Tech support

I got the birthday package and the raincoat today. The coat's a little big, but it'll keep me dry if it ever rains again. 😉 I don't have very much time to email because they got new computers in the mission office and a missionary who was in the MTC with me ratted me out for being good with computers, so I spent most of the day playing tech support guy and helping them with computer set up. 

We did a lot of tracting this week, and we were able to set up a lot of return appointments, but so far none of them have ended up happening. We've been setting up about two return appointments per day though, so sooner or later we're bound to get to teach a lesson. 😉 

I love you guys! Have a great week!

Setting realistic goals

Everybody's emails came in late this week, so I didn't see the emails you or dad sent until after P-day was over. I offer congratulations and condolences to Ammon on his science fair project, it's not every day you accidentally win a science fair. 😉 As far as racism in California, I've run into a lot of people who think we're a racist church, but aside from that I really haven't seen any racism. So that's good I guess. We haven't gotten much snow here either, surprise surprise. 😉 It did get all the way down to like, 34° one night, but it warmed up and felt really nice during the day. Today is transfer P-day, but Elder Wasden and I are staying here, so it's basically like any other Monday. I finally made it an entire transfer in one area. The work in this area has been slower than in the YSA or the first area I was in, but it's nice to be able to compare the start of this transfer to the start of last transfer. The potential investigators we have now are more solid than anybody we had in the area book when I got here, so even though it's moving slowly the work is definitely progressing, we just have to keep working hard and I'm sure it'll continue to get better.

I don't have a ton of time left, so I'll just share two or three things that happened this week. First one was I had a really good exchange with our district leader Elder Paulson this week. We just knocked on a ton of doors all day long, and he showed me how he and his companion had been setting daily goals in the morning, and I really liked it. It really helped to have something achievable to shoot for, and I think it helped us work harder throughout the whole day. Our hard work paid off, we were able to talk to a lot of people and we set up four return appointments, two of which were with really cool people. There was one woman who was carrying a whole bunch of stuff out of her house, and we were able to help her out with that, which was super awesome because the people we meet in California never accept when we offer to help them out. We were able to teach her a lot about the Book of Mormon and she said we could come back and teach her more, we should be teaching her in the evening today. Then at the end of the night we met a really cool person who moved to California from Hungary. Setting realistic goals and making plans to accomplish those goals really works.

We met quite a few other cool people this week, but at least half of them were young single adults. Younger people just seem to be more open to listening to us than older people, so we just send all of them over to the zone leaders. Except for one person we didn't send to the zone leaders because I was in a hurry and accidentally sent the text with the refferal to the Bank of America. We got it figured out and sent her to the zone leaders too, but now the Bank of America knows that we taught someone about the Book of Mormon and she wants to learn more about it on a Wednesday around four. Maybe if we're lucky they'll send a representitve and they can join them for the lesson.

That's pretty much it. .Good to hear from you, I love you all.

-Elder Clark

In a car?

Hello everyone! 

 

