thursday morning, I had exchanges with Elder Vang, and we also had Multi-Zone Conferences on Friday and the Stake Service Project on Saturday. The rest of the time we had appointments and team-ups. There were very few days where we got to do our full studies, and I think we only did 12-week one time, so we have some catching up to do on that.
Multi-Zone Conferences were good. I felt like a lot of the training was the exact same stuff we'd talked about at previous multi-zones and zone meetings. When I asked the zone leaders they said it was the exact same things they had been trained on at the past two or three MLC's. So either we're not doing it well enough yet, or the mission leaders are too busy to come up with more training material. It was good though. We had out Multi-Zones with the Mt. Rubidoux Zone, so that was pretty fun. I was able to see Elder Walker and Sister McCulloch again.
The Stake Service Project was good, but there wasn't enough work, and the work that there was didn't feel like hard work. We were cleaning the trails up to the "M" as well as cleaning the parking lots. It mostly consisted of weeding and then carrying all the bags of weeds to the dumpster. There were so many people that showed up to help that we finished the job in no time. We ran out of room for the weeds in the dumpster rather quickly too. Then we went back to the stake center for food and the performance, but the line for food was so long and so slow moving that we didn't really see any of the performance. It was a Japanese girl who does traditional dances. Apparently she had been an exchange student in a member's home here in MoVal, and because the church helped so much with the clean-up after the Sendai earthquake/tsunami a few years ago, she wanted to come perform as a way of saying thank you. There was also a fireside by the man who was mission president of that area during the disaster, but we weren't able to attend that.
This was the we me performed our musical number. It was a violin arrangement of "Did You Think to Pray" with a piano accompaniment. We actually performed it three times this week. Once at multi-zone conferences, once during Valley View's sacrament meeting, and once at the Nuevo Ward's baptism on Sunday. We all thought we did it the best at different times, and I don't remember any of them going perfectly. During sacrament meeting, I got behind a couple of measures by the second line in the song and just had to drop out for a few measures to catch up. But no one really noticed I guess, and one of the moms came up to me afterward and told me that she told her son that if he practiced hard he could play as well as me one day, so that made me feel good.
For teaching this week we were able to meet with Elvis twice and he came to church. The first time we met with him we gave him a Book of Mormon and talked about it a little bit. The next time we taught the Restoration, and so far he seems to understand and accept everything we're talking about. On Sunday he came to church and really enjoyed it. It was a missionary homecoming and farewell, so it was an interesting meeting. We had a sister who just returned from Spain speak about her mission, and the other sister is going to the Salt Lake City South Mission. Then we did the musical number so it was an entirely missionary sacrament meeting. In Gospel Principles we talked about the scriptures, and he was very intrigued by the Pearl of Great Price, which isn't a bad thing, but you don't exactly teach that in the first lesson either, so it will be interesting to see what questions he has about it.
We picked up a couple of new investigators, but we don't really know a whole lot about them yet. We will be meeting with one tonight and another one on Wednesday, so we'll see how it goes. We also met with a part-member family and we just talked about the family proclamation and eternal families. At the end, we asked if the husband would be willing to take the lessons and he said sure, so we were really excited. But then we got a text this morning from his wife that he had felt kind of pressured and that she would approach us when he was ready for the lessons, so that was really disappointing. I'd like to say I'm sure that one day he'll be ready, but there are a lot of families that just get complacent about it, and it really makes me wonder what they think. I mean you're raised in the church thinking about eternal families and temple marriage and all this, and then if your spouse doesn't join the church, you probably kind of wonder what will happen. I mean being sealed is a pretty big deal. Sigh, you can always hope that one day they will understand too.
Maybe our week doesn't sound as busy as it was, but I feel like we barely had any time to rest the whole week, and even our P-Day is pretty full with people who say that Monday is the best/only day to meet with them. We'll see how things work out though, what's sacrificing a few P-Days, if you have people progressing towards baptism.
See you soon,
Elder Cornaby
"Get on your knees and pray, then get on your feet and work." -Gordon B Hinckley