Letter #26

 

Gig Harbor is pretty much the opposite of Tacoma.  My new apartment is right on the edge of Gig Harbor, so when I look out my back window, I see a line of yachts.  And there aren't really streets to tract around here.  Mostly you just forage through a blackberry jungle until you run into a group of mailboxes, and then look for houses around them.  People live super spread out for the most part, unless they are in a gated community, which we aren't allowed to tract.  Last night we were in one of those for dinner.  I guess it's one of the nicer ones in the ward, because there is a golf course in the middle, and a security guard on duty 24-hours a day.  And it was just really funny being there, because I was thinking the entire time about how the week before, I was eating dinner with members in the slums of our mission.  And probably the biggest difference about here is that people here actually have jobs and work during the day... In Tacoma, so many people were living off SSI, and you could give out lessons like candy at any time of the day. Here, the afternoons are super slow, because everyone is out at their jobs....  And so it is way different here.  There are so many normal people that I don't even know what to do.  I can't handle them.  But I mean, there are some nice things.  It is really pretty out here.  And you don't hear gunfire out of your window at night.

So on Saturday, I got permission from President Weaver to come back to Tacoma for Francis' baptism.  He asked me to do it, so that was really cool.  We got kinda a late start on it, because we were expecting the first councilor in the bishopric to show up, and then he didn't, and he wouldn't answer his phone, so we ended up just starting without him.  So while we were waiting, Francis called me into the other room with him, and asked me to pray with him.  So I said a prayer with him, and he said a prayer afterward, and it was a really sweet thing.  And so we actually got started, and I took him down into the water, and bring him up, but he's not helping me out at all, so I have to pull him up myself, which is always on the awkward side.  And when I get him out of the water, he's sobbing.  Loudly.  He's just standing there in the water, howling.  And I was standing there with him, and I didn't know what to do.  And eventually, Sister Copeland says, "Well give him a hug!"  So I sorta did that, but that was pretty awkward too.  And then the witnesses finally just closed the doors to the font, and so I led  Francis back out to the dressing room.  And so we get dressed and make it back, and everyone is crying.  And then we have our talk on the gift of the Holy Ghost, and everyone cries some more.  And then we have a closing prayer, and then a closing song (Yes, it was as awkward as it sounds.  Funny how set in our patterns we get.), and then everyone went to talk to Francis one-on-one, and everyone cried some more.  So it was a pretty eventful baptism, I guess.  And then we had to go back to regular missionary work after all of that.  So we got back to Gig Harbor and did our 5-7s, which President Weaver has been pretty strict about lately.  And so I haven't been too excited about them, because apparently the missionary who I replaced here said that he tracted the entire area in the last 3 months.  So we were knocking this street that was actually pretty busy, and we got a ton of honks and shouts and everything, and there weren't many houses to knock on it, but we decided to knock it anyway.  And we knocked on this one house, and the only person there was an 18-year-old kid who just graduated high school.  He was the only one home, but he let us in and let us talk to him.  He said that he did a little 1 week mission thing in Mexico with a Lutheran church in the area about 3 weeks ago, and that  before that, he wasn't super interested in religion, and that before that, he probably wouldn't have even let us in, but since then, he had been thinking about it a lot.  Also, he said that his grandma was a member, so some of the things we were saying sounded familiar from when he was a kid and talked to her a ton about that stuff.  Also, he knew someone in our ward who just barely left on a mission to Brazil.  So he was pretty prepared to listen to the Restoration.  And my comp wasn't used to getting lessons while tracting, so he was a little over-excited (like Elder Calhoon teaching the resto from The Best Two Years) about the whole thing, but it went over really well.  After that, we went to a dinner appointment, and one of the kids there was friends with the younger brother of the guy we talked to, and he said that the guy we taught wasn't even supposed to be home at that time, because he was supposed to be doing something with his family, but that he went home because he had just gotten his wisdom teeth out, and he didn't feel that well.  So that was a really cool teaching experience that we had this last week.  He is going to go on a church tour this next week, so we're pretty excited for us.