Good times

I was reading through one of my old journals from my mission last night, and it brought back some good/funny/crazy memories. Pretty much every day I spent in Australia, there was something memorable that happened. I think one day in particular does a good job of representing at least a part of mission life. I was in Cairns (pronounced "Cans"), a beautiful, tropical city in the northern part of Queensland, and my companion was Elder Reiser, from Salt Lake. I was a seasoned missionary at this point, like 22 months out, and I was training Reiser, who had only been serving for a couple of weeks. I'm just going to quote straight from this particular day in my journal, with some minor editing and comments for clarity.


"5/15/07 -- This morning, after study, Elder Reiser and I went to go see Jeff, that half-paralyzed guy who we played chess with. (The week prior to this, we were following up on an old contact and met Jeff, who had been meeting with missionaries for a long time. He had each missionary that came to visit him draw a picture, and he had all of these pictures on his wall... maybe 50 or so drawings. He wasn't able to speak very well, but clearly enough to be understood. Like I said, we played chess with him, and he gave us each nicknames. I was "Cowboy," because I was from Wyoming, and Reiser was something like "Ruby." He was a cool old guy... anyway back to the narration.) We got there and the first thing he did was yell at us, saying that we came "straight from hell" and he didn't ever want to see us again. Total change of attitude. I thought he was kidding at first, but apparently not. Weird. (By the way, we went back the next week, not something we normally did if someone told us to go away, and he was right back to normal again.)

We then went to go see Stephany, a former investigator who sounded really interested from the teaching record, and whom it described as "an intelligent and attractive young lady." That is, of course, obviously not the reason we wanted to go see her, but she was right around the corner from Jeff, so we might as well. (We had never met her prior to this.) We knocked on the door and waited for a minute. The screen door and lighting was such that we couldn't see anything on the other side, but they could see everything outside. Someone came to the door and answered in a deep, gravelly, harsh voice, 'Yes?'
'G'day, is Stephany here?' I said.
'I am Stephany,' the baritone voice said.
We had a hard time believing that the body that belonged to the voice on the other side of the screen door could possibly be attractive, much less female, and the one described on the teaching record. So we talked with the disembodied voice for a second, just trying to get some clarification on stuff (name, previous contact with missionaries, etc.) . She... or he... or 'it' dismissed us by reacting violently against the door, and we came away quite confused. We thought that 'Stephany' might have gotten eaten by that voice. We never actually got to see who was talking to us.

...

We tracted into this one house that was in a state of disrepair. A man answered from the background and brought us into the front room to meet the owner. He was sitting in a chair in the corner of this dimly lit room. There was a couch next to it and a TV across the room. He was old and frail, and sitting in the middle of heaps of random rubbish -- newspapers, plates, banana peels, etc. Above everything else that was noticable was the smell. Like urine mixed with poo, rotten fruit, moldy bread, beer, BO, everything sick you can think of (most of which, by the way, you could see in piles all around this guy). I almost lost my lunch right there, and Elder Reiser was the same. And this guy was sitting in the middle of all of that. It would have almost been a relief if he would have rejected us and sent us away, but he wanted to talk with us, so we obliged and tenderly sat down on the couch. We tried our hardest not to be affected by the stench, but it was awfully painful. We taught him as best we could, given the circumstances, but it was rough, tell you what. He was a pretty nice guy, though. Maybe he just didn't notice the filth he was living in, but I find that hard to believe. We were there for over an hour, anyway. When we finally got outside, it was pure relief. Incidentally, it turns out that he wasn't really interested, anyway.


We took the bus back home in time to pick up the other elders and take them to PEC, and for us to go to youth night. When we got there, though, everyone had apparently already gone golfing, so we just went to Hungry Jack's to get some dinner. When we finished, we went back to the chapel to pick up the other elders. That was the day!"

Yeah, I'd say this day was a pretty typical one. We got yelled at, got a slammed door in our faces, met "interesting" people, and loved every minute of it.