This week started out pretty crazy and then ended up being pretty slow, but it was pretty good for the most part. It started out with all the rain on monday. After we finished the P-day activity we went out and started knocking on some doors. (The rain actually stopped before we went out and started talking to people, so I still haven't proselyted in the rain yet.) We met two cool families, one who wasn't interested in meeting with us but really respected what we do as missionaries and talked to us about that for a while, and one who has a bunch of Mormon friends and really likes the church who said they'd love to have us over for dinner. I'm actually not totally sure why they aren't already members of the church, but I'm sure we'll learn more about that whenever we're able to schedule a time to meet them. Anyways, after we talked to that family we got on our bikes to ride to the next area we had in the plans and as Elder Wasden was going around a corner the back wheel of his bike slid out from under him and he fell off and hit his knee on the ground. He was having trouble walking and definitely wasn't going to be able to ride the bike, so we called one of the members in our ward who was super awesome and came over and drove us and our bikes back to our apartment. That was all we really did for that night, and the next morning we called the mission nurse and she told us to head over to an urgent care center and get his knee looked at. All the other elders in our district were busy all morning, so we stayed in the apartment until about four in the afternoon. I studied a lot, cleaned pretty much everything there was to clean, and watched it rain a little. It felt weird to have so much time, but it was kind of nice to be able to study so much. When we finally made it to the urgent care and sat in the waiting room for a little over two hours. I always thought that the flu season happened in the winter because it gets really cold and everyone's immune systems are down, but it's rarely dropped below 60° here and everyone is still getting super sick, so I'm honestly not really sure what the deal is there. But regardless, when we finally got in to see the doctor he told us that all of the ligaments in Elder Wasden's knee seemed to be doing just fine, but it was pretty swollen so he should probably avoid riding a bike for at least a couple of days. When we got back we called and told the zone leaders, and Wednesday we went into the misssion office and we have a car now. It had been in the shop getting something fixed, so we didn't even put any other missionaries on bike to get it, so that was nice. But yeah, since then we've mostly just been driving around and knocking on doors. We met a cool person who was YSA, so we reffered him to the zone leaders, and we met someone who seemed pretty cool but didn't show up for the return appointment we set. Friday was a little different, we watched the broadcast of President Monson's funeral and then we helped basically our only two investigators who haven't dropped us move out of the area. The missionaries where they moved to said it went super well and they already had a return appointment set and were planning on coming to church on Sunday, so hopefully everything continues to go well for them, they're really awesome people. Then on Sunday Elder Wasden and I gave talks about missionary work. It was kind of funny, because I sort of thought that since I'm a full time missionary and I'm focused on the savior 24/7 it would be easier to write a talk, but if anything it was actually harder because we had all of our other missionary responsibilities to get done. The talk went really well though, even though I ended up writing most of it the night before I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about all week, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to say without even writing very much of it down. 

In Ether chapter 12, verse 27 the Lord says, "I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them." I know without a doubt in my mind that what He says there is true. As I've put my trust in the Lord he has made me into a person who is positive and happy regardless of outside circumstances, and he can do the same for you with any and all weaknesses you may struggle with. It's not an overnight experience, but if you keep at it and work with Christ's help, all things are possible through Him.

I love you all, keep fighting the good fight!

-Elder Clark

Also, here's some pictures. One is Elder Wasden's chair after I decided to take it apart while he was in the bedroom reading True to the Faith, and the other one is from Wednesday. No one was answering their doors so I decided to give a Book of Mormon to a very receptive looking statue.

Rain

Tell the Richins thank you so much, I'm so grateful for everyone that's helped pay for my mission. I kind of wish I had done something to pay for some of it myself, but I'm glad I have so many friends and family supporting me. I actually haven't got the rain jacket yet, it's been warm enough my sweater has been plenty though. I just haven't found one I like that doesn't have a logo on it and is mission approved. That's all I have as far as introduction to this email, so I'll just go right into it.

On Wednesday we had something kind of funny happened. I walked up and knocked on this door with a big open window, and after a few seconds this woman walked past and turned and saw me and Elder Wasden standing there. She was super startled and jumped way back, then came back and opened the door. She told us that she hadn't heard us knock, and we apologized for scaring her. We started to talk to her when her two year old son came running up behind her wearing no clothes. She looked super flustered and told us that it really wasn't a good time. So I asked if there would be another time that would be better and she told us to come back in an hour or two. I'm pretty sure she only invited us back because she was so flustered by the situation, but we were able to come back after dinner and share the whole restoration, it was really great. 

On Saturday we rode down in the morning to help a woman clear a bunch of stuff out of her apartment. We got to the apartment and I locked up our bikes and realized that I had left the key to the bike lock back at our apartment. So after we finished the service we spent most of our morning walking to get our bikes unlocked. The evening went really well though, we were able to find get in contact with an investigator who fell of the face of the earth for a while, and he's still really interested, he's just been pretty busy lately. We have his phone number, so hopefully we'll be able to set up a lesson soon. 

