Guys, it's Christmas time! Now before you start protesting that it's only November, I'll remind you that Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is a fake holiday. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
These last two weeks have been quite the grind, I'll tell you. We're still working on finding those deaf people who are ready to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ, but I can promise you they're out there somewhere... We're starting to go through old records from past missionaries, and I have a feeling at least one of them will be ready and willing to talk to us again. We're gonna start doing some Facebook automation again now that I have more time to focus on it, so stay tuned. It will for sure be finished by 2025.
Speaking of Facebook, we have been preparing for the live stream this Friday. There's a devotional once a month that the Mormon Battalion site holds once a month, and the mission president's wife, Sister Merritt, has asked me to live stream it to Facebook and also get people to live translate it into 4 languages. That is quite the task, and I've been researching how to get all this set up since there's definitely not room at the Mobat to host a whole bunch of missionary translators.
I've designed a system to do a language-agnostic stream that will be pushed to a self-hosted RTMP server, that the mission server can then pull and split into four different streams with headsets and mics for the poor missionaries who got tricked into translating. It's been quite the ordeal figuring this all out, and we'll be running a test on Tuesday to make sure that everything works. For all my homies who want to see Elder Coxson sign, it will be live on Facebook.
We had our ward Halloween party last week, and it was pretty hype. Not so much the party activities themselves, but chatting with our deaf members and our Vietnamese member is always good. Our Vietnamese lady, Tham, invited a few of her friends to come to the party. They all came dressed as witches, and it was funny to see them speaking Vietnamese in a huddle together.
One of the Vietnamese ladies pulled me aside and talked to me in her broken English. She pulled out a picture of a young woman on her phone and asked me for my opinion. I just said, "wow, that's nice" and she tells me that's her granddaughter. She asks me if I would like her phone number, which I quickly told her I was a missionary and wasn't dating right now. So, on the plus side I must be attractive to Vietnamese grandmothers looking to get their granddaughters married.
Of course, the food was good and there was leftover candy from the trunk-or-treat! Score for Elder Coxson. Don't worry, Mom, I've picked up a new hobby from the pre-mission life to help with this; distance running. My new companion actually goes to the gym every morning, and I didn't just want to sit there and twiddle my thumbs! I didn't know what else to do besides start running, so that's exactly what I did. I am definitely way out of shape compared to before I came to San Diego, so my stats aren't that impressive, but I've worked my way down to a 27:34 5k in the last two weeks. 14 year old Jackson ran a 5k way faster and I can't even imagine how fast I was running back then, but that's the goal.
Speaking of goals, I've been thinking a lot about life goals these last weeks. I'm not talking about goals like becoming CEO of Apple or getting married, we need to think from an eternal perspective. The most important thing we can work towards in this life is preparing for that one day when our Heavenly Father will take us home. It's grim to think about even during the Halloween season, but our prophet has encouraged us to keep this mindset. Whenever you have problems in life, no worries; think Celestial. Temptation arises? Don't care, think Celestial. Easy peasy.
Whelp, that's all that's happened! Thank you for reading my very long email. I hope y'all have a better week than last, because Jesus has already won. Merry Christmas, y'all!
-- Elder Coxson
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