I told many of you that I may not send this email this week, and even as I write it I don't know if I'll have time to finish it. So if you're reading this next week... I hope you thought I removed you from my list out of petty spite. If you're reading this this week, just know there's always a possibility I'll still remove you if you don't send me lots of emails and pay my platypus 1-3 compliments.
There's a member family here named the Kirby's, and they take good care of us missionaries. They were responsible for us eating dinner on at least 3 separate occasions this week, despite my best efforts to never have a dinner plan. (My companion keeps track of if someone is gonna host us, but he never tells me so it's always a fun surprise when he's like "we get dinner tonight!" It makes me feel like a child who minded his manners and is getting rewarded with supper.) Sometimes though, even when we don't have dinner scheduled, the Kerby's see us by the side of the road and snatch us up to take us to Costco and get us hotdogs, or just take us home for dinner. One time they even packed us some pasta to take home and eat. They gave us some cheesy garlic bread too which was an expirience that reached a "green sweater" level of excellence. Brother Kerby is a super nerdy art guy, who talks a lot. Which is super nice especially when I'm tired, cause he's fun to listen to and he doesn't make me contribute to the conversation. He's also probably the whitest guy in this whole ward, and it's cause hes from Canada. He's kinda short, and always pushing up his glasses as he talks about working on video games and being credited in the second Avatar movie. His wife is Polynesian though, and she's so different from him, but they make a good pair. She's a lot quieter and has a stern attitude that makes me fear her chastisment, though luckily I've managed to stay on her good side.
***Another person that wasn't a member talked to me this week!!!!***
He was a Maori guy who was prooooooobably homeless, and I met him at a bus stop. Not for long though, he had some big ideas that might just fix the world.
Idea 1: give everyone in the world 2 million dollars and teach them how to use that money to never be poor again. He called this "giving them back thier freewill." I can think of no problems with this idea.
Idea 2: bring back the titens. For those ignorant among you, who don't know what those are, I'll bore the rest of us with an obvious definition that you would know if you'd paid any attention in school. The Titens were big trees that used to grow that were tall enough to touch the top of the dome and let more fresh air in. That's why the air was more fresh in "those days."
He also told me about how "global warming" is code for "indigenous peoples" and so when the governments say they're trying to get rid of global warming they're actually trying to rid the world of indigenous peoples. All so they can greedily become indigenous themselves. (I'm not quite sure how that works considering the current definition of indigenous, but I trust he's got it figured out. I'm probably just confused because "they like to keep us confused cause it robs us of freewill.") This guy told me that he argued with AI sometimes and was so smart that he "tricked" it into admitting he was right about everything he said.
I talked to him for a good 45 minutes at the bus stop, until I finally gave my companion a panicked look that pled for him to save me. This was right after the guy started confessing to murders and telling me that Satan was his alter ego, so I figured it was time to go. Luckily my companion read my face and made an excuse about an appointment we had to get to, and apologized for "dragging me away." Kinda ironic that the first guy I meet here who believes we don't have freewill had to be this guy, but it's okay he'll forever live on in my heart as the only one who knows the "truth." Even AI can't deny it, and we all know how good AI is at telling people what they don't want to hear.
I had supposed not to have written more, but I have not as yet perished; and I make not myself known to the Lamanites lest they should destroy me. Wherefore, I write a few more things, contrary to that which I had supposed; for I had supposed not to have written any more; but I write a few more things.
It rained almost every day this week, and in NZ in rains HARD. I love it. I come back soaked sometimes, and I feel great cause I know I'm soaked for Christ! I'm generally pretty waterproof but unfortunately my backpack is less so. I was walking through the pouring rain one of the days, when I'd forgotten to bring my umbrella, and I couldn't do anything to save my poor bag which contained important notebooks, scriptures, my excessively marked copy of PMG, and a deck of playing cards. As I walked I prayed quietly that nothing I needed would be ruined, and resolved not to be too sad to lose a partially filled journal or a copy of PMG. After all, the lessons I'm learning are the thing with value, my notes are just am example of that. When I got home I opened my bag and both the inside and outside were soaked, but every notebook and copy of scriptures inside was dry! The only thing that was ruined was my deck of cards which had been nestled between two dry notebooks. God might've been trying to teach me something there, but I'm greatful to have my notebooks either way.
