We must depart from the regularly scheduled programing where I tell you about useless stuff that's, at best, tangentially related to my week, as this week's events actually deserves relating. (I think that sentence was a chiasmus, guys. I should get in to greek poetry.) All in all I'd say its easily been the craziest week of my mission.
The Journey.
Speaking of departing from regularly scheduled programing, I got 3 NEW COMPANIONS THIS WEEK!! I get transfered for real for real next week, but sometimes they decide to give you a fun surprise and transfer you early. This fun surprise is called an "emergency transfer" which is a really exciting name for a relatively mundane activity, that involves a dissapointingly small amount of amount of running around and screaming. Obviously the running around and screaming is what makes most emergencies so fun, so I was underwhelmed by my first emergency transfer. 3/5 star emergency rating. (The more stars something has the more emergency-efficient it is.)
Basically it all began when I was with a little Indonesian Elder named Elder Andika. I call him little, not as a knock against his charachter, just as a frantic way to claw back my pride and pass on the suffering with which I've been afflicted. (He's the only Elder in the mission that's shorter than me.) Anyway he's a sweet guy who's been out only a couple transfers longer than I have. I was on exchanges with him and my real companion was off with Andika's companion. (If you're already confused, I have some bad news for you. It's all about to go "A Mid Summer Night's Dream.") So there we were just doing the work of the Lord, when Preisdent calls us.
"Are you with Elder Nielson?" He asked Elder Andika. He asked in his scary, deep, Australian voice, and Andika imidiatetly confirmed he was with me.
"Who authorized this exchange?"
So I didn't know this at the time, but certian exchanges need to be authorized by president or his assistants, and aperently this exchange wasn't properly authorized and thus was against alllllllllll the rules.
Andika said my real companion had promised us that he'd gotten permission, but apparently there's little evidence suggesting proper permission was obtained. So to our great surprise, we were told that this unauthorized exchange was authorized now! Furthermore, this unauthorized exchange wasn't going to end after the usual 24 hours, but instead it would end next week at the end of the transfer! (Since my real companion isn’t coming back to me ever. Apparently there were a lot of untold things transpiring with him and his other companion. He's a great guy though!)
Now stay with me, brothers and sisters, because if you didn't follow that part you won't follow this next part. Feel free to go re-read the last few paragraphs if you want to make sure you've got the facts down.
So I'm with my new Indonesian companion, and we head back to our flat, and my new companion is having a really hard time. We're both a little befuddled by recent happenings too. But luckily Sister Mackie, (the Mission President's wife) comes to help clear things up. She also came to inspect if our flat was clean, which it wasn't, but not for lack of (my) effort. She was super kind to me and pulled me aside to tell me President isn't mad at me and he knows I've been doing my best.
So we would have gone out again to do the work of the Lord, but Elder Andika (my new companion) did not wanna go out. He was feeling sick and lots of other things too. So we did another mini exchange, this time with my friend from the MTC, Elder Hafner. He and I are both in training, but we make a bit of a dream team cause we just wanna work. We got a lot done in the hour we were together. But then I returned to my sick companion Elder Andika. The next morning he didn't even want to get out of bed because of how he was feeling, so I went back to my favorite passtime which is listening to saints and cleaning the flat. The mission groupchat then demanded a bereal from us, and so I sent a picture of my cleaning. To everyone's surprise, President replied directly to my messege with just three words.
"About to change."
So that was vaugely ominous.
My Mission President actually has a habit of being vaugely ominous which might be why everyone is scared of him. Or it might be because he's really tall and sometimes calls other poor missionaries "small." But anyway last week he sent me an email with some kind words, and acompanying them was the warning (if it was a warning) "More change is coming next week. Get ready for the new news." He didn't tell me how I was supposed to "get ready," if it was a physical preparation or a spiritual one, so I'm a little nervous about what this "new news" might be. Maybe he had a preminition about this emergency transfer situation, who knows. (Final destination style?)
I'm sure yous are on the edge of your seats to hear how my wending journey proceeded, so I shall comence with my tale. President moved me again, to spend the rest of the transfer with my DL and his companion, so we're in a trio now and I have to say we're a powerful trio. One of the Elders is about to go home so he has lots of good expirience, one of the elders is a DL and pretty smart, and one of the Elders is new but also me so that adds up to us being a companionship equiped with every skill under the sun. (Except whittling. None of us know how to whittle away our time, on acount of us being so locked in.)
The only problem is that I had a bunch of lessons and apointments in my area that I wanted to get to this week, but now I'm not asigned to the area so I'm not allowed to go visit or serve any of those people. I called the office Elders to see if I could be assigned to both areas, but they were somehow both as frusterating and as unhelpful as every other customer-support type person I've called. Apple should hire these missionaries the way they don't even try to solve problems, instead settling for insincere apologies and patronizing tautologies.
