Open House Starts Today!

Hey,

So this week was pretty much getting ready for the Open House that starts today and will go until Saturday night with the "re-dedication" of the chapel on Sunday night. We had these really sweet invites printed out to hand out to as many people as possible in our area and we started visiting less-actives and all our investigators like crazy to get all the invites out and to make sure that they were going to come.

So that's what Elder Affonso and I did and then yesterday 2 and 1/2 zones (about 35 missionaries) came to our area and the area of the other elders and helped us deliver invites to everyone. It was pretty annoying because I called my bishop like 3 times throughout this last week and then had lunch with him once to make sure that he was going to bring a map of the area for everyone to have and to color in parts in order to let all the companionships know where they had to work, but then we showed up at the chapel and he just told me that he forgot and then went and started talking to some other members and left me there with 36 missionaries just waiting in the chapel to do something.

Hooray! So I ended up just taking them out (Well half of them at least because the other half went to the other area) and showed them where they needed to go. Then I just let them go and it all worked out because all they needed to go was to go talk to the maximum amount of people as possible and deliver the invites...and they are missionaries so that's not too hard for them. So it all worked out but we lost like 1/2 hour of our time but whatevs...If I let a little something like that to get to me in this ward then I would have asked to be transferred away from the ward long ago haha.

It doesn't help that my companion doesn't help me at all with it or write anything in his planner because if he writes stuff down then it just "stresses (him) out too much" and he can't get stressed or else "bad things will happen".

But we's good!

I am really excited about the chapel and hope it will help turn this area around again. We have this family that is so awesome that says they will go to it and I really hope they do because I know they will love it. My companion says that if we baptize this family then his mission will be complete because they are really that awesome and would become members that would end up as stake leaders in a year or so from now. I don't know if my mission here would quite be "complete" but it would be a huge accomplishment for me and it would validate my nearly fruitless hard work in this area.

Thank you for all your prayers of support! I can't thank many people for emails this week unfortunately...but those who did email I am very grateful! Just kidding, I am grateful to everyone...but really...this week's inbox = sad.

-Elder Brent Parsons