The Week of Unexpected Detours

Hello Everybody!

        Very weird week this week.   Many random things
just popped up over and over again.  We weren't able to spend
as much time out proselyting as we would have liked to. Here are just a few
of the random things that came up this week, as given in a poem...

             I'm Confused

We're both out knocking doors,
Helping people come to Christ,
Biking - oh no! There's a bump!
Then this bike tire gets sliced.

Trying to plan for next week,
About to get finished up,
Ring, ring! An unexpected call!
Surprise meeting with Bishop.

We're on our way to dinner now,
Excited after a long day,
But nope! Off to help an old lady,
Into the mud her car had been swept away.

It's been a pretty crazy week,
We haven't done what we'd planned,
But whatever! We just keep smiling!
We know it's all in God's hands.

        Yes, many weird things this week... But the highlight was Darrell's
baptism on Saturday!!! We'd been talking to him since the very
beginning of when I came to Fort Caroline, about 4 months ago, and
there were times when we were convinced that he'd just never be
baptized. But he's changed so much and come such a long way - watching
his conversion has changed me as a person. So it was special to watch
him be baptized.

        The other picture is another surprise event - a sister tells us that
she is moving (this was Tuesday afternoon) and asked us to take the
food from her pantry and keep it! So we took it all and tried to fit
it in the car. This is the result. No cans or bones were broken in the
process.

  This past weeks district meeting was the best one yet, but I tend to get nervous the mornings before.  I LOVE GIVING TRAININGS SO MUCH. I love it not because I love talking and unfolding scriptures to people (even though that's fun) but I love getting people to receiving revelation as they speak. I love picking the right people to share their feelings and impressions, I love coming into a
training with a goal and then having the district get there without me even doing anything. 

   This past week I trained on Charity and the importance of loving our companions. This week I'm training on the importance of helping our investigators understand the concept of "remission of sins". Nobody in the south understands what a "remission of sins" is. They think that it's "1 cross + 3 nails =4given" (a bumper sticker that we saw a few days back.) Not even the right number of nails.... Try again....

    Why do they need a remission of sins? So they can "stand in the presence of God"! That's the role of everything we teach! I feel like our mission talks about the doctrine of Christ really well, but we tend not to understand why we're teaching it - so that our investigators know how they can be truly forgiven of sins.

Here's our sweaty district today.

        Love you all!!! Have a great week!

                        Elder McMullin

Poetry and Ice Cream Sandwiches

Hello Everybody!!!

This week was a fun week. I had the chance to go on a trade-off with one of the members of our district, Elder Antares, and it was a super fun day! So here's a short bio about him because he's an interesting guy. We'll just say that.

 - Loves Lord of the Rings and watched all three movies + all three part of The Hobbit consecutively. 21 hours straight and he didn't fall asleep. Respect. 

 - He's from Pleasant Grove Utah. Ironically, the same city that his companion is from. Did they know each other? Nope. 

 - He likes Banana Pudding.

 - He went through Basic Training this last summer in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

 - While there, he sold cough drops and peanut butter for ridiculous prices and made over $500 by doing so. 

 - He looks kind of like my favorite tennis player, Roger Federer. Maybe it's just the nose. You decide.

Elder Antares 

Federer

     Anyway, we went out and spent some time looking for less active members of our congregation and we were biking. We got sworn at/yelled at/the usual while we were biking, but it was all worth it because one of the people we visited gave us ice cream sandwiches. The point of this story is - if two Mormon missionaries ever knock on your door, give them ice cream sandwiches.

     Just kidding, that's not the point. The point is, it's relieving a lot of the time to see how many amazing, good people there are here in Florida! We talk to so many grumpy, mad people that it's hard to keep a positive attitude while we're looking for people to teach. But there are lots of them. "Count your many blessings, name them one by one, soon it will surprise you what the Lord has done."

Also, at the subtle prompt of my mother, who feels that my blog posts lack artistic talent (she's right), I'm going to start writing a poem at the end of each. In honor of how we spent about 3 hours a day last week, this poem is entitled "Knocking Doors".

We walk around the city,

We knock on many doors.

Sometimes we're all giddy,

Sometimes we're all snores. 

Sometimes we walk in silence,

Sometimes we laugh nonstop,

We are faced by much violence,

We are gifted some soda pop. 

Why are we out here knocking?

Why do we scour the streets?

What is it that keeps us walking?

What keeps us out in this heat?

It's the Gospel of Jesus Christ,

The desire to share what we know.

Because from the tomb He rised,

The way to true joy we can show.

   So I took about 5 minutes and wrote this because I don't have any time on Mondays... so save critiques for when I'm home in two years. Also, here's a kind of basic picture of me and a nice sunset. Florida has really pretty sunsets, even if it is crazy humid and hot. 

Love you all, and have a great week!

Elder McMullin

Itemized Rejections and Various Pictures

Hello everybody!

        This week was good - the work is a little slow right now and we don't have a lot of people to teach, so we are spending all of our time trying to find people. It's hard and the days are long, but I always feel like days spent out finding are the most productive and I'm happiest during days when we're out working hard talking to people. 

        So we counted the rejections that we got, offering to show people a video about Jesus Christ, and here are the top three rejections this week... Leading the list at number one is "I've already been saved", which we heard 11 times. Closely following is "I already know Jesus", at 9 instances. Then the basic "I'm busy" coming in at 8. I think that it's funny that people who love Jesus don't want to watch a video about Him. Funny! Maybe that's just bad, and I'm weird. But everybody already knows that. 

And now for pictures from this week:

        Here is a picture of me one night last week. We'd been out working all day and may/may not have just drank about 75 ounces of water within one minute. Maybe I am smiling, but the only thing going through my mind was "why did I just do that?" 

