Monday, September 2, 2019

The Work Explodes in Enoch; Meanwhile Elder Oswald Fights Off the Spider Horde

September 21, 2015

Hi everyone!

This week has been crazy, exhausting, and fllippin' awesome all at the same time! For one, we had the best week the Enoch West Area has had since at least several months ago. We hit Standards of Excellence! Standards of Excellence in this mission is a total of 22 lessons, 2 new investigators, 3 on date for baptism, and 3 investigators at church. We got 23 lessons, 7 new investigators, 6 on date for baptism, and 6 at church! This week has been awesome! New investigators seem to be coming out of nowhere, and we're going to get at least 2 more this week we're going into! We also finally met with some of our investigators who haven't been able to meet with us for about 2 months! The Stake Presidency plan to do splits with the missionaries is also working pretty well, and has gotten us some extra appointments, and from the looks of it it will continue to be very productive. However, I think it is working too well! We literally don't have time to do that most evenings. We're getting totally booked in the evenings. Too much more, and we're going to have to stop this plan! We might have to start double booking ourselves, without all the splits! It's awesome, but there is such a thing as "too busy" sometimes, especially when the area we cover is rather large. What I'd like to see is the attention of the plan shift to filling our afternoons. Our evenings are getting ridiculously full, but our afternoons are for the most part pretty bare. If all that energy and focus that the Stake has could be channeled to the afternoons, when we actually need to be busier, that would be stupendous. As awesome as this week has been, it's also been exhausting. In addition to regularly scheduled lessons, and lessons scheduled by ward mission leaders as part of the Stake initiative, we've also done an outrageous amount of personal contacting. And we've found quite a bit of success. But I'm totally exhausted, physically, spiritually, mentally, etc. Thank goodness for P-Days, right? Anyway, the Lord is really blessing this area, and I'm so thankful to a part of that work.

As for the Spider Hordes mentioned in the subject of this email, that's actually pretty crazy. So, a week or so ago, we were trying to see if one of our investigators was home, and we found a black widow spider on their door. We decided to do them a service and destroy it for them, which we did. I've seen a few other spiders around over the week that followed, that made me uneasy, but it wasn't anything too serious, and nothing like the vinegaroon from a month and a half or so ago (anyone remember that story?). But then this past week, we got some very unwelcome beasties. In the corner by the door of the stairs that leads down to the basement we live in, there was a big fat black widow. In the driveway too, we found a dead one. Now, I'm terrified of the non-harmful kind of spiders. I don't take very fondly to the one that can actually kill me. The next morning, there was another black widow, and a freaking egg sack! I was not about to allow a couple hundred poisonous demon-spawns to hatch and spread themselves throughout the place, nor was I remotely fond of the adults. So we determined to put a stop to it. We went to the Family Dollar and I bought a can of bug killer spray. We came back, and lo an behold there was not one, but three black widows (and the egg sack), and two spiders of another sort that weren't black widows but were nonetheless spiders and had to go. And one of the black widows was HUGE. We nicknamed it Big Mama. Then we unleashed the bug-spray. We doused the whole corner, as well as spraying other parts of the stair-well that could be potential bug lairs.  The two that were not black widows died pretty much instantaneously. The two smaller black widows died shortly thereafter. But Big Mama didn't want to give it up, and she kept trying to escape. But she eventually died too. Then a couple days ago, another black widow tried to get in. However, this bug spray lasts several weeks, and this spider crawled into the sprayed area and died shortly thereafter. So that's a total of four black widows that I got rid of. Maybe that sounds like a really lame accomplishment to most people, but I feel like I just slayed some dragons or something.

In other news, today is my 8 Month Mark! I can't believe it's been that long! It's just flying by! Well that's about it for today. Have a great week!

-Elder Oswald

PS- My companion is just really awesome! I'm really enjoying training him and working with him!

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