Elder Thompson: Life in the Fast Lane: Farewell to Skoutmaster

Dear All,

“¿Qué es la diferencia entre una pera

y la novia

🏼 del misionero? La pera siempre es pera...pero la novia nunca espera!” Gotta love Spanish jokes that make no sense in English lol

A lot has happened, it seems. Our week last week started with service with Jaquelyn Montano. She’s the mom of the 2 girls we are teaching and going to baptize! We helped her move some dirt from this mound in her front yard toothed places in the yard to level out the ground. We got talking about our new car and then she offered for us to clean it with her hose because we couldn’t last week so she came out with a bucket and hand soap haha and we washed our car in her driveway. My comp and I established what we call Puro Español Tuesdays. We did our best of only talking in Spanish on Tuesdays. We did pretty good! We had correlation that day and my comp got a little fired up because us missionaries got talking about the white handbook and unwritten rules and Hermana Van was trying to prove that the white handbook says we can’t go to gyms but she couldn’t find it...stuff like that gets my comp mad I guess. We had an epic lightning visit with the Chiñas family that night and we found ourselves talking to 3 recently returned missionaries and so I asked them if they ever had the thought of how they promised themselves while on their missions that they would be a much better member missionary and help to the Ward when they got home and they did! So we did follow up with them asking them for referrals haha I loved it...and they gave us some!!

So Wednesday was kinda a bad day. The Church came out with an updated app for Areabook called Areabook 2.0. I think a lot of other missions have got it and ours, the Washington DC South Mission got it on the 4th. There was a stir across the entire mission because of this update because it was basically a downgrade and a complete change to what the old areabook app was. Hundreds of missionaries gave it 1 star ⭐️ on the reviews and the reviews section basically became missionary Twitter with all these complaints! My comp and I took 2 hours sitting in Target trying to get it to work and boot up but it wouldn’t. Basically they took out necessary things from the old version like our calendar view how we could see the day and what we were going to do at what times and they made it a list of events instead and you can’t see at what time of the day you’re at...and lots of other things. Basically the whole mission was confused at why this was happening. I have resorted to using Apple Calendar on my iPad because it has that calendar view. It will take some getting used to. It ruined our day on Wednesday.

On Thursday I turned 20.5 years old! Haha it was also the day I started my D&C challenge, that’s when you have 138 days left and you start reading D&C one section every day (most missionaries read it backwards as a countdown but I just can’t do that!) I also started reading El Libro de Mormón and I’m determined to finish it as soon as possible for the first time in Spanish!

We had another lesson with the Montano girls and this time they were kinda restless because they were going to go laser tagging right after our lesson so they were hard to keep focused. We basically told them they have to choose between English and Spanish Ward and we told them if they want to go to church in English we would have to send over other missionaries. That got em haha and they came to church his week!!! We got them to meet our Obispo and we got them to all of their classes! It was perfect!

We got confused Friday night because we were running around super busy and for some reason we came out of a lesson at 8:30 and we somehow that it was Saturday so we called our recent convert and left him a voicemail but in the middle of our message we realized we were going by his place Saturday and so we had a laugh. We came out of a lesson with Sergio Vargas and we brought up baptism super softly and he said nows not the time for that in his life. We’re gonna continue visiting him.

I felt bad because Friday we got stuck in a member’s house for an hour and a half at a dinner because she was telling us her WHOLE story of coming to America and meeting her husband and meeting the missionaries haha she said it would only take 5 min. haha

we had our lesson with our recent convert Kevin Hernandez and we taught the WofW by reading section 89 with them. They’re super cool. They’re our age and their daughter who just turned 1 just got the chicken pox so they were freaking out that we still came by but my comp and I have already had it ha

Church was successful but long for some reason. We got the girls to come and that was basically it. Elder Richardson and I had an incident after church that made us kinda down the whole rest of the day. After church, Elder Richardson showed a little bit of his inner colors and he started honking at the Hermana missionaries in our district because they were right in front of us pulling out. Well...he probably honked a little too much and he was just doing it to have fun. Not 2 minutes goes by and this Hermana member who’s a mother and returned missionary calls us and starts laying into us on how inappropriate that was and asking why we did that and all that. It honestly wasn’t the time and place for it because church was getting out right then but then this lady told us to look at our badges and consider why were even here. That crossed the line for me. I’m not denying that he didn’t deserve correction but the way this lady mothered us and bit our heads off was really rude and harsh cuz my comp is still striving to find why he’s here serving...my comp told me she and her husband both served missions and they’re so they hold grudges and judge every single missionary that goes through this Ward...ugh if you’re gonna give correction you have to do it the right way...in a way that doesn’t get the other person defensive. Whatever.

Well today we got shopping done early because kids are out of school and whatnot. We went bowling

today!!! We went with Sterling park elders, that’s our district leader. It was a lot of fun!! We are now just chilling at the Sterling Park chapel.

A cool spiritual thing I read this week was in my BOM reading. I’m in chapter 16 of 1 Nephi I think. I liked chapter 15 verses 5-6:

“5 And it came to pass that I was overcome because of my afflictions, for I considered that mine afflictions were great above all, because of the destruction of my people, for I had beheld their fall.

6 And it came to pass that after I had received strength I spake unto my brethren,...”

I wrote this down in my study thingy: Nephi had to take a moment and take in the fact that his posterity was going to fail and die off because he saw it with the angel. When was the last time you took a quiet moment to reflect and ponder on yourfuture family?

Just a thought. This is long. Have a great week!

️ Elder Thompson