Fairytale Investigators

Dear Family and Friends,

Things continue to be interesting here in Lincoln. For instance, today the internet keeps kicking me off so I am typing this letter in hope that I can get on long enough to copy and paste it into an email. This week has been a little crazy. We have been working hard, but with mixed results. It started off with cleaning inspections. But our inspector came at 9:00 am, when did they expect us to clean? It is a good thing that I cleaned fairly thoroughly the week before and really just had to touch up most things on Monday. We also had to spend the week touching up the car trying to make it is nice as possible (since I knew they would be paying particular attention to our car this inspection due to our accident the week before). I am happy to say that we did win one of those prizes (in fact the Sisters very nearly swept car inspections, a rare feat). As part of this effort we discovered that the Shell station’s car wash here actually has fairly decent wax—unfortunately it doesn’t clean perfectly so we ended up with some suds marks under our wax job (which I didn’t even realize we were getting, by the way). Oh well, Ichabod is nice and shiny this week.

The real news is two fold. First, I forgot one of the oddities last week; an increasing pet peeve of mine in fact: golf carts. Our area covers part of “Sun City” which is a very large retirement community. On all of the roads throughout the community there are golf cart lanes. Isn’t that crazy? I’ve never seen a golf cart lane before. What is even weirder to me is that some of these more senior citizens seem to think it is okay to take their golf carts out onto the parkways—not on the side of the road or in the bike lanes or anything, right there in the middle of traffic—across I-65 and over to go shopping. Now that just seems dangerous, they don’t really have all that much protection. Today we saw a gentleman driving his golf cart on the parkway today with his Labrador sitting in the passenger seat. These things don’t have any doors, what would he do if his dog saw something it wanted to chase and jumped out? People do strange things.

But the real news is about a very surreal experience Sister Kawasaki and I have been able to be a part of. On our second day here in Lincoln we started teaching a new investigator. He works at the pizza place here and one of the families who goes there fairly often started a friendship with him and invited him to church. He came for two weeks and then they asked if he would like the lessons (enter us). The weekend after we taught him the first lesson (in the member’s home) was General Conference—he watched all 5 sessions. The second lesson went really well and he liked it a lot. He always did all of his reading assignments and more as the members kept sending him home with church DVDs and optional reading. This past week we taught him the third lesson. Next Saturday he is getting baptized. This seriously has been like teaching exactly out of Preach My Gospel; he has literally been the perfect investigator. I guess it just goes to show that the General Authorities really knew what they were doing when they wrote the “text” and that it all really works. It has been neat to be a part of this. The only “down” side is that he lives in Roseville, so technically it is going to be their baptism, but hey it’s all the same mission and the same gospel and we get to go anyway.

Now hopefully we’ll be able to actually find some more people to teach this week since sadly we had 0 new investigators last week. That is the first time that has happened for me in 20 weeks. This week will be busy though, since we have interviews with our Mission President tomorrow and Trainer/Trainee to go to on Friday. But with concerted effort I am sure we can do it.

Love,
Sister L. Sorensen