Cutting down a tree...

I hear people enjoyed the videos and pics. I will try to take more but it's hard sometimes because usually there is nothing here that is worth filming or taking a picture of...

I sent some pictures of this tree Elder Lemos and I cut this week. It was a service project for one of the neighbors of one of the members in our ward...her son kept climbing the tree to go smoke pot and the thick branches fully covered him from the vision of those on the ground. Thus, Elder Lemos and I cut that sucker down...successfully ridding one of what I am sure are many of the kid's pot-hideouts.

It took us 2 mornings adding up to about 7 hours of work...but it was actually pretty fun. I cut up my hands pretty bad due to the lack of hard manual labor they have seen while on my mission...oh plus the other 19 years of my life. But wounds heal...trees shaped to a form that won't allow cover for pot-heads last forever. I was actually kind of a master lumberjack-monkey up in that tree (as I am sure it is easy to see from the video I sent of me chopping away at the stubborn branches). Good times.

This week was a bit difficult in some ways. My companion Elder Lemos entertains me for hours when he talks about all his insecurities. Sometimes he can't even work because he loses all confidence in himself. We are supposed to do 12 "contacts" a day, 85 a week, which I usually do, but he only did 30 last week because he usually can't summon the courage to go talk to people on the street. I feel so bad for him sometimes because he has a year and 10 months on the mission and I am sure this self-esteem curse has plagued his work and the work of his companions his entire mission.

Sometimes he just asks me to sit down with him under a tree for a while and he just tells me more about all the fears about the future that he has. I try my best to console him but usually to no avail. He thought he lost the cell phone the other night but we found out he just left it at a member's house when we were having lunch...but for that whole night his confidence hit an all time low...an abyss that even I couldn't pull him out of.

But to be honest the last few days we have found quite a few people, and many families, which are really looking promising so this week and the weeks to come I think the work will get better here. I hope at least. It's a lot harder here to teach than it was in my last area, I won't lie. But we are trying.

I was walking on the street the other day and saw this lady sitting on the ground smoking on the other side of the street...I planned on just walking by her but then I all the sudden just decided to leave my companion and walk across the street to talk to her. I started to present myself to her and she was like "look Elder, I am a member and I know about the church. I was baptized about 5 years ago. It would be really nice though if you could stop by my house and talk to me again about the gospel." Sounded perfect so we went there on Monday night and talked to her and her husband for like 3 hours about why they left and if they were going to come back.

The mom was offended by something one of the sisters in the ward said. But it was really funny because they have been inactive for almost 3 years but have never stopped reading the Book of Mormon everyday, doing family home evenings, or any of the stuff that normal member families usually do. We just had to convince them to come back to church and they actually are going to. It was pretty cool actually because she said they had been thinking about going back to church and when she saw me on the street she thought "if he comes over and talks to me then I think my husband and I will decide to go back to church." Glad I listened to the Spirit's prompting to go over there eh?

Well, I don't have tons more to write. Good bunch of emails this week, well done everyone! Thanks for the support, love you all.

-Elder Brent Parsons