I'm basically dead. I have two more weeks as a missionary. The time has really gone fast and I'm working hard to make the rest of my time count. If any of you have forgotten what the life of a missionary entails, it goes something like this: wake up at 6:30 and try to exercise for a little bit. After that it's time to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. We study and plan until 10:00am and then go fulfill any appointments we had for the morning and introduce ourselves to as many people as we can. The hope with the introductions is that we'll find people willing to listen to our church's unique message and have interest in learning more. Then we have lunch and study for another couple hours. Then we go back out into the world to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with everyone. If we don't have any appointments then we're searching for new people to teach. And then we come back for dinner. Lately dinner has been at eight because people don't really like it too much when we knock on their doors after that. Curfew is at nine. And lights out is at ten thirty. There's sometimes a little bit of other drama. We have district meetings once a week and zone conference every six weeks. Sometimes we decide that it's a good idea to go to another area and work with other missionaries so that we can learn from each other. We also have interviews with our mission president every other transfer, and sometimes we have mission conferences like we did for Christmas a couple weeks ago. I think that's about it. I guess we have church every Sunday. We're supposed to go to that... :)
Some thoughts that I have: A mission is exactly two years. Sometimes people have reasons to go home early, and in rare cases missionaries can stay for an extra transfer or two, but it's a very well defined period of time. And time waits for no one. Some similar activities are school, careers, going on a run, and eating a pizza. It doesn't matter how much effort you spend on making them last, how much you try to enjoy it, or how much you try to do other things at the same time, they will come to an end. And at that point all you can do is move forward. We have to make the most of the time we have now. I'm not sure if that's sad but it's definitely true.
Here's a short miracle that my companion and I saw this week! We had a goal of finding three new people who we could visit again and teach about the church and we were stuck at one all the way until Sunday night with a few hours left. We knew that we needed to find two more people so we found a huge line of apartments inhabited mostly by graduate students at a nearby college and started knocking on their doors. For some reason we had several contacts that were very high quality, but none of them would let us come back and talk again. We got down to the last hour and had a 40 minute walk back to the apartment in the snow. We thought about leaving and just trying to talk to people on the street, but we decided to stay and do one last building. One of the first doors was a super nice college kid that we taught about the restoration and got a preferred return visit time! About five doors later we talked to a college girl that also had interest in hearing more! We ended up being late because of how long we spent talking to people in that apartment building and made our goal for the week!! We said a prayer of thanks to Heavenly Father and then walked home.
Lots of love!
Elder Mitchell
P.S. I got bullied into dressing up like Santa Claus.
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