Sunday, August 11, 2013

July 13, 2013

Hi,
Sorry this week the email will be a little short, I took some time to respond to Dad's email. 
Yes, transfers were this week. We had some Elders finish and go home. It is always interesting to send Elders home, to see how they act in their last few hours. This time I even got to be with them right to the end, we got to help take them to the airport. Then it took us 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot (this is an airport with only one runway.)

We should be going back up to three in the office in a week or two because there is a new Elder coming in soon. But we don't know who it will be (in the office).

We are sort of seeing an increase. Our problem is that we have a lot of missionaries going home soon. This next transfer, 12 missionaries go home. So our numbers get a little screwy with that. But overall, yes it is increasing. We found out this last week though that we are really supposed to have 6 senior couples in the mission... and we have 2 for the moment, 3 in September when Elder and Sister Christensen arrive (and I remind blog readers, that's no relation to me).

Teaching is generally going well. This last week was hard with the missionaries going home and some other problems that came up, but overall we do pretty well. This week we fixed a baptism date for a mother and daughter we have been teaching for a while now, the problem is they are so busy that I'm not sure if we will have time to teach them everything. And obviously we can't baptize them if there is still stuff to learn. 

Haha, yeah definitely don't send any tuna. It's way cheaper for me to just buy it here. If you want to send a cheap CD player that would be fine, I miss being able to listen to hymns as I clean and do laundry. 

As far as college goes, I still don't have a lot of info to make a perfectly informed choice. I actually don't know about my BYU scholarship, but I think I'm okay there. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about my New Century scholarship, I wrote dad a couple of weeks ago about that problem. For the moment I'm thinking I'll do winter semester, but the absolute earliest I could be home would be January 1 (and more realistically it's Jan. 3-4). I don't know about that turn-around. Your thoughts?

Oh yeah, tell Aunt Sally I got her card.

I recently read Alma 60-61. It's where Captain Moroni writes to Pahoran telling him to shape up or Moroni will come to shape him up. Then Pahoran says "not my fault, please come help!" As I was reading this, All I could think of was "this is pretty much exactly my relationship with Accra." It was funny as I was reading Moroni's letter, but a reminder against judging as I read Pahoran's response. I had some other experiences this week also where I misjudged people, usually due to things I had heard about them. It taught me that I still need to be more charitable, and always try to assume that people are good-natured. Most people really aren't trying to do things badly, they just make mistakes. We need to treat them thusly. 

This week we had a very interesting lesson. The church this man goes to teaches that baptism isn't necessary. Apparently baptism by water was only important for Jesus. He had so many other weird ideas, it was astounding. Of course, I met a man once who thinks that AIDS is just a glitch that some humans have because their hardware (body) isn't powerful enough to run the software (spirit, which apparently got upgraded recently in the last 50 years or so).

Oh yeah, my weight is still holding steady at about 140. I think it will stay there until I leave the office, then it might go down a little more.

I had a really cool thought about obedience, but I don't have time to type it out. Darn. Just know that I figured out this week some of the ways that I have been blessed in my mission for trying to be obedient (note: I am not a perfectly obedient missionary. But I do try. I feel pretty good, but I do still have room to improve).

Flat Elder Ethan Christensen and Flat Elder Jacob Christensen at the Hill Cumorah Pageant

Love you all, have a great last week at pageant!
Elder Christensen

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