The Door & The Dog

Thursday, 22nd of August 2013


It's temple day today so they changed P-Day from Monday to Thursday this week. The temple was a great experience for Sam as the spirit is really strong and each time he goes he learns a lot.

Sam was emailing from an office on a golf course today, as the bishop from the San Destin ward took them to the temple, then he took them out to lunch at a place on the golf course, and now he's letting them use the computers there.

Transfers were interesting, Sam threw up in the car park at the stake centre, but then he felt fine immediately afterwards, he doesn't know if it was anxiety, but he has been fine since then. Sam and Elder Ballard get along well, serving together has been really fun and they learn a lot from each other. He is senior companion, however Sam is the only person who knows the members and the area, so he is pretty much just taking the lead for now.

They had an interesting experience on Tuesday, they were tracting and Sam knocked on a door and was talking to a lady who was trying to hold a dog back, it managed to break free of her grip and jumped up on Elder Ballard and started barking in his face. Elder Ballard turned and started running as fast as he could, the dog kept chasing him and he slipped and fell on the road, luckily the dog stopped chasing him after he fell, but his white shirt got covered in the oil from the road and his hands were black as well. After this whole episode Sam just turn to the lady and say "yeah.... and.... we're sharing a message about Jesus Christ", he was trying so hard not to laugh. She must have apologised 20 times to us.

As they walked away from her door, one of the members (Kenny Thomason) asked if they were okay, they told him that they were, and he said "I was about to shoot that thing" and pulled a pistol out of his shorts. Sam kept having to stop himself from cracking up during the whole day, every time he was thinking about it he just wanted to laugh :P

Sam's scripture memorising is going well, he knows around 20 scriptures now, along with some other things he decided to memorise from other books. He is hoping he can keep it up for the rest of his mission!

They might be close to stopping tracting in the mission, because some people dressed up as missionaries somewhere in Nevada and robbed somebody, now it's all over the news so people aren't really wanting to answer the door. They are being visited by Elder Neil L. Anderson, and another general authority, the east and west missions will be combining so they can meet them for a conference. Hopefully they will find out when they will be using tablet computers and facebook.

Fellowship is important for new and potential investigators, it makes the missionaries jobs so much easier when they have people they know at church which make them feel comfortable.

There is still a fair bit of work, but since he is coming up on 5 months in the same area, it's hard for him to stay focused, since he pretty much has the ward directory memorised, he knows whether a member is going to answer the door to them or not before they even get there. There are some people who they can just not track down.