Email Received February 16, 2011: "Still Hanging In There"

I want to apologize for all I wrote last week. I know it was largely negative, but it had been a hard week. We had a couple of spiritually strong lessons where the investigators dropped us, knowing very well they might be closing the door on God, followed by a contentious lesson with the husband of one investigator, which had been our only member present lesson in weeks. When the Holy Ghost is sad, you're sad too, and it can be hard to keep going. We were feeling really down, and it was just one of those weeks where there really isn't much good news.

Thanks for offering to send me new stuff, but I think I'll manage. Last week was really cold, didn't get above 10 degrees and one day didn't get above 0, but it's snapped really warm these last few days, 30s and 40s. We're thrilled, because we've wanted to wash the inside of our car windows, and vacuum our floor mats, but that's just impossible in below freezing weather. Just in time too, we have vehicle inspections tomorrow.

This week was good. We're getting new investigators, and dropping some others. Ruben went in for surgery this last week, so we're going to have to re-think when he could get baptized. I think He's worse off than he expected, so maybe he won't be going to Mexico after all.

We've had some interesting knocking moments. People here in Illinois are generally too lazy to yell at us, but one lady gave us a 3-minute discourse. Which is nothing compared to when we knocked into a Jehovah's Witness pastor who sermonized to us for over an hour. He was very polite, and did an excellent job inviting the spirit of contention. He was especially annoyed when I knew what Zion, the kingdom of god, Free agency, and several other things were. The deeper he found my understanding of the bible to be, the more annoyed he became... while continuing to be polite. (My poor companion. This guy had a thick accent, and spoke too fast. He directed several questions at her that she simply could not handle in Spanish, and he kind of scorned her for it.) When he finally realized he could not sway us, he let us go. We bore testimony of the living prophets and apostles, and got out. Gah, I hate those. The Jehovah's Witnesses have contention down to an art.

We also got in with this non-denominational lady who was polite, but not interested, but also deathly afraid for us, walking around at night. We hit up a nice little Buddhist lady, who told me enough that , adding things up, I've realized that most American Buddhists, or at least the ones out here, do not practice anything remotely like Buddhism as it is practiced in Asia. IE, when I asked about sutras and Bodhisattvas, they knew nothing. Shouldn’t surprise me... it makes sense that Buddhism would be as varied as Christianity. Anyway she was thrilled to look at our website.

(BTW, I encourage you all to check out the new Mormon.org, and if you're a member, to consider making a profile. The church is suing it to jump-start online proselytizing techniques.)

The final and best one was this poor guy who was disillusioned with all of Christianity. He started out by trying to give us a donation. We refused it. Confused, he kept on trying, and we repeatedly told him we couldn't take his money. His eyes got really big, and said, "You guys are for real, aren't you?" We replied that we were. We offered to have someone come by and talk to him, and he said he wasn't interested, unless he could teach us. We decided to open the can of worms, and ask him what it was he wanted to teach. He spoke generally of the second coming, (he was very correct, by the way) and then mentioned that the big sign that it was the last days was that the Jews were back in Israel. We solemnly agreed, and his eyes got big again. "You guys believe in that?" We said we believed in the literal gathering of Israel, that it had started and wasn't finished yet. He was surprised again and said most people just looked at him crazy when he said stuff like that. "Us too," we said with a smile. In the end, he still wasn't interested.

That's about it for the moment. Hope things are looking better for you guys too.

Love,

Hermana Maren Jones

Email Received February 9, 2011: Grrrr....

So. My thumb drive just died.

I was downloading a song from the new LDS youth site, when my drive started getting hacked. Not even a little hacked. I think someone tried to install some sort of boot-on-plugin junk, because windows kept telling me things like, "Could not download file e:?#E.rk, data has been lost."  I tried to eject it, but couldn't, so I yanked it and restarted the computer. now I can't do anything with it - windows always says that there is a program accessing it. I might be able to fix it on a 98 or Vista machine, but not on the silly locked down XP's the library has. I feel awful, because I had a lot of the music you guys sent me on there, and all the fliers I've made for baptisms and events and stuff, not to mention a whole pile of articles that P. Doll sent me. I've already lost everything on it once before. So I'm pretty upset.

That said, this week has been OK. Not much has happened since I last e-mailed you, aside from the fact that it's gotten COLD. We went out knocking last night at about 0 degrees, and we lasted 45 minutes before we decided we could afford to show up at the next appointment 10 minutes early. It feels very weird to lose sensation in your knees.

In other news, one of the dryers in our laundry room is not working right. It's shrunk several of my things, including my footie pajamas, my gray jumper, and a few of my sweaters. Not to mention that it melted one of my sets of fuzzy socks so that they're not fuzzy anymore, as it did to Hermana's blanket.

I'm going to stop now before I think of other bad things that happened, or before my spelling deteriorates any more.

Love,

Hermana Maren Jones.

Email Received February 3, 2011: Brrrrrrr.....

Ok, so I'm properly disappointed. My whole mission gets declared a National Disaster area, and I get NO EMAILS? I mean, GRR!

Seriously!

Ok, so Preparation Day is on Thursday due to the snow. So are transfers. We took movies, and I hope to send them to you next week. I left my camera at home.

About 10:15 Monday night, we had already been talking about preparations for the so-called life-threatening storm, when we got a text from the assistants, telling us not to go to bed for another 30 minutes, because they were going to be announcing transfers that night.

We all were staying in my district, but, we also found out transfers were not going to be until Thursday.

So, Tuesday was blowing really hard. We briefly went up to Harvard for a lesson, but decided to come right back home, because the wind was getting stronger, and we were afraid of drifts across the roads and loss of visibility. We stayed in the apartment all day; we got a text from President, saying he didn't want us driving between 4:00 PM Tuesday to 4:00 PM Wednesday. We got a little cabin fever, and that's when we started taking movies.

About 5 at night the storm really started picking up. It got nasty, so we adventured outside for a movie, and then went back in. We played around a little, texted everybody to see how they were, and then went to bed.

We get up. Our car, front porch and apartment door are all under about 5 feet of snow. We just stare at it. We're not going anywhere for a while, especially since our snow shovels are in the trunk of our car.

About 10:00 am the apartments start getting to us, plowing things out. Out building really pulls together and gets all the cars unburied and moved, so our spots got plowed nice and clean. Everyone else only dug themselves out enough to get out, and then re-parked, so the parking in front of the rest of the buildings is miserable. We tried to help out, but there was only so much we could do, since nobody except our building was working together. We went to a local appointment that evening, but did not go knocking. The roads were horrible.

I think Woodstock is the only city in our area that's open, right now. Harvard should be opening tomorrow and Hebron in three to four days. (That's where the English sisters live.) McHenry is officially closed, with no date set to open, and the elders are thoroughly stuck. Their road is still not plowed.

In the city, they have to remove truckloads of snow, because there is nowhere to put it, and ship it to "snow farms" outside of town. I don't know how that works, but I'm betting the city elders are stuck, too.

Other than that, I don't know the damage is. Between transfers and the disaster, P. Doll has not updated the mission blog.

Last week was amazing, but the storm has kind of blown it out of my mind. Today we are going to play in a snow mountain next to our apartment.

Love you, and totally safe, thanks for asking.

Hermana Maren Jones.