By the time I email you all again... I will have been a missionary for over a year. Wow. I feel so old. But I haven't kicked the bucket yet!
The bestest news: Florencio, who came to church last week, got baptized yesterday! Yay! It's astounding how quickly he turned his life around, especially considering how hard his old temptations attacked him throughout the week. He told us he was willing to quit his job and give up everything to follow Christ, and he means it. It was amazing how everything just fell into our hands; he contacted us, he came to Church on his own, he understood and excepted everything (and already knew a lot of it), the members moved their schedules around to help us out, and the Sister Missionaries set up the baptismal program for us since they had another investigator. Months of hard work with little visible success suddenly paid off in one crazy week. It's like I always say, "You have to go through a lot of needles to find a haystack."
Speaking of which, last night Elder Pope got stabbed by a needle in his butt.
On top of all that, this has been quite an adventurous week. So on Wednesday we got caught in this ridiculous storm. Huge thunder blast and torrential downpours for just a few hours. We're not supposed to drive through standing water, but that's hard when the entire city of Sullivan is flooded (except of course for the rapids, but we avoided those). So that was a blast.
We were about to go knock on a door on Thursday when I suddenly felt a ton of bugs pelting me left and right. I realized the entire driveway was covered with giant flying ants, all in piles and just going crazy. It was horrifying. So I know that only the male drones and the females that will become queens have wings, so if this wasn't some kind of giant ant war, it was definitely a massive heap of fornication.
Elder Pope is making a homemade tie out of denim. It has Spider Man on the inside.
On Friday I broke out in horrendous hives, starting on my arms and spreading... well, everywhere. It's just short of unbearable. I know you're all itching to know the details, but I think I'll forbear. We have no idea what's causing it, but hopefully this Benadryl will keep it under control. On Sunday it ended up on my face. I looked all leprous for a while, then my whole face swelled up and I looked like some kind of old man. It was weird.
Elder Pope and I had matching batman symbols on us; his a sunburn on his face, and mine a rashy splotch on my chest. None of the pictures turned out, though.
Sorry this was a long one. I know none of you read it all. If you did, congratulations! You're my favorite!
With much love and appreciation,
Elder Dylan "Sunspot" Young
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| A random Virgen Maria thing on a garage |
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| Endless Dirt Roads |
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| Real life dung beetles! |
