Heyyy everyone!! I hope you have had a solid week just like I have :D Sorry for the the weak email last week but here we are now. My companions are awesome! I am here with Elder Kentner from Fort Worth Texas, and Elder Burningham from Provo!! We have had a super fun week and have been grinding. We are covering two wards and have plenty of work to do, so it is just a party. I am coming up on 1 year as a missionary in the next couple of days!
On Tuesday we met with this Part Member family. The dad of the family, Chris, isn't a member but has been meeting with missionaries for awhile now. He has been getting super busy with his family, school, and work but said that he is all in right now, so we taught him the Restoration and put him on baptismal date for July 3rd! He is super prepared and we are excited for him. Shout out to the Spirit and the missionaries before us for getting him to that point. It is a little sad I won't be there for it, but it is all the Lord's work.
On Wednesday or Thursday we were in this one neighborhood, stopping by a few people. We knocked on this one door and this man came to us. He looked at us for a moment and then started calling us bigots. We tried talking to him but he kept coming back with the fact that we were bigots. He said that because we believe in something, that made us a bigot. I asked him what he believes in and he said, "I don't believe, I think." Haha, so that was weird and apparently I am now a bigot. Nice. But like come on, deep down everyone believes in something or at least thinks a lot more deeply about some things than others. I don't even know but I do know that my belief in Jesus Christ has brought me more joy than anything else in life. Some people are missing out.
Friday was a pretty awesome day as well. Earlier in the week I had taken a look at our map and noticed that we have part of a canyon in our area, so of course I thought it would be a good idea to go up there and knock on some people's doors (even though our mission isn't really doing full tracting yet). We found this dude named Juan who said he would want to hear more from us, so Friday was the day we decided to go back. There was a language barrier so we decided to bring one of the Elders who speaks Spanish in our district with us. We got up there and didn't find Juan but talked to his grandma, and I got to sit there and smile as Elder Tuttle taught her in Spanish. We decided to keep knocking on the surrounding doors. Not too much luck but it was nice to be out in some nature. We got to this one door and my companion knocked on it. After a second I proclaimed," I'm pretty sure we just tracted a shed." And that we did. Not too much luck there either, haha.
Saturday was one for the books. We did some service for this super awesome lady that we are teaching named Debra. Then we went to Brian's baptism in the Laguna Niguel zone. Throwing it back to Christmas day (about 6 months ago) I was in Aliso Viejo. We were out visiting a member and on our way back to the car we saw this dude walking two big dogs. At that point, because of local Covid restrictions, we weren't supposed to approach anyone on the streets to do street contacting. I decided to talk to this guy anyway. Turns out his name was Brian and he said he was interested in learning more. Fast forward to now, Brian has been taught by a couple of companionships of Elders and is in the Addiction Recovery Program. Brian has overcame many addictions and many trials and was baptized on Saturday. The Atonement of Jesus Christ is REAL. He can change us, and he truly has descended below all things.
Love, Elder Shockley
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