POW! POW!

March 5, 2011 Saturday

A double whammy, that’s what it was. One person, Michelle, whom we’ve been working with since we came to Thornlie had her mom call to tell us not to come around anymore. She’s been inactive for a long time and had broken up with her latest partner when we met her. She wanted to come back to the church and raise her kids in it. We’ve been encouraging her and teaching her kids, Keira, 12, and Kalen, 8. They’ve been having family prayer and she’d been teaching them about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. But every Sunday something would come up that kept them from attending church. And then last Sunday, her old boyfriend called and asked her to pick him up at the hospital. Immediately, all her old feelings came back for him, and she has given up all the good things she was thinking and feeling over the past month. We tried hard this week to work with her, but she was resisting us. So her mom, who lives in a different ward, said she’d call some of Michelle’s old friends who are active LDS in the ward and have them work on her—there’s more than one way to skin a cat!
Then we drove over to see James and remind him and his family that they’d said they would come to church. He met us on the porch and said they wouldn’t be coming. We tried to talk to him about how much good his return to church would do his family. He told us they were already good parents; and when he drinks, he’s a “nice drunk” who doesn’t hurt anybody. How can you argue with great logic like that? It’s too bad.
The best part of the day was when Elder and Sister Nielsen came over and had dinner with us. We enjoyed it a lot and they were proud to have been able to find our place with only a couple of turn-arounds necessary on the trip. They live up near the mission office which is about 45 minutes away from here on the north side of the Swan River.