I ran in our backyard field one of the mornings, and due to the excessive rain it was covered with mud. The mud splashed all over me and my shoes, which was kinda fun cause then I was covered in mud. I hosed off my shoes after, and improvised a Boot Dryer to restore them to thier proper state. I didn't yet have 2 boot dryers at that point, I just had 1 and it didn't work. But I used its stand to put my shoes on, and put that stand on my room's heater, which worked pretty well. Now though I'll just use my working boot dryer, which was shipped to Zone Conference in a box that was surely big enough to fit a small Malachi. Everyone gave me awe filled looks as I dragged my large box out to the car. There was envy in thier eyes, as they wished they had a family kind enough to send them oversized boxes. (A clear violation of the 10th comandment if I'm being honest.) If the rest of you wanna pull your weight a little and do your part to inspire envy in other missionaries, you should send me mail. Address of mission home below.
9 Taharoto Road, Takapuna, Auckland 0622, New Zealand
I did a 24 hour exchange with the ZL in my mission, and he was super cool, and well motivated, but most importantly he played Catan with me. To this day I've never played a full game of Catan, cause it's a dumb game, but people always look down on me when I admit that I, a true board gamer, don't know how to play Catan. So anyway I just don't tell people that I don't know how to play. I just put my settlement down and everyone's like "...that's an interesting choice." To which I nod sagely and reply "I know what I'm doing. I like to go for the uncontested strategies." So yeah I won't despite never having the rules explained to me. Luckily it's pretty simple. And to be clear we didn't technically finish we just had to call it quits because 10:30 rolled around, and that's the universal bedtime of effective missionaries. (Which I surely am.)No Q and A today as E. Whitchurch already answered all the questions.
Pushups: between 4500 and 5000 I'll check when I get home.
Miles run: 30 (sorry I gotta lock in.)
Radioactive cookie points (in order of radioactivity):
- Caleb Brown: 3.9 Milironkins. (you put way more thought into this than I did. Loved the insight.)
- Lincoln Henage: 1 Milironkin
- Daisy: 1 Milironkin
Overall not great, but not terrible.
Okay I'm gonna rant for a second, but this part is barely important so you can skip it if you don't have blades and hang from the ceiling and spin. (If you're not a real fan.)
They KEEP saying that the mission is not about the numbers, but they WILL NOT SHUT UP about the numbers. "Today we're going to asign a point value to everything you do as a missionary. Whoever ends eith the highest arbitrary number of points wins!! But be sure not to forget, dear missionaries, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE NUMBERS!" I'm so annoyed every time. And if you aren't getting baptisms the zone leaders are all "let's set some goals to get your numbers up." Fine if the mission is gonna be about the numbers that's okay but quit pretending it's not. Furthermore they keep telling us (numerical) statistics about how much more likely someone is to join the church if they come to sacriment meeting week 1 which is a fine goal but they gotta stop pretending that it's causal. If my political science class taught me one thing it's that correlation is not causation, and it seems VERY likely that sacriment attendance and baptisms have a spurious relationship, e.g. they're both caused by some third factor (spirituality? Willingness to inconvenience oneself for something you belive in? Devotion? Curiosity? Etc.) that would cause those that are already more likely to join the church to also attend sacriment meeting the first week. I don't get how they would be even using statistics like this much less at EVERY MEETING without considering what I'm yapping about here. Am I missing something crazy? Did my stats teachings lie to me? Feel free to let me know.
Sorry I'm grumpy today, I think I woke up on the right side of the bed. (Which is wrong here cause it's the other side of the world obvi.)
Anyway have a good week, all of you who're real fans and read this far. As for the rest of you, may your mayonnaise forever taste microwaved, you loafs.
♡,
Malachi
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