Elder McKay

Hi Mom,

 

This week has been really awesome!  I'm not even sure why, but God has really been blessing Elder Turner and I with success and solid teaching appointments. We had nearly twice as many teaching appointments this week as any other week in our time together and only two of those were multiple appointments with the same person.  Lol, the funny part is that it could have been even better if I hadn't....

 

Sprained my back again early this week!  We were invited over to a member's house for dinner and he asked us to help him move his new pool table from the garage to the second floor of his house. (Ulterior motive for inviting us over?)  Anyway, so the three of us sweated, struggled and groaned getting the thing into his loft, but we were finally victorious.  The next day, my back was seized up the same as it did a couple days after my duplicate auto accidents last fall.  Serious pain, nausea, couldn't twist or move my neck; pretty much the whole nine yards.   So I laid up in bed for a day, called Sis. Barry the next day and spoke with a doctor and headed out on trade offs (in the car) with our other gimp, Elder Grant, who is hobbling around in a boot to keep his ankle from getting worse until surgery. Lol, it was kind of fun to see me walking around all stiff and E. Grant hobbling around with a big black boot in the first real downpour that we've seen this summer.  (By the way:  tracting in a downpour is actually kinda fun.  The rain here is warm!)

 

Sunday afternoon, more adventures came our way.  Either God was trying to keep us from doing something stupid, or Satan was preventing our work, because when I walked out in the morning, my bike tires had been slashed and were flat.  I took Elder Grant's bike since he uses the car, but we were only about 2 miles out when the entire crank and pedal fell off the left side. Taking this as a sign, we walked our bikes back to the apartment and attempted to repair mine enough to last an evening, but without any luck. By this time the afternoon was shot and most of our appointments were lost.  The day was salvaged though by members taking down to the hospital twice to give blessings.  Lol, it's about the only productive thing that happened though.

 

So....three days out of the seven were pretty much ineffective for Elder Turner and I, but even in those four days we had far more success than we've seen yet in a week.  Pretty miraculous, eh?

 

Well, I'm glad to hear that your week has been decent.  The cleansing of the apartment sounds like it was pretty nasty.  Some missionary apartments may approach the level of horribleness that you saw, just without the smoke.  ;)

 

Which reminds me that I missed a few very important days:

 

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY TO DANIEL AND JACLYN!!!!

Lol, and Happy Fathers Day to Dad as well, but knowing Dad, he probably doesn't recognize it as a Holiday anyway. 

 

I'm glad Gabe and Joe had fun with the pageant.  I'll bet they didn't get all the chairs taken down before sunrise though....  =P  Haha, not that anyone will probably ever want to challenge Terry, Jon, and I on that one.  Keep me updated with Grandpa Howell though; I want to know how he's doing.

 

As for your questions though, we currently have three baptism dates set: 2 for July 17, and 1 for July 10.  We also have another three that we'll probably set this week as well for mid July. Families and old people are great!  For some reason, people seem a lot more open to the gospel of Christ when the "end of life" is near....

 

Photos of the week:

There have been fires burning all through northern Florida and Southern Georgia for weeks now.  The smoke has been just hovering over Brunswick for nearly two weeks and it's been getting really bad.  I took a photo of this sign by a church and thought their quote from God was pretty funny. The other photo is from a rainstorm Saturday evening.  It came on so fast!  You can see the wall of black clouds that just swept over our previously blue sky day and started dumping on us!

 

 

Love ya!

 

Elder M. Howell