Hi everyone!
I knew it! I totally called it. I knew that a bunch of negative things would happen this past week, because we've been doing really well, having a lot of success, and development we had a baptism on Saturday, and times like that are when Satan REALLY tries to mess things up. Tuesday was our really negative day. We had a few really great lessons and visits, but we also had to deal with a lot of disappointment and stupidity. Firstly, the Navajo family we were teaching dropped us. For some reason, the aunt hates us. I think she didn't like Elder Burt's previous companion, so she's just decided that all Elders are stupid and rude and what not. Makes sense, right? Well, she's gotten the grandma and some of the rest of the family on her side, so now we're not welcome back there ever again. So that was disappointing, and also really obnoxious of the aunt. We literally have done nothing to offend her. But apparently she hates us.
Anyway, about an hour and a half later, we got a phone call from a crazy lady, who pretty much put a damper on our whole day. And she called as we were trying to go into a lesson too. And she wouldn't
shut up! So, we had asked this lady's husband for help fellowshipping some new investigators we were picking up, because he knows the family better than most. But apparently asking a member for help is an unpardonable sin, and this lady calls us up, screaming so loud that her voice echoed back into the phone and we couldn't even understand what she was saying half the time. She was mostly attacking my companion, but she was super rude to me as well. And get this, she accused US of being disrespectful and rude among a list of other things she flipped out about. She's calling us rude Really? Well we're not the ones randomly calling people and screaming at them for 20 minutes (no exaggeration, it was literally 20 minutes). And here's the thing, we haven't done ANYTHING to her! We've literally only seen her twice. And actually I had only seen her once before. So we really had no idea what she was going on about. Everyone else seems to think we're ok. I'm not saying we're perfect, but we're not anything close to what she was yelling at us for. And we handled the phone call
really well. We could have easily lost our cool and started giving her a taste of her own medicine (show her what "disrespectful and rude" really is). But we didn't. We just kind of sat there waiting for her to be done. We attempted to politely and calmly defend ourselves and come to an understanding, but she would just cut us off and and say some rude comment. At the end of the conversation she decided she had had enough talking to Elder Burt and wanted to talk to me. Her last words of the conversation were "Thank you for your opinion. I didn't ask for it. Goodbye." Excuse me?!! Grrr!!! It really made us mad. Even if we had done something, you can't just talk to people like that. Who does this hag think she is?
A little bit later we went to visit our ward mission leader in that ward, and guess what! Crazy Lady was there trash talking us to the ward mission leader. Great. This person seemed dead set on destroying
all of the work we had in that ward. So we call the bishop and ask if she's talked to him at all. I guess he's aware of all this, and guess what! Crazy Lady and the aunt who hates us are in cahoots! Bishop's
sad about it all, but told us not to worry too much. I guess Crazy Lady has flipped out on plenty of other people, so he said to take it with a grain of salt.
So that was not the most terrific start to the week, unless you go by the old definition of terrific which is "causing terror". Throughout the week, we had appointments cancel, and Crazy Lady even showed up to one of our appointments, and we had to bite our tongues a bit. But despite all of those things, we kept working throughout the week, and we had much more success than we had negativity. We actually hit Standards of Excellence again, and some of our lessons went extremely well!
And we had a baptism! Mona finally took the plunge! Mona has been awesome to teach, and she's been super prepared. Now she's set a really good example for her family, who are on date for the 28th. The baptism went really well. But it did seem like a lot was going wrong leading up to it. For one, a water pipe at the church broke, so the water had to be shut off. And you can't fill a baptismal font without water! At first we heard that the water was supposed to be off pretty much all day Saturday, but then (Hallelujah!) that estimate was moved back to 10:00 AM. The baptism was scheduled for 1:00 so that ended up not being a problem. And then there was the fact that everything
seemed to be going wrong for Mona that day, and due to her not getting the day off work, and just a bunch of other craziness, she ended up being an hour late to her baptism! But we didn't really have anything else that afternoon, so we had the baptism anyway! :) I'll include a picture at the bottom of this email.
And then to top the week off, I got to Skype home for Mothers Day, which was pretty much the best thing ever. :)
This past week has definitely been an adventure. It really is true that there is opposition in all things. But there are also miracles and as annoying as opposition is, it can always be overcome. This week
is shaping up to be another good one, complete with one, possibly two baptisms! In other words, there's probably going to be a lot of opposition this week too. But it's all a learning experience, and at
least personally, it makes me feel all the more epic for overcoming it. :)
Have a great week everyone!
-Elder Oswald
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