April 29, 2014

Haven't spent much time in my area over the past week.

Since my companion finished last Monday, and one of the elders broke his arm, I was outside of my area from pretty much Monday to Wednesday, at which point we went to Hamilton for transfers on Thursday. We got in late Thursday night, with not a whole lot of time to proselyte, but we were able to have a pretty good weekend. Then we had to drive back up to Hamilton Sunday night so that we could be here for a zone conference that happened all day yesterday. That's why I'm emailing today and not yesterday as per the usual.

Elder Pearson from the area presidency is doing a mission tour and his first training was with us and a few other zones yesterday. It was really awesome, but I was struggling just a bit since it went from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. We started off with an hour long meeting for the zone leaders, then went into the conference with the rest of the missionaries. It was a bit of a confusing day for a couple of reasons. Elder Pearson is fiery. He reminded me of the talk by Elder Holland where he said "with just enough fire to singe your eyebrows a little." He'd rip us to shreds and then turn into the most loving guy you've ever had talk to you. He kept taking me through a roller coaster ride of feeling totally torn apart to him building me back up. Very interesting. His wife as well, man can she really strike a dagger straight into your heart. After a very long day of instruction that effectively exploded my mind by the end, I was pretty ready to get moving and get back to work. But alas, I was not going to be allowed to remain motivated and content for the day. I wasn't sure if it was really necessary to share the next experience but I might as well.

Right after it all finished I was asked to go into an interview with President Rudd. Once we got into the interview he got into a story about how apparently I had watched some MotoX with one of the missionaries in the zone. Which, quick disclaimer, I absolutely had not. Here's the story: I went on exchange with one of the missionaries in our zone who's only been out about six weeks. He's really been struggling at wanting to stay out, so I took the approach of having the most fun that we possibly could have as we went about doing the work. We talked a lot about Moto and dirt bikes, since we share that same passion, and he's the first missionary that I've met who does. We went and worked the whole day through of course, had some awesome things happen, and then exchanged back the next morning. This missionary, we'll call him missionary #1, told his companion, we'll call him missionary #2, how much fun we'd had and how he was so happy to talk dirt bikes with someone again, etc.. Obviously the only conclusion that one can pull from that is that I took missionary #1 to the library and watched MotoX. All day long. Not only was there no evidence to support it, but there was no evidence because it never happened. So, with that conclusion in mind, the next step should, of course, be to contact the mission president and say that you know and are certain this is what happened.

So, I went into the interview, and had absolutely no idea what President was talking about. As is my nature in instances such as this, I sat quietly, trying to figure out what was going on, and didn't argue with President. He then interviewed missionary #1 while I was outside trying to suss what in the world was going on. Shortly after his interview, missionary #1 pulled me aside and asked me what was going on. President had pulled him in for a moment or two to apologize for the way in which his zone leader had acted (that's me), and missionary #1 had sat there quietly perplexed at what in the world was going on. Needless to say, we requested another sit down with President and told him we had never done what we were being accused of. It all seemed to get resolved, but you never can know. How sad that after such an awesome day, that had to happen, and I've spent the subsequent time slightly stressed but mostly exasperated at this most unfortunate turn of events.

I love President Rudd, and I'd never want to do anything to ruin his trust in me, so I'm hoping that everything is resolved. You just never know though. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all turns out.

Other than that, not a whole lot to report. Looking forward to an awesome week though.
 Love ya! Kurt