Fake Rolex and Satan

Dear family and friends!

This has been one of the hardest weeks of my entire mission. I don't have a lot of time to write today since we're doing all sorts of crazy things for our prep day. Tuesday was fine. We went around trying to find people to teach and visit. We got nothing... We probably went to 15 houses and didn't get any doors opened. We've decided as a companionship to stop finding new investigators and start teaching inactive members. Our ward has about 700 members and there are 90 or so that are active. By active, I mean attend at least once a month. It's ridiculous how many inactive members there are. We went back to the apartment for dinner having taught nobody at all.  We had 4 appointments and all 4 of them texted us to cancel, and none of the inactive visits really went anywhere. They either didn't answer their doors, or they answered and told us to go away, most of them kindly, fortunately.

Wednesday we got new iPads! We now have 32 GB iPads, so that's awesome! We can download so much stuff on these things now from gospel library! It's fantastic! Before getting them we had a 4 hour long meeting with a member of the first quorum of the seventy and he instructed us on how to properly use this technology. Something that really stuck out to me was that the reason we have these iPads is not because it hastens the work of salvation. It's because what better time than a mission to give someone a piece of technology, and to teach them how to properly use it, and to avoid abusing it. You can always get a piece of software that will block bad websites, but there's almost always a way to circumvent it. The best and most consistent filter is yourself! After that meeting we spent the next 3 hours setting them up, then we went to dinner at our apartment. After dinner we had a lesson set up for Lisa, but she cancelled it and pushed it to Thursday. Thursday she pushed it to Saturday. Saturday pushed it to Sunday, then to today, but we just got a text saying she couldn't do it today. We have been trying to have this appointment with her for over 3 weeks now... That's pretty discouraging, because she was on fire! She was totally prepared for baptism but now she's just fallen off of the face of the earth... I forgot to mention that morning we got a call form Brother Talley that was pretty sad. Sister Talley had passed away the night before. She was basically my mission mom. We are putting together a missionary choir to sing at her funeral next Friday. Keep the Talley family in your prayers.

Thursday was interesting for sure. I was with Elder Hepworth who is on his mission because his mom made him go. He hates it out here and knows exactly how many days he has left on his mission. It's kind of sad... Anyway, we went out and visited a ton of people, but nobody answered. We had a few people that did, but they weren't interested. We had one guy yell at us for trespassing, even though we weren't, and he told us he would call the cops on us next time we knocked on his door. At another door the lady came out and was being pretty nice, but then her husband came and saw who she was talking to, pushed her into the house and told us that the next time we came over he'd pull his gun out and shoot us. We decided we'd better not knock those two again... Haha! It's okay, I don't think he would actually shoot us, he just didn't want to have us over there. I finally got Elder Sweeten back and we went and visited Carol, our recent convert. I'm super confused and discouraged when it comes to her. We baptized her and she was on fire! She loved the gospel and loved coming to church. She showed up for her confirmation, she went to the Visitors Center with us, and she absolutely loved it, then she never came to church again. It's been a month since she came. I don't even know how to handle this. We go over to visit and she talks for four or five minutes then goes back inside. She always cancels the appointments we make.  I don't know what to do. We'll figure it out though!

Friday was another kind of awful day. We had scheduled  8 appointments that day. They all seemed like they would be super solid and like they would go through, but slowly one by one they dropped like flies.

Friday we had zero lessons.  We went to see a lot of inactive members though. None of them were really interested in us coming by, so that was sad.

Saturday was pretty much just going out and finding inactive members. None of those were interested either. We had a lesson with Daymian scheduled, but that fell through.  At least he rescheduled it to Sunday. I've decided that the reason all of these inactive come out to AJ is to get away from the church. I've probably talked to about 30 of them and all 30 have said in one way or another not to come back. The majority of them were pretty nice about it, but there were a couple bad apples. Oh well... Lunch time on Saturday was pretty good though! We went over the Ayala family’s home. They are returning members and most of the family comes to church every week. The biggest reason we go over is for their daughter Gisselle. She is 16 and doesn't really come to church because she doesn't agree with a couple of things and also she was offended by someone. The person that offended her was pretty rude and inconsiderate, and she has every right to have taken offense to that. We just hope she can work past the people and come back to church. We will be teaching her more. She plays the violin and loves to play it for us. It's always a party at the Ayalas! Her little brothers have a bunch of NERF guns, so they brought Elder Sweeten and I one each and we had a battle. It was pretty fun until Elder Sweeten hit Sister Ayala square between the eyes with his. Man, I have never been so scared in my life! She got so mad at her boys for shooting her! Hahahaha! She totally thought it was Jose! Elder Sweeten finally spoke up and she just laughed. Haha! I think her boys have hit her more than once, because she yelled in Spanish and what little Spanish I do know, I know that some of those words coming out of her mouth were NOT missionary appropriate. Haha.   Poor Jose and Reuben. They're only 7 and 9. It was a party over there! Gisselle really opened up to us about her concerns, which was great. I think part of why she sees us is she has a crush on Elder Sweeten! At least that's what Sister Ayala said.

Yesterday was fantastic. It was a great refresher to get to go to church. I felt the Spirit and was rejuvenated. It was pretty disappointing when last week we had 10 investigators at church and this week we had 1, but that just means there's room for improvement! Pray for the people in our area that they will be able to have their hearts softened and that they will begin to accept us and the gospel.

We did have a lesson with Daymian though! We talked about why he doesn't feel like he's ready to be baptized and he said that it's because if he gets baptized he has to live the Mormon life, as he put it. He wants to still have fun. I have a fake Rolex that I bought off of another missionary. It looks pretty legit, so I took it off and showed it to him and compared it to Satan. I told him Satan makes something look really desirable when really it's not. We talked about the deceptions of Satan and how what might look awesome, and fun, and cool, really isn't. He kind of put that together and we left him with that to think about. I think he will have a change of heart. That lesson was definitely the best thing that happened all week. It was a fantastic way to end it!

This was a pretty rough week, but we need them in our lives. Opposition in all things, right? We'll survive out here.  We have a lot of fun together. I think this email sounded pretty rough, but that's okay. It's hard right now. I'm learning a lot though and I love it! I love all of you and hope you all have fantastic weeks!

Love,

Elder Mullins