Dead Batteries and Ferraris

Dear family and friends,

This week was a great one! I went on a couple of exchanges, so that was fun and one of them was very successful! On Wednesday I went with Elder Chatfield to his area. We were driving around going about our business when we came out of the church building to leave and when we turned the key in the ignition we heard the worst sound you can hear when it's 113° out. *Click click click click click click.* We looked at each other and simultaneously went, "Dead battery." If it were a movie there would have been some sort of horror music in the background and then it would have been really suspenseful as we sat in the heat trying to get someone to come jump it for us. We called Elder Christiansen, a senior missionary in charge of the vehicles. He was kind enough to come give us a jump and then told us to take it straight to the dealership where it's still under warranty. We did and they told us that it was probably the worst day we could have decided to have our battery die. They were completely backed up, so it was quite the wait. We checked out all the cars they had. They had about 30+ Corvettes, so those were kind of cool to sit in and look at. Then we went in and had some complimentary donuts and water.  It was great! We were at the dealership for about 3 1/2 hours. Elder Chatfield was glad that it happened on our exchange and not when he was with Elder Ojala or his usual companion, Elder Quist. They both are fairly fresh out and he thought it wouldn't be a very good thing to spend a good portion of the exchange sitting around doing nothing. I also thought it was a blessing. The night before when we were talking about what we wanted to work on during the exchange he said he wanted to focus on staying positive because apparently it's easy for him to drop into negative thinking. That was for sure a test for him to see if he would stay positive. He did a great job at staying positive through it, so that was good to see!

Thursday was a pretty dang good day! We had a zone conference in the morning. It was President and Sister Jenkins last one. They leave a week from tomorrow. It's kind of crazy. Sister Jenkins wanted to leave us with a gift that would stick with us. She memorized the Living Christ and recited it to us and then handed us all a copy of it. It inspired me to memorize it again. I had it at one point, but that was about 20 months ago at the very start of my mission.  President left it us with a really long document called 'Teach Repentance.' It's an amazing document! It's probably near 30 pages of nothing but repentance.

After the meeting we went and washed a bunch of cars for a member. We were told he had several, so we pulled up to this warehouse with like 50 cars in it and right up front, the first cars he wanted washed were two Ferraris. I looked at those and immediately recognizing them for what they were just thought, "This guy wants 18, 19, and 20 year olds washing his Ferrari's?" Then I looked to the right and there was a Bentley he wanted us to wash. And then I looked further down the line and there were two Porches, the exact same model and year, one black and one white. I asked him why he had two of the same car and he said he and his wife couldn't decide on which color they wanted so they just got one in each color. This guy is loaded out of his mind! I'll send some pictures of me leaning up on a Ferrari. He had a lot of really cool cars.

Well, nothing else really happened this week; just lots of knocking on doors and looking for people to teach. This week we should have a few lessons, so that's going to be exciting for us! We usually have 3 in a week and we have 3 set right now with members lined up to come with us to those! We're excited that the work is starting to pick up a little bit. Have a great week everyone!

Love,

Elder Mullins

Our investigator Bradley

Yeah, I'm sitting in a Ferrari right there...

Freshly washed Ferrari

Is that a semi-truck?  Nope!  It's the biggest pickup truck I've ever seen in my entire life!  It's custom made and has a crazy intense sound system inside of it, just in case the truck itself isn't cool enough on its own.