   Here are all of us with Brother Hernandez.  He's in the navy and he comes out teaching with us a bunch. He's really great and he's leaving this week. All the missionaries will miss him!!!

   Here's us on p-day!   (Preparation Day, where we take a break, have fun, go shopping, etc.)   We usually meet up with a bunch of other missionaries at the church to play basketball while we type our letters home.   I'm slowly growing a love for basketball.. hahaha.

Love you all! Have a great week!!!

         Elder McMullin

Easter Weekend Pictures

Hello everybody!

    I don't have much time this week so I'll just share an experience I had at church. The program was musical numbers and then scriptures mingled together. I played a solo piece at the beginning and it went well, then there were powerful musical numbers after. I felt the Spirit so strongly.  It really hit me.   "He is not here, for he is risen."    (Some of my favorite words in scripture, when they come and try to see Christ in the tomb.)

Here are some pictures:

Easter Party at the church

Here's us at the members' who fed us at night. We had super tasty food and they gave us TONS of food.

As close as we can get to the beach! It's so pretty... I love the ocean. The breeze is so refreshing and it's just awe inspiring to watch the waves. This was on Preparation Day and my vote was to stay there and just stare for 8 hours, but nobody else wanted to....

New Companion / Baptismal Service

Hello Everybody!

So yeah, I was transferred! Surprise! I'm now in the same ward but in a different area - since our "wards" (basically congregations) are geographic, so you go to a certain church building if you live in a certain area, my old area was the west half and now my area is the east half. So I packed everything up and moved a stunning 2.6 miles to be with Elder Wilson!

Bio of Elder Wilson, my new companion. He is from Ririe, Idaho, a stunning town of about 650 people, or so I hear from him. At home, he spent a lot of time doing video editing and splicing and went to a number of national competitions with a high school team for developing and editing video. He's a really good teacher, confident speaker, and likes bubbles. See below picture. 

We had a baptism on Saturday and it was amazing!!! It was for a girl named Danielle, who has extended family who are church members but no immediate family. She had been exploring Mormon.org for a few weeks and finally got the courage to call us and see if we could come teach her. She has such a burning desire to learn about the gospel - Danielle works teaching dance at a studio and has a crazy busy schedule, but we would go by at 9 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon at her 30 minute breaks to teach her. 

Elder Wilson, Danielle, Brother Gordon, and myself

Her baptismal service was powerful, the Spirit was strong there and everybody there knew that what Danielle was doing was right. And I got to play viola there! So it was even better! (Well, I thought it was fun, I was probably the only person who enjoyed that part.) She was baptized by an amazing member, Brother Gordon. 

Love you all lots! Spring is here (well, in Florida, at least) so enjoy it!

Elder McMullin

People come, and people go, and we still keep working.

     Hello everybody! This week had been a good one.  We've learned lots of things about how to be optimistic all the time. We've really been cultivating our attitudes and gaining a better eternal perspective.

      This past week we had a lot of struggle moments... At the start of week, we had a lot of coals in the fire, so to speak. Several investigators on date for baptism, lots of investigators to go and visit at night with members, many investigators that we were going to set baptismal dates with, etc. Lots of things to do and lots of possibilities.

      BUT since last week we've 1) Lost contact with them 2) Had them text us and tell us that they're not interested in learning anymore 3) Had many of them move. So hence, not many people for us to teach right now!  This week is going to be a lot of time knocking and talking to church members trying to find people to teach... which is one of my favorite things to do in missionary work, so I can't complain!

    Here are some fun pictures - love y'all!

On Saturday morning, we volunteered downtown at a "Color Me Rad 5k run". We threw paint at everybody running and it was crazy fun!  Some people got mad at us, haha. They signed up for it! But we had some great opportunities to share he gospel with some people there.

We went to a showing that another ward out in of "Meet the Mormons" on Friday night! It was super fun! Brother Dodge, a great member is on the left, and our investigator Darrell is on the right. It is an amazing movie! Watch it! (click here)

Meeting new people left and right...

Hello Everybody!

        This week has been great! The members here are so great. They're so kind and willing to help in the work, whether it's inviting our investigators to sit by them in church, or inviting us over for dinner on the fly, or coming to lessons that come up on the fly. They do so much and it's so great to be in a ward where the church members have such a desire to be involved with missionary work.

        We've been sharing "miracles" with members a lot recently, For example, we had an experience on Tuesday where Elder Willets and I had 30 minutes in between dinner and several lessons that night and wanted to know where to go to find somebody who was ready to hear the gospel. We both prayed to know where to go and the same apartment complex came to mind, so we went there.

Then we prayed to know where to go in the complex, and biked around until we found a building that we both wanted to knock. So we go there and after 20 minutes, we knock into somebody who moved in recently and doesn't have a church to go to. We teach her (her name is Brianna and she has two adorable young kids) and set a baptismal date.

It's been fun to talk with members and get them excited about doing missionary work.

        Love you all! Here are some pictures from the week.

We did service helping with a fence for this lady, Sister Cheng. She was a movie star back in China and has some amazing stories. She also makes really good friend rice and egg rolls. AKA it's actually Chinese food, not Panda Express.

Left to right, a great member of our ward, Johnny, then our investigator Daniel, then us. This is usually what a lesson setting looks like, except here we got dinner together which isn't normal. 

Yeah ok, kind of random picture, but in church, there was a member's ADORABLE son who's just learning to walk and he was playing with the camera on my iPad and took a picture of himself and you've got to admit that he's pretty cute. Right? Right? Ok maybe I just miss my little brother.