November 19, 2014
Today was so great!
We went to the plaza to buy stuff and I got a new trompo! My miracle was when I was throwing it in the
plaza:
Miracle #58: I threw the new harder trompo in front of
the Chilean shopkeeper and nailed it! I even did an awesome trick and it was
funny because they were blown away that a gringo could do it.
We had a great lesson with the family V. especially with the mother of the
family. She is so ready for her baptism
and the change that we have seen take place in the family really makes me
happy.
November 20, 2014
Today was great! We
did service at 8:00 A.M. with our investigator family V. We helped them work on their house. We had to pick another elder up to help us
and because we had meetings with the mission president afterwards, we decided
to drop our clothes off at his house because it was closer to the president.
Complicated, and would have been a good idea if I would have remembered my
dress shoes. Instead I had to wear my
tennis shoes to my interview…smooth. I
only got chewed out a little bit. The
worst part was that our interviews were 2 hours delayed. We sacrificed our
study time and just worked the whole rest of the day. We had an awesome/creepy experience of
watching a man run down the street carrying a large bag of cocaine. We also had
an annoying experience of having to teach a lesson where the neighbor was
smoking weed so we got to smell that for an hour. My miracle for the day was little
Josephina, the youngest of the family V.
Miracle #59: My two-year-old investigator remembers my
name and can clearly say it! She likes
to get my attention and it is adorable.
November 21, 2014
Today we had divisions again! I stayed in my sector, but the bummer was
that every single cita fell through.
EVERY. Single. One. We walked and
knocked doors for 4 1.2 hours in the blazing sun. I wanted to melt and die, but I didn’t. The
best part was in the end of the day when we bought sopapillas.
Miracle #60: A man at the street vendors who I made a
contact with, bought both me and my companion, Elder Fernelius, another sopapilla. That was awesome.
The funny moment of the day was when we were studying and I
crashed…hard! I was out cold for 25 minutes
and Elder Soulier couldn’t wake me up.
He yelled and nudged and finally sprayed me in the face. It was a nice nap.
November 22, 2014
Today had some ups and downs. We didn’t really do much til after lunch,
when the party began. The very first contact
we had was my miracle and it was with a couple of guys who had obviously been
drinking. They called us over and one of
them wanted to show us his champion kickboxing moves.
Miracle #61: I
took everything out of my pockets and started using my years of taekwondo to
follow everything that he did. He was
super impressed and the miracle was that it turned into a fantastic
contact. Who woulda thunk it? I used my
martial arts to make a contact.
On the down side of things, we got dropped by one of our
investigators. It was a really weird
meeting with him because one day we were fine and today he didn’t want to have
anything to do with us. Sadly, it didn’t
really bother me. I honestly couldn’t understand much of what he said, and I
never really could understand him so as a result, I never formed a strong bond
with him. I think that as time goes on
and I improve my ability to communicate, then I will care more when we get
dropped.
On a funny note, we were studying and Elder S. went to the
bathroom. After about 30 minutes I
realized that he was still in the bathroom and we had to leave. I yelled to him and he gasped and woke up.
Yeah, he fell asleep ON THE TOILET! I
laughed so hard.
November 23, 2013
This was a rough day for me.
One of the families on our ward is really hard to get along with. Today I had an encounter with the mother and
it was not cool. So, the mother is a
seminary teacher and there is a youth in her class who missed class for a week
and also missed mutual. Instead of
reaching out to him with love and concern, she was chewing this kid out in
public. He put up with it for an
impressive length of time, but when he started to give her his excuse for not
coming, she went crazy on him and started almost yelling. I was thinking, “This is really awkward and
inappropriate and hope it ends soon.”
But, it got worse, the young man tried to just walk away, which I
thought was a good response to the circumstances. The teacher wouldn’t have any of it, and she
grabbed him and dragged him into the classroom and cornered him. Then she started tearing into him again. I asked Elder Bickle (one of the 5
missionaries in our ward) if we should step in. He
didn’t respond so after about
another 20 seconds of screaming, I just walked into the room and said, “What
are you doing?” The Hermana responded,
“We are just playing.” I responded, “It
doesn’t look like playing to me.” She
told me to leave so I went and stood in the doorway. Then, believe it or not, she continued her
rant for a few more minutes, and she blamed the kid for how he made her look in
front of the missionaries. At this
point, Elder Bickle ran away, and left slightly fluent me to deal with the
angry Hermana. She turned to me and started
questioning me. I said, “It looks like you
are chewing him out.” Little did I know
that I had not seen the she-bear fully awakened until this point. I took the
brunt of the attack and it wasn’t pretty.
Finally, I was rescued by Elder Soulier who came in and said that we had
a meeting. He dragged me down the hall
as this sister shouted to him that he needed to tell me to be more humble and
much more. I agree with her that I need
to be more humble, but that does not mean that I was wrong to step in. (Mom side note: Elder Colvin has a weakness
for sticking up for the underdog ever since he was a little boy, no matter what
grief or pain it caused him. Why would
he change now?) Elder Ocarez said that
he thought that I did the right thing. I
think that I did the right thing too, but not in the best way. I compared my experience today with
power-washing the horse stalls. This
particular family is like a power washer in the barn, just spewing high-pressure
crap and hurting everything in their path.
What I did was essentially shoving my hand in front of the spray. Maybe I deflected the spray for a little bit,
and prevented a little damage to a young boy, but it stung and ultimately it
didn’t do much good.
Miracle for the day lasted 2 long hours:
Miracle #62: We had our first ward council in more
than 6 months!
Other than that, the only thing worth note is that we had a
service activity at 9:30 at night moving someone’s furniture a block to their
new house. I carried an oven/stovetop
all alone for a block and almost died. I
liked it though because it was an excuse to get a little exercise in on Sunday.
We negated any benefit though by eating more sopapillas.
November 24, 2014
Ugghhh! Today was a
day! We had only had 2 out of 6 planned
lessons work out. We spent 2 long hours
on list work to no avail (contacting less active members). Nothing happened, well, one thing happened
that was a miracle-ish.
Miracle-ish # 63:
A man was working on fixing his car so I started talking to him about
his car and it turned out that he is a less active member and is a relative of
someone in our ward. This is the second contact this week that I have made
because of my own personal hobbies or interests.
The funny/creepy point of the day was when we were doing
door contacts and this girl (of indistinguishable age – you just can’t tell
down here because the girls mature really early) was creeping out on me. She was climbing up the fence and shoving her
mom out of the way so that she could stare at me. So NOT cool.
November 25, 2014
We had a good morning!
One appointment, one meeting, and one PACKAGE!!!! I got my Christmas wish from my parents, the
Insanity Workout. That program is made
to kill you and I almost threw up doing one of the workouts. It is going to be good fun for me and it will
help me with my excess pent up energy. The
miracle of the day was one that only my dad would appreciate.
Miracle #64: We taught someone who just moved back to
Chile after 10 years in Germany. He gave
us German chocolates!! Mmmmmm Sister
Brim is so lucky! (Friend of Elder Colvin’s who is serving in Berlin.)
I saw at least 10 drug deals go down right next door to one
of our strongest members….really depressing.
