Chapter 28: Jokes

 1/5/2021

Today was a great day. We spent a lot of time working on Facebook finding efforts, and it was a really cool opportunity to meet a lot of new people. We tried messaging everyone that we could, and even got a couple of responses which was very nice. Our whole District is pretty excited about these new tracting methods, and we have high hopes that they’ll help us to start finding those who are being prepared to hear the Gospel message faster.

1/6/2021

Today was a really good day. We got to spend a lot of our time working on things to post on Facebook, and so I got a good ways through another section of a drawing. Hopefully by the end of the week it’ll be done and I’ll have another mission drawing that I can put up on Facebook. Today was also our first District call with our new District. We got to meet Elder Humes and Hollingsworth, and they’re both very nice Elders. Elder Humes was actually one of the first generation of Missionaries in Monument 2. Elder Humes and Morse opened up this area together, and then when he left Morse and I continued to work here together for another transfer before Morse left. Now Gomez and I are here, the second generation of missionaries in Monument 2. It’s very cool to have our District councils, because Humes recognizes a lot of the names of people that we talk about.

1/7/2021

Elder Gomez had $30 of McDonalds gift cards, and so today he decided he was going to use them all up on us and the Redlands Elders. We walked into the McDonalds on the side of Walmart, and Gomez asked for a total of sixteen hamburgers. I don’t think that they were used to dealing with that quantity of food since they weren’t a main chain location, just a little side shop, but they still did a great job with our order. In the drive back I got one of the best ab workouts I’ve ever had, because of how hard I was laughing. Elder Gomez has one joke that he really likes to use. Yesterday when we were talking to the Sisters, he said, “Sisters, do you want to hear a joke?” and when they agreed I jumped in with, “butterfly” (the punchline for the joke). He got mad in a very funny way. Afterwards he looked up a second joke on Facebook. He hadn’t used it before, but it was simple enough that when he said it I guessed the punchline again, and again he got really mad in a way that was way funnier than the joke was. Today Elder Gomez asked the Redlands Elders if they wanted to hear a joke, they agreed and he said, “What does a... wait, how-” and I jumped in again, “it logs in” (the punchline), and Elder Gomez again started yelling “UGH ANDERSON WHY?!” to which all of us in the car lost it, we were crying we were laughing so hard. Elder Bott then said, “wait, I didn’t hear the punchline, tell the joke” and after Elder Gomez had made death threats if any of us opened our mouths and ruined the joke, he said, “how does a tree log into the internet-Wait! Dangit!” (The complete joke is “how does a tree connect to the internet? It ‘logs’ in!”), he had ruined the joke himself and again, that was so much funnier than the actual punchline. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time, every time Gomez tries to tell a joke it’s the funniest thing ever.

1/8/2021

Today was a great day. Elder Gomez also had a Chick-Fil-A gift card that he wanted to use up, so today we went out for fast food part two. When we were getting our food we got a call from the Redlands Elders saying that they needed to be at the church at 1:30, which was only twenty minutes away. The church was fifteen minutes away, but we had to go out of our way to pick up the Redlands Elders and to pick up our supplies for the day from our house (we were coming back from service and so we didn’t have everything that we would need for the day). We told the Redlands Elders we would be at their house in two minutes. I started a timer and gave Elder gomez incremental updates. Those updates became very useful because they helped Elder Gomez to know how much he needed to speed in the last ten seconds of the two minute time period. We pulled up right at two minutes. Then we rushed to our house and back to the church to make it to the church in the remaining five minutes that we had. Again, we pulled up right on time. I wish I had been filming, that would have made for a great racing scene.

1/9/2021

Today was a really good day. We had a lot of lessons, and one of them ended up going for about an hour. The hour long lesson was really good, we were studying the vision of the Tree of Life with Sister Thompson, and we went a lot slower than I have in a really long time, and we ended up getting so much more out of it as a result. There were so many incredible symbols that started jumping out at us immediately, and I was really grateful that we got to study with her. We also rewrote the “Phineas and Ferb” theme song today to fit in with missionary work for another hype video, and Elder Bott singing that song quickly became one of my favorite things ever, it was so funny to hear him scream those awesome lyrics.

1/10/2021

I’m not sure if we hit a new record or not today, we had six lessons which I think was our old record, but still pretty impressive. We were very busy today, we had church which was a welcome surprise, and got permission from our mission President to do lessons in person as long as they’re under 15 minutes. We’re still thinking the majority of our lessons are probably going to be over Zoom and not actually in-person lessons, just because it’s so much easier to try to work this way than physically going to our lessons. At first it was kind of difficult to keep attention, but now we’re doing a great job of it, and families are starting to get really interactive, which is amazing. Today was also the day it began: We began pushing out our Ward Mission Plan to the Ward. We taught the primary kids about it first, and then started talking about it in our personal lessons. The lessons were very powerful, and we knew that this plan was going to have a lasting impact on the Ward, and that it was one that Heavenly Father approved of wholeheartedly, as He accompanied our message with power. We’re excited to see what everyone does to use it.

Today for a Spiritual thought I wanted to share a section of a verse. The whole verse is really good, but I wanted to focus on just the beginning of it. In Helaman 3:35 we read: Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their humility, and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation. This verse comes from when the people of God's church were exceedingly righteous. They didn't let temptations enter into their hearts for a really long time, and because of it they were richly blessed. Among the greatest of the blessings they receive was that of the Spiritual strength they found. This was a people who understood conversion, and their conversion to Christ had three steps: They fasted and prayed, they humbled themselves, and grew their faith; Each of these steps build off the last, indeed it is impossible to truly pray without humbling ourselves, and how can we humble ourselves without exercising our faith in God? It is my testimony that as we seek to do these things we will become further converted to the Lord, even unto the filling of our souls with true joy and consolation.