You know it's been a rough week when the best part of the week was a funeral. But more about that later.
We haven't been able to meet with Joe again. He was sick on Tuesday when we went by and when we called later in the week he said he had too many medical things going on, so to call him the next week. We still haven't met with Cecilia, so at this time it is pointless to continue to plan her into our schedule. She's in the former's section of the area book and some Elders will go by in the next 6 months or so and see if her situation has changed.
We haven't been able to meet with Joe again. He was sick on Tuesday when we went by and when we called later in the week he said he had too many medical things going on, so to call him the next week. We still haven't met with Cecilia, so at this time it is pointless to continue to plan her into our schedule. She's in the former's section of the area book and some Elders will go by in the next 6 months or so and see if her situation has changed.
We have contacted over half of the people from the blitz. None of them really seem like super solid as far as already having a good idea of what we teach and the purpose in meeting with us. But there are definitely some that have a little bit better attitude and have told us to come back. We haven't actually been able to meet with any of them, whenever we stop by it's always a bad time for them so they just tell us to come back by some other time. Most of their lives are also too crazy to actually set an actual return appointment. We do have a couple of people that seem really nice, but that doesn't always mean they're serious. We also had a couple of people tell us that it wasn't worth our time when we went back by. Blitzes are normally pretty hit and miss, but it does give us something to do when we don't have many confirmed lesson appointments.
The rest of the week wasn't really an improvement on our success with the names from the blitz.
We have been working with the members of the ward council to try and identify those names that they think might be more willing to meet with us, as well as us giving them our insights as they shuffle around the home teaching routes. I know it's important and helpful, but it's hard to go to ward council, and your missionary meetings, and not really have anyone to talk about that you're teaching.
We attended the funeral of Jean Hernandez this week. She was a less active lady that Elder Camper and I had been working with for a few months before her health really started to take a dive and the holidays interrupted things as well. Her cancer had come back and her doctors stopped chemo back in November. It was a very short service, and it was definitely interesting because she was one of only a few members in the family, and the only one who was anything close to active and involved. Her daughter prayed like a Mormon when she said the opening prayer though, and there were a few other little things that gave it away. But the service in general was just very different from your typical LDS service from what I've seen, so it was interesting to see the difference. Her home teacher gave a wonderful talk about the plan of salvation though and he really brought the spirit into the meeting, it was a really good part of the week, even if it was just 30 minutes on a Saturday.
We were able to provide service hours to Claudia Wilson this week. She's an older lady in our ward. She asked us to come help her on Wednesday, and we ended up going over there on Thursday as well. She has lived in the same house for 40 years. Her husband was a pretty brilliant engineer and tinkerer so he had a bunch of old technology from when it was new and state-of-the-art. However, he has been physically disabled for quite a while, and that has led to some mental illness as well for him. It's made him become sort of a hoarder and very attached to some things. But after a decade or more of it, she finally said that some of it has to go, so we were helping her to move a lot of that junk and put it in a trailer to be taken to the dump or in bins to take for scrap metal and recycling and such. I really enjoyed it and I think it helped her out a lot.
Elder Walker is doing well. I still tend to be the alpha in most situations, it's a bad habit I have. But, this week was Week 11, so I took this opportunity to let him lead. The idea is that he should be ready to train by next week if called upon. So I didn't make a move to start or end studies, lunch, get to places on time, or call/text anybody, because when you're trainee first arrives they have no idea who anybody is or what's going on really, no matter how much they think they know. He caught on after a day or two that all he had to do was ask me to do things, but that's hard for Elder Walker. The first day he spent nearly 45 minutes doing various things to get my attention to start companion study, none of which were him saying "Elder, we need to start companion study." I was hoping to maybe instill in him a little bit of the maturity and responsibility you need to be a good senior companion.
I've started reading the Book of Mormon again this week, so I'm on 1 Nephi 8 at the moment. I'm redoing the marking scheme I had before to see if I missed anything, as well as marking in another color all the times that people pray or talk about prayer. I chose that because prayer is mentioned a lot in my patriarchal blessing, or at least it stood out to me this time.
This week we at least had a lot of our less actives at church as well as Mitchell. So even though it's not exactly the progress and numbers our mission president wants, seeing each of them walk into the chapel that day was extremely rewarding after a week of not seeing anybody during the week.
See you soon,
Elder Cornaby
"Get on your knees and pray, then get on your feet and work." - Gordon B. Hinckley