I managed to get by this week without offending anyone. Whew.
And the total members of the branch presidency at church this week was...1! I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle preaching church attendance when even the branch presidency seems to be awol pretty frequently. Oh well. We'll make do with what we've got.
I got news on Saturday that a family we were teaching in my last area is getting baptized and one of the kids wanted me to baptize them. So I had the option of driving seven hours on Sunday and missing Church to do the baptism. That sounded a little much so I politely declined unless I was really needed. It's cool that they're getting baptized, though.
We've got a baptism coming up for Saturday. The branch is pretty excited. The son of one of the recent converts is gonna get baptized. Afterwards I heard a rumor that there will also be a carne asada at their house. There are few things better than having an awesome baptism followed by a carne asada. I'm excited. The guy's ready. He'll be a really great member.
We also have another family that's really close. The husband's just looking for a way to attend on Sundays. But other than that they're super solid. They're basically already a part of the branch. They're even helping out with the branch fhe we're planning.
This week I went on splits with Elder Bartlett to Sedona. I'm really glad I'm not an English missionary in Sedona. We spent the day going down part member and prospective elder lists. It was weird that even people who were supposedly members of the church totally weren't receptive. Every single one we went by gave us some sort of story about how they lost their faith and now don't really care to build it again. It was kinda sad. There was one lady who tried to pull the good old "there's lots of truths for every different person." We explained that in fact that is opposite to the nature of the word truth. When there are lots of different truths for different people we call those opinions. Some people just think that by mangling the English language they can come out looking like a genius.
So yeah, Sedona's beautiful but not necessarily a hotspot of English missionary work. It was fun though. We spent the night in the mortuary. I got to see the cremator and the machine they use to crush your bones. Mortuaries are really weird. They keep a log of the temperature of the cremator and we saw they burned somebody up on Monday. I decided if you owned a mortuary it'd be really easy to commit murder. Just kill em and then throw em in the cremator, crush their bones into a fine powder and then scatter their ashes to the wind.
We had a sweet P-day last week. We went to some indian ruins that aren't very well known so there aren't a lot of people that go. We had to hike a couple of miles to get there but it was definitely worth it. You could see the outlines of all of the walls of their houses, which was cool, but the coolest part was the part of the settlement where they basically threw all their trash. So there were tons of shards of pottery and chips of obsidian from making arrowheads. It was sweet being able to pick up a shard of pottery and think that somebody used it centuries before any white people got here. It was the closest thing to being an archaeologist/treasure hunter I think I've ever gotten.
Well, things are going pretty good. I'm excited for the month of September. I think I'm gonna wind up training again in a couple of weeks. I'm ready. As long as he's just a little patient with me I think I'll be good.
Love,
Elder Grasley
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