"It is what it is, Elder Nielson."
"What a stunningly verbose way to say absolutely nothing, Office Elder."*
My District Leader was very kind and patient with them, which added to my anoyance, but I still hope to be like him someday.
Shout out to the late Elder Grant and Elder Henage who were probably great office elders.
*The church is still true.
CRAZY PEOPLE!!
We met soooo many crazy people this week and I love them so much. Words cannot describe how much I love talking to people who are crazy. We had one day where like three different drunk guys came over to talk to us about how much they love Jesus, which is awesome cause Jesus loves them too! (He probably even loves them almost as much as I do.)
One guy who we visited is in the process of copying every song (ever probably) into his personal digital database. Which in and of itself is not that crazy, except he does it full time for hours and hours a day and never leaves his house. He was so much fun to talk to. What's more, the other members we visited that day had opinions about him. None of those opinions seemed particularly logical or well-formed, but they were certianly strong! So before I even knew it I was drawn into all this ward gossip, hearing all these strange stories from different persepctives, and it was just the best. They were all probably unreliable narrators which is my favorite kind of narrator, and the whole thing was a story-teller's dream. Interesting stories all around.
One of the crazy guys also tried to follow us home but he's no match for the holy Spirit (and the local gangs) that are protecting us.
ALSO MIKE WENT TO CHURCH AGAIN!! Which is good because he's my favorite cause he's so grumpy. So now we don't have to stop teaching him! He went to the wrong ward though, which sometimes happens, and was confused when everyone spoke Tagolog. Overall still a win.
We visited one member who started ranting about AI. And I always love a good AI rant, but his was especially fun because of the positive light it painted AI in. He told us how he used AI to produce music online and people were mad about it but that was just like how people were mad about the printing press. "People just get mad about everything," he told me. "They just hate progress." As someone who gets mad about everything, and hates progress, I agree. He also told us about an alogrithm he'd created for one of his songs, but it was too complicated to explain to us. He then spent the next few minutes explaining it to us anyway, and I don't remember exactly how it went, but it was something like "Corporations are chasing the statisics, and not what the statistics represent," or something along those lines. He accused us of chasing statistics too on our missions, which was relatable because missions are all about the numbers. I wasn't quite sure how his theory constituted an "algorithm" but that's for his music-creating AI to figure out.
Blessings:
You may not know this, but I'm really good at almost everything. Especially daily planning though, I cook up some fire plans for the days. Problem is, God keeps trying to humble me. Made worse by the fact that it's working, and I am more humble now.
We went out with a member from our ward named brother Parsons (not like on a date, just like to do missionary work) and despite having planned the whole day he took us to some inactive members and families who he thought needed visits, and almost every visit we made was a miracle. We went in to help one elderly gentleman who'd gotten stuck (you don't need more details, I promise) just a few minutes earlier. We visited a family that really needed us, and who usually wasn't home, and talked to some really cool members and invited them to our activity. My daily plan was good, but God had other plans, and he got us to all the places he wanted us to be. All to say God's way is better than Abe's way.
We knocked on someone's door, and to our surprise they were literally already doing a Bible study, and so me and my two new companions taught them about the Restoration. Elder Talmage is our senior companion, who's been here almost 2 years, and he's so good at teaching. It was a crazy thing to watch. Also he used magic and a Book of Mormon pass along card to build a tower of cups, which was both relevant to the discussion and vaguely defiant to the law's of physics. And when he removed the bottom cup (Jesus Christ) THE TOWER DIDN'T FALL because of the book of mormon pass along card which is a testimony to the power of pass along cards.
Distressng Realizations:
1. They have daylight savings here, which is about to disrupt my internal Utah to New Zealand time converter and I'm terrified of the ramifications of this disruption.
2. My new flat has 2 bathrooms, one of which may be haunted. I make a point to always use the haunted one, but distressing part is that it's only haunted at 3 AM and missionaries are required to be sleeping at that hour.
3. If Satan really wanted to ruin God's plan, he could stop providing "oposition in all things" and then with no temptation everyone would choose God. (Which is a bad thing cause they wouldn't have free will when they did so, which was Satan's plan from the start.) Don't any of you go telling him this though.
4. It is what it is. (Never a fun thing to realize, I hate when that's what it is.)
5. This email is long, and thus will not contain any stats.
6. There's probably a thousand things I'm forgetting to tell you, but I'm tryina golf with Ben so I'ma need you to get allllllllll the way off my back about it.
7. My love for you knows no bounds! Byeeeeeeeeeee
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