Craziness!

Dear family and friends!

This has been an absolutely crazy week full of all sorts of adventures! I don't have a ton of time to email today since we're doing so many things, but I'll give it my best shot!

Randy accepted our invitation to be baptized a while ago and now his baptism is coming up next Saturday! We had a lesson with him to go over the interview questions and to organize what was going to happen at his baptism. On Sunday we had his interview. He passed!  He's getting baptized the 28th and is super excited for it. He's got people coming in from all over the country and even a few from Europe to come to this thing! Randy has an interesting story as to how he got in contact with the missionaries. His friend was baptized back in 2011 in Scotland.  He started asking questions so missionaries that were serving inScotland Skyped him. They taught him through that amazing modern resource. The only problem was they were poaching from the other side of the world, so they finally handed him over to us after he'd been taught for about 5 months by them...  We met him and he knew everything.  We asked if he would like to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized by someone holding the proper priesthood authority. He said yes after about 2 weeks of fasting and praying to know if it was the right choice for him. It's going to be quite an amazing service!

On Thursday we got to go to the temple. It was awesome as always! I got to sit next to Elder Foulger in the Celestial room. He was my roommate for the first 4 months of my mission. He's now one of the Assistants. It's awesome that he's an assistant so early in his mission! He's only been out for 14 months and usually Elders aren't assigned to that position until they're 18 months out. He's one of my favorite missionaries by far! He inspired me over and over again while I was roommates with him.

After the temple trip we did some service at a thing called Operation Connect. It's basically a service for homeless people to get several things done in the same location. They had things such as pet food, showers, legal things such as birth certificates and other legal documentation, food stamps, all sorts of things like that. The man Elder Sweeten and I helped out was named Phillip. That guy was pretty off his rocker... He served 3 tours in Vietnam as a high priority person’s sniper. He had over 90 kills and even got a guy right in the jugular from 950 yards. That's approx. 3/4 of a mile by the way! He had some of the worst PTSD I think I've ever seen in my life. He doesn't sleep very much because of it and he said when he does sleep he has to take Cannibnoids (marijuana) before he does so that he doesn't have night terrors. He was nuts... Haha! I loved him though. He was pretty awesome! He had so many war stories it was unreal!

Elder Sweeten got sick that day, so we went back to the apartment after service and just stayed there. He had a really bad cold and sore throat. I about went stir crazy... That night I had a competition to see how many dominoes I could balance on my face. I got 15 by the way! I'll have to send a picture. I did the cinnamon challenge, and beat it!!! Haha! I held my breath for 3 1/2 minutes, so that was pretty awesome. I don't even know what else I did, but yah... It was fun.

Then next day I did kind of the same deal and just was bored because we just stayed in all day. Saturday was the same. Sunday was the same except we went to church and then to dinner. The Shope's at the end of dinner asked me if I would like to borrow their extra trumpet for the rest of my mission and just return it at the end. Of course I said yes! So now I have a trumpet! President told me on the first day of my mission that I could do that, so I'm pretty pumped about that! It's an old Conn Director, so in its condition it’s worth about $75, but that's alright... Beggars can't be choosers, right? So now I have something to do on P-days when we aren't doing anything at all.

I love every second of my mission and am so happy to be out here!  I'm having a blast! There are, of course, hard days, but that's alright because that just means the good days are going to be even better.  I love all of you and miss you.  I'll see you in 18 months or so!

Love,

Elder Mullins