Hey everyone, welcome back to Elder Coxson's spam blast. I'm coming at you pretty late again, as it's been a super packed day. Hopefully I can super pack this letter full of neat experiences and maybe soap box preach a little bit. We'll see.
So on Saturday we left the mission. Now hold you horses, no need to get all up in arms! We had permission. We left around 10am, drove up the i5 and escaped the boundaries which have held me for the past 10 months. Now this information will shock you: outside of the mission boundaries look exactly like the inside. Crazy, I know. They do have Legoland up there, though. We were tempted to drive up to the front gate, take a selfie and send it to mission leadership. Fear not, we resisted the temptation as to avoid ruffling more feathers.
We pulled up to our first visit all the way in Oceanside and attempted to knock on the door. Unfortunately, deaf people cannot hear door knocking. We pounded on their walls across the front of their house, trying to make enough vibrations for them to investigate the mini earthquake we were creating, but alas; no answer. We went back later that night and flashed our phone flashlights through their blinds, but to no avail. We visited a number of other people up around Vista without a whole lot of success in contacting the people we set out to visit. One was on vacation, another moved a while back. Mighty unfortunate. We had some late lunch at Subway and discussed what to do with the rest of our time. It was quite the mile investment to go all the way up to Oceanside, we didn't want to waste it.
Now you may be wondering why I would even bother writing this in my email. I know my readers don't come back every week to hear the failures of Elder Coxson (I think), that's no fun. Don't even worry, though, because this is the moral of the story today. The Lord sees effort, and I'm unable to see the exact effect of the work that I did that day. Sure, nothing that Elder W and I wanted to accomplish actually got done. We felt pretty mid sitting in the Subway wondering what we had done with the past 6 hours and 100+ miles. But thinking back, we still touched the lives of the people around us. I had a conversation with the sandwich lady at Subway, we talked with the brothers that lived next to the deaf man that moved. Maybe we did more good than we realized. I just don't know, and there is no way I can know.
Back when I was serving in Black Mountain, there was a video that I loved to show to members to get them hyped about missionary work. It was about not seeing all the good that they were doing in their own lives and with the people around them, and that was the lesson that I needed on Saturday. I recommend y'all go watch it. I can promise that the work that you guys do is more than you can imagine. Just think of the ripples that have changed your life, and the source of said ripples don't even know about it. Y'all are doing better than you think you are.
Anyways, sitting in the Subway, we get a call from the English missionaries in Vista. They tell us that they had just met a deaf lady out in public and she wanted the ASL missionaries to come by later that day and teach her about Jesus Christ. We had already spent the time and miles to drive all the way to Vista, and that happened to coincide with the day that English missionaries would stumble across a deaf woman who needed to hear the gospel. We finished up our late lunch, called a few of our friends about church the next day and then headed over when that lady got out of work. We head over to the apartment that the English missionaries gave us and waved in the door. The people in there were like, 'can we help you?' No good, deaf people can't ask if they can help us. We ask if there's a deaf lady who lives here, she wanted to talk with us. But to our surprise, the hearing lady in the apartment said she didn't know anyone who was deaf, and there wasn't anybody in that apartment who was deaf.
So Elder W and I do the best thing we could think of and knock almost every door in the complex, trying to find this one deaf woman. Maybe she wrote down the wrong apartment, or the wrong apartment name, or something. We spent almost two hours asking every person who would listen if they knew a deaf lady, but to no avail. We gave the phone number she gave the English missionaries a ring, but the call wouldn't go through. It wasn't a VP number, and calling it failed. So here we are, back to square one. Why were we up there? I'll be honest with you, I have no idea. I can only speculate, and only God knows why. Perhaps the many people we talked to needed to hear from us, I'm not sure. God knows where to find his children and has a plan for each of them. I truly hope that deaf woman will find missionaries again. Wherever she is now, whatever she is doing, God is aware of her. There's a plan for her, and somehow we will return to live with God once more.
The reason this letter is coming at you so late at night is due to a trip to the Midway. It's a decommissioned USS Aircraft Carrier that's been turned into a museum, and it was super neat. Walking around the inside and seeing a place like the ones my ancestors served in was a cool experience, and I'm a big ship nerd anyways. I just want to watch a crew build that big of a vehicle, like, how do they put all the wiring and pipes together like that? Crazy. I also learned that the current US fleet is powered by nuclear, how about that. It's a little sad to think that the sole purpose of that ship is to take away the lives of others, but the technology behind it is cool nonetheless.
I hope that you all have a wonderful week! It'll be a good week! Choose to be happy, and I promise it will be.
-- Elder Coxson
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