September 2, 2013

It's finally coming into spring here! The official first day of spring was yesterday. I think. It's pretty awesome knowing that you're all about to go into another cold, long, dark winter, whereas I'm just coming out of a rather mild, slightly wet though still relatively warm winter, and into a beautiful, pretty much never too hot New Zealand summer. I'll give you a second to digest that one.

We had another baptism and confirmation over the weekend. Pretty awesome. And we've got our next baptism set for the 21st of this month. It was pretty interesting when we told our ward mission leader about the date. He came back a few minutes later and told us that the chapel was booked on that Saturday, so we were either going to have to move the date, or move the baptism to another chapel. I'm still pretty upset about it. Where exactly are our priorities here? I told him the worth of a soul is greater than the worth of a party, so people are just going to have to deal with it. We still haven't gotten it resolved. How crazy is that though? We're having a shin dig so you can't have a baptism. Wow.

The week was pretty mild, we just had one moment of excitement. I was on exchanges with the Zone Leader, Elder Rawlinson. We were walking down the street and a guy pulled up next to us and waved us over. As soon as we got to his car he asked us what the firmament was, because this is our job, so we should know what it is, and how crucial it is to our existence, talking about D&C and stuff. Whenever I tried to answer his question though, he wouldn't let me talk, then he started to get really upset that we weren't answering him. So he started yelling at us and telling us we're ignorant and arrogant, and that we failed, etc. After a few minutes of it, we said, "see ya" and walked off. That didn't stop him though. He started following us along the road yelling at us, then cussed us out for a few minutes and finally drove off. That night when exchanges finished we told the story to our comps, and it turns out that the other Zone Leader has met him a few times before. Apparently the guy believes that the Firmament is a place where Heavenly Father has a giant god making factory. Right now though the factory is broken down, so that's why we're stuck here on earth. I guess some of us are the mechanics for it too, so that's why it hasn't gotten fixed yet. Crazy right? Sure threw me for a loop.

 Well, that about does it for this week.
  Love ya!
   Elder O'Neal