Elder Jaren Brown: Post-Exit Interview Excitement: Elder Hall is a real missionary, and Racism!

Hi Everyone!

This has been a very interesting week! We found a few new people to teach.We had some people come to church, and had some very interesting experiences!

I had my Exit Interview with President Smith on Tuesday, and that was really good. I was super nervous and had butterflies going in, kind of psyching myself out, but it was surprisingly normal. Of course I felt right at home with President Smith, and really the only difference was the subject matter. He gave me some excellent counsel.

We found one of our new people just before the interviews, and he was super cool! He readily agreed with the message of the restoration and sincerely committed to read and pray! We are coming back this Tuesday.

We contacted a less active we are working with on Monday, and he was outside drinking with some amigos, but that's ok! They were all super nice (and I think they felt bad they were drinking in front of the missionaries), and we met with him again on Wednesday, and he had some good questions! He was really honest with us and said he wants to resolve his doubts and improve his gospel learning! He's so cool, and he showed us his Book of Mormon he got when he was baptized, and we gave him a Ven, Sigueme manual!

We found our second new person that same night by following a prompting! As we planned that morning, we planned to go to an area which is usually pretty promising. I kinda felt uneasy about it, but we went ahead and planned it anyway. Then I felt it again as we were leaving from the Less Active, so I voiced it and we decided to go to another area we hadn't been in a while, and we tried someone we had tried several times without success. Tonight he happened to be home! He was super cool as well, and knows his Bible pretty well. It was a miracle that we found him, and it was all because we followed a prompting!

We talked, with another less active that lives with the Martinez family, for a long time after dinner with them on Thursday night, and it was really good! He told us his story of how he found the church and his activity level throughout the years. We have broken the ice a little with him, and the Branch is also focusing on him right now, so hopefully we can start to make a little progress with him soon.

Friday night was really good for us! We contacted some new people, and spent the evening in the promised land (trailer park)! We taught the family from Honduras and then made some other really promising contacts, and I got to pet some cats! They are all over in that trailer park.

We did Family History tabling on Saturday with the Hermanas and Hermano Florentino, who brought some great lemonade! The weirdest part about the whole thing was that there were already people handing out pamphlets at the first tienda we planned on, and then some other people from another church showed up at the backup Tienda! We got a sweet lanyard from them.

We found our final person on Sunday, which was a crazy day! Elder Hall got bit by a dog, the family from Honduras came to church, I got to hear from my trainer because he called brother Bowler while we were at dinner with him, and then we found a cool guy from Guatemala, and get this! In the middle of the contact, this african american guy approaches us, and holds us up for the rest of the night (about an hour) explaining his beliefs, which can be summed up as racist. God and Jesus Christ are black, white people cannot be saved, and are meant to be slaves and serve the black people. It was pretty wild. But we split up conversations though, so we were able to save the contact! Elder Hall finished with the Guatemalan while I headed off the servant of the devil. Pretty wild night.

Anyway, this email may be way too long for some of you, but it was a wild week! The mission is slipping through my fingers way faster than I am comfortable with, and I already know I am going to miss it like crazy when I get home! I guess I need to "get my fringes on" (a quote from the black crazy guy) and buckle in for an interesting adjustment in about a week and a half!

Tune in next week for my final email.

Elder Brown