Elder Jackson Beach: Fun week!

Hola to all of my fam, friends, neighbors, and others. I hope that y'all are doing well. This week has flown by. It's been a little bit of a bummer week as far as teaching goes, but we have been having a lot of fun (within the rules, of course) and working hard.

We were at Walmart the other day and we saw these little tabletop games for $10. So we decided to buy one - mini billiards. Haha the table is only like 2 feet long, but we played for about 45 minutes that night. I strapped my camera to my head for one of our rounds, and it just so happened to be the most incredible round ever. It should definitely be on ESPN Classics. Well, it was just so darn fun that we decided that we needed some more of those games. So a couple of days later we went and grabbed mini corn hole, and a couple days after that we got mini air hockey. Since then, we have spent most of our time from 9:00 until 10:30 playing one or more of those games. It's been a party.

Last week when we met Joe Poole, we gave him our number and he said he would call us in two or three days to set up an appointment to teach his kids. Two days later, we were walking down the street, he drove by, pulled over, and told us that he would call/text us tomorrow. Well, that didn't happen, so we called him. We called both numbers that we have for him, got no answer, and left messages on both. We never heard back from him until a couple of days after that when we finally just went over to his house and asked if we could make an appointment. We finally got one set up for this Wednesday, so I am hopeful that that will work out and that we can get everything squared away. I'm really excited to start teaching them, reactivating him, helping his kids learn basic doctrines and preparing them for baptism. It should be fun!

Also a bummer this week: last week when we taught Carol Anne, we asked if we could come back during the week sometime, but she said she would be busy until Sunday. So we made the appointment for Sunday (yesterday), which ultimately fell through. We had invited her to church, which she seemed kind of 50/50 about coming, but she never showed. We also invited her to the Branch's Thanksgiving lunch that was right after church on Sunday, and she didn't really give us a hard "yes" or "no" so we just hoped she would come. Well she didn't come to either, and so we texted her to see if we could still come by that night for our appointment and she cancelled. It was sad, but she did tell us that she had been reading the Book of Mormon, praying, and that we could come see her during the week, so we'll give her a call tomorrow or Wednesday. I really want to invite her to be baptized. That was the plan for our appointment yesterday, but obviously that didn't happen. We look forward to inviting her this week.

Elder Marshall finally met Dustin this week (Dustin has been in jail for the last couple of weeks). We went and saw Dustin on Friday and invited him to church and to the Thanksgiving lunch. He told us that he would be there, and that he would bring some sweet potatoes or something like that. We were looking forward to it, but he didn't show up at church (which starts at 9:30). Well, at about 12:45 he texts us and says, "we overslept big time." Haha yeah, you did. I asked him if he was still going to come, and he just told us that he "didn't want to come to church just to eat food." I can understand that, but I was still a little bummed and disappointed. Nobody in the branch would have cared if he showed up just for lunch. I asked him if he would come to church next week and he said okay, so that's good. We'll remind him several times this week and we'll probably go to his house Sunday morning and wake him up so that he doesn't sleep past noon again haha.

This week we knew that we were having the Thanksgiving lunch right after church, so we invited like everybody we knew. We invited pretty much everyone on our potentials list, a bunch of people we met knocking doors, and we also went through the entire roster for the branch and called every single person to invite them. At our branch council meeting before church on Sunday I told President Bennett, "We invited like 400 people to church and lunch today." They were a tiny bit worried because obviously they had only planned for like 70 or so from the branch. Well, not a single person that we invited showed up for church or for lunch. I surely didn't expect a majority of the people we invited to show, but I definitely expected more than 0. That was too bad. It was still a great lunch, and we were able to take time to chat and build relationships with those in the branch. While we were calling our roster to invite people, we also got a hold of a couple of less actives that I have never met before, who told us we could come visit them sometime. That was a plus!

One more bit of good news this week that I will finish up with. I may or may not have told y'all about Drew. He lives downstairs in our same apartment building, and we see him pretty often as we are going in and out. We have become good friends with him over the months, and we have come to understand that his life is pretty stressful and seems to have a lot of lows. I'm thankful that we are able to be a little bit of a support and a pick-me-up for him whenever we see him. We have been trying to figure out a time when we can teach him what we teach others, because he could really use the Gospel in his life right now (actually, everyone could). But the good news is that we finally were able to make an appointment to teach him - tonight! I'm really excited for that.

As has been said, "days are long and weeks are short." This week was evidence of that, at least in my experience. It was a decent week, full of fun, work, ups, and downs. I love it. I love all of you too, and I hope you have a great week as well.

Much love,

Elder Beach

#RollTide