I am so excited for my new companion, Elder W. What a great guy. At the transfer meeting, President Johnson told me my new companion was going to be a really, really good one- and he was right. I have served around Elder W before; he was in York the entire time I was in Lancaster. Just a fantastic missionary, really dedicated to doing work and helping other people. He's been out for 20 months and has been on the east side of the mission the whole time. He was really close with Elder L and learned a lot from him, so there is just a wealth of experience, wisdom, and determination to draw from. We are going to do work this transfer. We get along really well and I couldn't ask for a better companion to finish my mission with. I had my interview with President the other day and he told me, "It's not very often that I put two stellar missionaries together. I don't know what the seventh ward did to deserve this".
That being said, this week was a really tough one. The adversary was really lashing out; we had a lot of hard knocks this week. Just a lot of bitter people, who are stubborn and didn't want to change. There is one less active family we were teaching who told us essentially to not come back because while they knew the church was true they weren't "ready to go back yet". The message "just isn't needed right now ". I told them the gospel message is always needed- sometimes it just isn't accepted. Then I flipped over the table and walked out. (No, I didn't do that.)
We also had some pretty intense encounters with an antichrist and even just some very bitter active members. We asked them how they were doing with their family mission plan and they told us family mission plan sounded like a great way to lose friends. I am so grateful for the atonement. When you have Christ's sacrifice in your mind it makes it so much easier to not take things personally and to not be offended when people reject you. In reality, they aren't rejecting us, they're rejecting Christ.
This week we had a pretty good miracle. M took us out to lunch, and we walked to our apartment afterwards to get our car to go to a lesson. As we drove down our street I realized our car had a big flat tire. And we needed to be in a lesson in 15 minutes on the other side of town. Just as we are trying to figure out what to do, M drives by on his way to go grocery shopping. He drove us to our lesson, which went well, and then afterwards he let us use his Triple A card. We got the flat taken care of pretty fast, luckily. God sure looks out for his missionaries
In other news we are going to be using the iPad for all planning and area book work starting this week. That is a little bit of a change! President Johnson wants to roll out the iPads as quickly as possible, so we can begin using Facebook and blogs to proselyte. Honestly, it's a weird change. I enjoy using the iPad but I am just accustomed to doing missionary work the old-fashioned way, with my scriptures in one hand and a pamphlet in the other. But it should be a good way to keep pushing myself and learning new things. An annoying thing is that we need to copy all of our records into our iPads and then shred the existing paper records- that is just going to take a long time.
Yours in the digital age,
Elder Wright
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