Back on P-day last week there was this butter pecan cake mix in the clearance rack at Target for 74 cents, so naturally I bought one. On Thursday I made it and frosted it with whip cream and caramel sauce, and it was basically the greatest thing ever. So today when we went grocery shopping I went right to the baking aisle to see if they had more that was still on sale. They did, so I bought four packages of cake mix and another tub of whip cream for less than five dollars. Mission life is pretty great. 😉 

Today it's raining!! It's so wonderful, I love the rain so much. It's the first time it's rained during the day since I came out on my mission, and it's just made me super happy today. I hope all of you are having happy days too!! Love you guys!

-Elder Clark

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

This week was super slow to be honest. Elder Wasden has been feeling sick for the past couple of weeks, so Tuesday night we called the mission nurse and she had us go to the instacare Wednesday morning to get him checked out. She prescribed him some medicine and told him not to ride his bike in the cold for the next two or three days, so we had to go back to our apartment early for that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, then the whole mission had to go in early on Sunday since it was New Years Eve. So, between all that and the fact that a lot of people were out of town for the holidays we didn't have much success this week. We had one appointment get rescheduled for next week because our investigators went to a Christmas party instead and we knocked on a lot of doors and had a lot of people tell us they didn't want to talk to us. There were a few funny things that happened throughout the week though, so I'll write about those. The first one happened while we were knocking doors in a wealthier part of our area. We were walking away from two or three houses in a row where nobody answered the door when we saw two door to door salespeople holding clipboards and wearing red shirts. They went right past us and started knocking on the doors we had just barely knocked on. I thought about telling them there was no one home, but I decided to wait and watch instead, and all three of the people that didn't answer for us opened the door for the two ladies selling things! I wish I knew what they were doing that we weren't doing cuz we could totally add it to our approach and get some more people talking to us. It was probably the clipboards, clipboards always look super professional. 😉 

In other news, I forgot how to ride a bicycle this week. About two weeks ago one of the missionaries in the other bike areas crashed pretty bad and they've been in a car since then. I jokingly told my companion one of us should wreck our bike so we could get a car. We thought I was joking, then I ran into things not once, not twice, but three times in the past five days. The first time we were riding down this sidewalk where there was a wall on one side and telephone poles on the other side. Between the two there was enough room for my bike to pass through with about an inch or two on either side. I made it past three or four of the poles just fine, and I don't know if I was getting too confident or if I'm just not good at riding my bike, but my left handlbar clipped the telephone pole and turned me so that I ran into the wall on my right. I cut my thumb a little, but other than that I was fine. The second one I was riding on the bike trail and looking at a funny looking duck in the water to my right. When I looked back there was a pole right in front of me, so I swerved and clipped my ankle on it and pulled off to the side of the road. I blame you for that one dad. 😉 The third time was the next day, and I was riding a lot slower than I had been because it hurt to pedal too hard with my ankle. There was a family walking in front of us, so we dropped off the sidewalk and onto the road. After we passed the people I went to get back on the sidewalk, but I didn't have enough momentum since I wasn't pedaling very hard, so my back tire just caught on the curb and before I knew it I was laying on the ground. That one didn't even hurt that much, I just skinned my knee a little. It was mostly just embarrassing because I crashed right in front of the family I was trying to go around. Despite all of those efforts my bike's doing okay and I'm doing okay though, so I'll have to try a little harder if I want to get us a car. 😉

I took a video of Elder Wasden and I celebrating New Years, but my tablet says it's too big to send. Basically we twisted up some water bottles and launched the lids off at 10 pm because it was midnight somewhere. We also made an oreo pie, so here's the pie eating picture Britney asked for a month and a half ago.

That's all for this week.  Love you all!

-Elder Clark