“Will you read it to me, Ben?”

Quote of the week explanation

Some of you may remember the crazy lady who would call us in Oakland and do things like offer us beer-making sets or tell us about her 12 houses in Turkey. Upon leaving Oakland, I had assumed that her shenanigans were behind me. Well... I was wrong. You see, for some reason the only missionary that she likes is me; she never wanted anything to do with my companion, so I was always the one who had the... "privilege" of talking to her over the phone. This week, she called the Elders in Oakland. I'm sure the conversation went something like this:

Kerttu: “Hello, Ben?”

Elders: “Uhhhh…”

Kerttu: “Ben?”

Elders: “Uhhhhhh….”

Kerttu: “Is this... Mr. Rivera?”

At  which point the Elders realized what she was talking about. From what they've told me, they decided to be patronizing to the little woman and give her the phone number for the area in which I now serve. 

“A red sun rises”, as they say…

Anyway, she called us. I pick up the phone and hear a soft voice say “Hello is this Ben? Mr. Rivera?”, and immediately I text the Oakland Elders a horrible string of profanities and middle-finger emojis (Calm down, I didn't actually do that, I'm just trying to make things dramatic). We talk on the phone for a while, most of it is her trying to give me erroneous life advice and things while I try to find a semi-polite way to hang up the phone. And then, out of nowhere, she tells me to flip to 1 Corinthians 13. I get there and she says: “Will you read it to me Ben?” So I read it, and at the end of the chapter, she paused for a moment, before saying: “Amen”.

Oof…

After that long-winded introduction…

I hope you've all had a pleasant week. We've had a pretty good one ourselves.

We've been continuing to figure out the area, and have had a pretty good time doing it.

One of the people who I may have mentioned last week, Chris, continues to shine. He's making slow progress. He will eventually be baptized, he just wants to be able to leave his other church on a good note, which is why it may be a while still. But he loves the Book of Mormon and everything so he is doing pretty good.

We also found someone new this week. His name is Carl. It's somewhat of an interesting story there, because we were tracting and a lady answered the door of one of the houses. We introduced ourselves before she happily said “Come in! You have to talk to Carl!” and sat us down right next to an older gentleman. She then scurried off into the house. But we taught Carl a pretty good lesson and he made a New Years resolution to read the Book of Mormon. So that was kind of cool. We'll go back again this week to see how he's doing.

We also have a visit from good 'ol Gary E. Stevenson coming up this week, so we get to go to Oakland for that.

So yeah. I think that's about all the Earth-shattering news I have for today. Our weeks have been filled with a lot of finding in an attempt to build the area up. We've seen some pretty cool stuff happen, so we'll see if we can't do something in this place!

Anyway, bye.

Ben

P.S. We also found a pretty cool Chinese guy named Zhan. He seems pretty interested.

P.P.S. Even though... We don't have a Chinese branch up here...

P.P.P.S. Oh man, I've discovered that the most difficult part of a mission is when people who think they know the Bible are trying to bash you and you know you could destroy any argument they have using the same Bible they are but you have to hold back and just act all pleasant.