Well, this week I have gotten no letters so it was kinda a sad week, but I got a new companion who is Elder Pitts who is from.... wait for it... Provo, Utah! He lived 5 minutes from the MTC! He loves anything to do with horses, guns, hunting, and country music. To make money to go on a mission he trained and sold horses and spent most of his time in the mountains. Everyone already likes him more than me, so that's good, we will get a lot of work done. 

     

We had John Cavinee (who is a non member but he and his wife feed us every week) drive us to transfers to pick up Elder Pitts. John is from New York and used to live in NYC and work in Hunts Point Terminal in the Bronx, which is the worst neighborhood in the city, which is funny because meeting him you'd never guess that he would've ever worked there. On the way home I had John drive us to the Wessington House which is a four-story brick mansion built in the 1850's that is currently for sale for 3 million dollars--which is a steal of a price for this house! We pulled into the driveway of the Wessington House and I turned around to Elder Pitts and said, "Alright, we are here. We're home," and Elder Pitts said, "WHAT? No way. This is awesome!" Then we laughed and backed out of the driveway and drove to our little one-bedroom cotton millworker house and showed him where we actually live.

Right before Elder Pendlebury and I left for transfers we got to teach this girl who lives here in town. . . She is one of the nicest people ever, who missionaries have known for a long time, but not once had ever asked her if she would like to learn more about the message we share. So I was the first person to ever ask her if we could teach her, and we/I invited her to be baptized she said, "If you know that what you have shared with me is true, you don't have an option you have to get baptized. If you know it's true, that's the only choice."  And all I could think in my head was, "Finally someone gets it, finally someone actually gets the significance of what we teach as missionaries!"  We were sitting on some benches on the street corner downtown in front of a kinda fancy restaurant and the entire restaurant was watching us teach her the whole time we sat there, probably because she is pretty well known around town because she's the manager at the Barker House here in town.

One of our favorite less-active members we work with actually came to church this week! We committed him to come and he actually did, which is great. The only problem was that when he walked in the door at church, the first thing said to him was by the ward mission leader and it was an insult....... he told our less-active, "Hey, you either need to lose some weight or get a bigger car. You hardly fit in that thing."  Elder Pitts and I just stood there in shock. I can't believe that he said that. Imagine it was the first time you had come to church in a long, long time and that was the first thing said to you! That made us pretty frustrated because, how are you supposed to be a leader in the branch if you insult returning less active members?!

This week we were walking down Oakum Street and there were police officers everywhere--at least 20 officers, and 13 or 14 police cars all over the place. One of them stopped and asked us, "Hey, y'all ain't seen no guy running around in handcuffs have ya?" Apparently someone escaped one of the officers and they were all looking for him. Just off that same street we were teaching a family who showed us the 7 or 8 bullet holes through the front of their house, their son and his friend were shot right on their own porch in a drive-by shooting back in October. This town is a strange place, there are 3 million dollar historic homes and just 5 blocks away people are being shot in drive by shootings.

All in all, it was a fairly eventful week. It's always interesting when you get a new companion. Well, that's all the time I've got for this week have a blessed week y'all!

-- Elder White

P.S. I haven't been good at keeping a journal these last few days because Elder Pitts, my new companion, is more or less Uncle Stew if he was 19 and a missionary, so we have been talking a lot and I have forgotten to write in my journal. Elder Pitts is the same size as Uncle Stew, they talk the exact same--like the same word choices and every thing, and their voices sound identical---It's crazy--and Elder Pitts skis a ton and they like the same kind of trucks and the whole deal! It's pretty funny. Oh, and beef jerky. Elder Pitts loves beef jerky, so naturally we're friends.