You Shall Not Be Confounded Before Men

Hello everybody! Elder Rowley has since departed Mexia and Elder Petrucka is my new companion. What's Elder Petrucka like? Well, I could use up most of the time I have today describing him but I'll only use two words: Theater Kid.

Bashing:

Saturday was a very good day. Almost every door we knocked on people wanted to talk to us about the gospel. We were on fire. It started to get pretty dark and knocking on doors late at night and so we were getting ready to head out because knocking on doors in a small town in a state that has more guns than red blood cells per capita is never a good idea. We found one last house that looked well lit enough that we probably wouldn't get shot at, and knocked on the door.

This woman answered and without saying anything she held up her finger to tell us 'one moment and walked into another room leaving her child to hold the door open.

We stood there for quite some time when all of the sudden this  younger African-American guy shows up at the door and says, "is y'all Mormons?" 

"Yep." We said not entirely sure where this conversation was going. 

He motioned for us to come in and said, "I got somethin for y'all." And he walked out of sight into another room. We were a little confused so we stayed put. 

He popped back in front of us, "come on!" He commanded us, and like lambs to the slaughter we obeyed. 

We saw the guy walk down a hallway into another room and he kept telling us, "I got somethin for y'all. I not somethin for y'all." 

At this point I was considering if I could make a run for it but there was another man too sitting close enough to us that he could grab me if I tried anything. 

The first guy appeared and was holding something behind his back and I don't know about you but "gun" is definitely on my list of things people probably hold behind their backs. 

He ran towards us and pulled whatever he was holding in front of me, I closed my eyes and said a little prayer that it wasn't a gun. 

BAM!

I opened my eyes, the man was now sitting down at the same table the other guy was sitting at. Placed before him wasn't a gun but something almost as bad. A Bible. This guy wanted to bash. 

Here's a fun fact about Bible bashing: Mormon missionaries are the best at it.

Here's another fun fact: In Alma 21 Aaron tries to bash but it gets him nowhere. 

"Aight let's hear it. Let's hear about Jesus then." The guy with the Bible sneered at us. 

"Hey Holy men," said the other guy "cast out the devil for me." 

Almost immediately after that I just moved into the Restoration, but before long they tried to confuse me and trip me up with weird and inappropriate questions but we were able to answer every single one of them and I guess you could say we confounded them.

After we stupefied them we kept going with the Restoration and then they started to act friendlier towards us asking real questions about the Book of Mormon. 

In the end, they still weren't very interested but they did like us enough to to give us bro hugs and said we could come by anytime. 

Christmas:

Christmas went by relatively fast, I got to call my family, we ate dinner at the Badgetts and we caroled to some old folks because who else would want unexpected company on Christmas? 

Everyone kept saying it would snow this year but Texans say that every year and last year it was 80 degrees on Christmas. It did however, get a little chilly on Christmas eve and so our windshield was covered in ice. That was great and all except for the part where we didn't own an ice scraper so we used some plastic spatulas we had. 

We were also told by an Elderly couple we caroled to, to go see the Smiths wagg out in the country. Despite the fact that we don't have many miles we felt like we should go. 

As we drove down a dark, cold, dirt road next to a cemetery I saw a possum in the road. Possums are filthy creatures that resemble an R.O.U.S. so I kept driving at regular speed to scare it off. When we were about 3 feet away I realized it wasn't a possum (fast) at all, but an armadillo (slow). It was really cool because that was the first time I've seen an armadillo. Unfortunately the fun experience of seeing a live armadillo turned into the morbid experience of making roadkill as it hopped right in front of the wheel and made an awful mettalic scraping sound when we killed it. That really doesn't have anything to do with anything but that was one of the more interesting parts of my Christmas. 

We made it to the Smiths and knocked on like 3 of their doors until Sister Smith finally answered one of them. We sang 'Silent Night and she told us she was touched by our thoughtfulness and that Brother Smith had been called into work in the middle of dinner so she spent most of Christmas alone. 

She also told us when she heard knocking she grabbed a Glock and put it in her back pocket because she wasn't really expecting company that far out in the country and how last week her house got robbed. 

But no one got shot and she enjoyed our singing and the cookies we made and she gave us some Pecan Pie. Not a bad Christmas.