Message in a Bottle: Mountains, Mosquitos, and Much To Do

Iaroana everyone!

This week hasn't been a whole lot eventful, mostly just getting to know the new sector and figuring things out, but I'll give you what I've got.

First things first, I have to tell you how beautiful Tautira is. None of you believed me when I said that Takaroa wasn't that pretty, but now you'll be able to see the contrast. I'm still not used to seeing mountains, lots of green plants, rivers, etc. I sometimes just stare at things for a while, thinking, "What is this?!"

I don't know if I've already mentioned this, but Tautira just got done with a baptising streak, and I'm coming in to clean up the mess. We don't have very many investigators, so we're doing quite a bit of contacting. Which is weird for me, I'm used to doing no contacting because I already know evreyone in my sector.

We found this Jehovah's witness and started teaching him. He's got to be at least a hundred years old. He's been a member since 1963 to give you an idea. Every time we asked him a question, he would go off on totally unrelated témoin doctrine and it was really hard to bring it back. What made it worse is that there were hundreds of mosquitos! I've never seen so many in one place in my life! But this investigator didn't seem to notice. To give you a sense, at any given time there wer about thirty mosquitos perched on your leg, trying to suck your blood. That was so hard to consentrate, switching between fending off a mosquito army and listening about how 144,000 people will be saved.

We do have amis with more potential than that. There is a couple who are adventist, although they left after seeing flaws. They believe wholeheartedly in the Bible, and that's there faith, nothing more and nothing less. For the lessons, we only use the Bible. We teach our lessons through the Bible, and they share scriptures, too. I've never seen anyone who know's so much or has so much faith in the Bible. The thing is, it's hard to help them accept that there are other scriptures, too. We can quote BoM scriptures and they will completely accept, but as soon as they know that it comes from somewhere other than the Bible they can't accept it. It's so hard to see someone with so much faith, so close to receiving the restored gospel, but not quite there. They definitely have potential, though.

We also do a service project each Saturday, building a house. I've never built a house before, but it's pretty fun.

There's a lot to do here. It's a big area, lots of non members, lots of people. It's going to be fun!

Elder Lewis