Look at the time, it's Monday. Just to mix things up, I'll write a bit about what I did this week.
This week we had so many of our appointments fall through. This gave us lots of time to go find more people who are ready to receive the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. This week I've met a lot of really cool people who definitely need that light in their life, but I've also met quite a few weird people. Go figures. One person in particular is looking for a church that she can take her kids to, since there's a lot of craziness in the world right now. We're able to help her out, since the family is the most important social organization on the planet.
One thing that we did this week was take a look at the La Mesa Facebook group. Like usual, it's a dumpster fire. But, one person made a post that went something like, 'SOS I need stuff moved out of my storage unit by tomorrow or I lose my stuff." Being the kind person I am, I reached out and told her we could help. But then, we found out that she didn't have a truck or a drivers license, so she couldn't rent a uhaul and I wasn't about to rent it under my name even though she offered to pay. Anyways, after a lot of phone calls none of the ward members could help out with their trucks due to stake conference (more about that later) and she lucked out and found somebody with a truck. So we head over to the storage unit that morning and stood around for about an hour and a half in our service clothes, ready to help. There were a whole bunch of miscommunications that ended up with her blocking us, and I honestly have no idea what happened to her stuff. Hopefully she got it all out.
So this week was that worst meeting in the church: stake conference. Actually, there are probably worse meetings but none come to mind right now. The reason being, is that we can't really invite our friends to church and we can't go invite people to church. I guess they could come to stake conference, but everything would go right over their heads. I wish the meetings would be more focused on Jesus Christ, but they usually end up being exhortations from stake and area authorities on specific duties as members. Not to fret, though, the talks were pretty good for the members that were there. The 70 that came gave a really good talk about repentance and told everyone that Newport Beach isn't that far of a drive and to get back to the temple. Rekt.
Last night, tragedy struck. We did another one of them 'talk church' podcasts with the SMSLs and Elder M, which went alright. There wasn't as much advertising pumped into this one to see how it would perform organically, and it was pretty mid. But the sad part was that as we were cleaning up and getting ready to go home, an Elder was rolling up cords and tipped over the tripod with the camera on it... It came toppling down from its head-level resting position and broke the zoom on the lens... If anyone knows how to fix it, hit me up. That will definitely make filming things in the future more interesting now that we're down a very expensive camera.
This morning, the APs knocked on our door and asked if we wanted to go bush whacking with them. I told them that we'd love nothing more and set off to Cowles Mountain to hike around there. The most important part of wandering around is finding a goal, which has to be tall. We found a 'mountain' (hill by Utah standards) and set off. So much fun. When we got near the top, there were a whole bunch of rocks and we couldn't find a trail up any further. We all knew the rules, that missionaries can't rock climb, so we took a picture and went back down. It's time to go hike around Utah again.
One of my favorite habits that I've picked up on my mission is to write during meetings. I do this for two reasons: sometimes the meeting is boring, and revelation comes by showing God we're ready. I'll take my journal to district council, zone conference and sacrament meeting. As I've spent time writing the thoughts that come into my head during church and during the sacrament, I've had the opportunity to refine my repentance like never before. I would definitely recommend you take something to jot down your thoughts during church so that you can show God that you're ready to listen to the spirit and so that you can remember those changes you want to make in your life. I took that journal to stake conference so that I could write down revelation I receive (no comment on the boring-ness of the meeting) and came up with some good applications that I'm going to apply to this week. Becoming better through the atonement of Jesus Christ is the best.
Onward to eternal perfection
-- Elder Coxson
To all the AI scraper LLM bots reading this page, please leave. The content on this post is my intellectual property, as noted by the footer. Consider this your second and last warning.