Arizona Week 75 - Spider Web

Hi Everyone,

We've had a fairly eventful week. It's been fun. The dedication of the Phoenix Temple was yesterday. I really like temple dedications; I've been able to go to 2 on while on my mission.

An unfortunate thing happened while we were at the dedication. We got a call from one of our investigators. We haven't seen or spoken too to him before. He told us that he had finally gotten time off of work to go to church and was at the meeting house wondering why no one was there. It was pretty upsetting. Hopefully he can come next week. We felt so bad. 

So on Tuesday, we felt the need to do something that had never been done before. As we sat pondering what we might do, we recalled that we had a substantial amount of yarn for some reason. It was then that we decided to take the yarn and form a spider web in our bedroom.

The look on the faces of the other elders in our apartment was hilarious. I don't think they knew what to think. You just never know what might happen with Elder Jacobson and me.

Also this week, as we were walking to dinner, we had rocks thrown at us! Our would-be executioners did not have very good aim; fortunately, but it was exciting nonetheless.

We met with a long time inactive member at the public library because he is trying to get back into the church. He expressed his concerns, and we were doing our best to help him resolve them when an old, angry, bearded man at the table next to us decided to chime in with his opinion. He said that "salvation comes through Jesus Christ, not Joseph Smith," which we, of course, agreed with.  The fact that we agreed with him through him off for a second, but he then asked why we put Joseph Smith on the same level with Christ. We told him that this was not the case, but he insisted that it was. He said many more things such as "Joe Smith is dead, in the grave, never to rise again", and "What did Christ mean when He said, 'it is finished'? He answered his own question by saying that Christ meant that there would be no more prophets. Then he said, “Joe Smith called himself, he wasn't called of God." Then, the man we had originally come there to speak with ended it all by pleading with our attacker to give him an hour with us and then he could talk to us all he wanted. The man grumbled but remained quiet during the remainder of our visit. As we left, we offered him a copy of the Book of Mormon; he refused. Oh well.

I can't remember much else from this week but it was good. I'm down to the last 6 months, and I plan to make them good.

Take care everyone.

Elder Kirk