Elder Will Murdoch-Ft. Worth Texas Mission

The jail cells in Wortham, TX. that are still in use Hermit Jew Pt.2: On Friday  we had a really interesting day, we had a what was basically a Q&A with a Baptist youth pastor that we met last week for like, an hour and a half. (I'll talk about that later.) We met a woman who was baptized into the church back in Tennessee and we began to teach her granddaughter. Also, someone who looked suspiciously like Tito Jackson tried to break our Branch Mission leaders hand. A pretty normal day if, a bit busy.   It was about  6:30  and I had to use the bathroom so we biked over to the Cefco in Wortham before we got back to tracting. When we were walking in we saw some guys in the parking lot trying to fix their car or something and we resolved to help them after I had taken care of business.  When I walked out of the bathroom Elder Petrucka was talking to the gas station attendant. She had tears in her eyes as she finished her life story about how...

Hermit Jew: Way back in November Elder Rowley and I got a referral to deliver a Bible and a Book of Mormon to an inactive member living in a town up north that we rarely went to, whose records weren't in our LDS tools. He lived too far away for us to just "pop in" on him unannounced so we tried calling and texting him several times to set up a time for us to drop by and give him the books. He never responded.  A week rolled by and we finally emailed him and our email said something like this: "Hey Brother R***, we have your Bible and Book of Mormon when would be a good time for us to drop them off to you?" A few days later we got an email that was sent out at like  11:00 pm  the previous night and all it said was: "You could drop them off now." We were a little mad that he tried using email as a fast form of communication so we emailed him again, told him that didn't work for us and told him to call us gave him our number and e...

Jerky Pal: On Monday evening Elder Petrucka saw this little neighborhood on the map and wanted to go knock the doors there. When we drove over it was pitch black and looked a little sketchy and since I didn't feel like getting murdered we left. The next day he wanted to go back, so after an early teaching visit we biked towards this place in the forgotten part of Groesbeck. We pulled up and realized this was no ordinary neighborhood, it was a large run down trailer park. At some point in time the roads had probably been pretty nice but, after decades of neglect they had become dilapidated and decrepit. Bordering the trailer park on 3 sides was a thick forest guarded by a rusted barb-wired fence. We could hear noises coming from the forest too. Some were distant human voices others were not-so-human. Basically, imagine if Jurassic Park had a really old trailer park in it. I took a step forward and I accidentally kicked something. A syringe.  I made one of those smiles y...

This week on Hoarders: On Friday  Elder Petrucka got the opportunity to go to the endowment session of a less active woman he helped reactivate a few months ago. I was super excited because that meant I got to got to the temple too but the Zone Leaders told us that the AP's were only letting Elder Petrucka and Elder Smith (Elder Petrucka' s old companion) go to the temple. So I got to spend my  Friday  in Hillsboro. Thursday  night Elder Bibeau texted and told me to bring service clothes and I was pretty excited because I haven't done service since a branch member, who shall remain nameless, tried turning the missionaries into his indentured servants.  I showed up at Hillsboro around  10 am  and at 11 we got in the car to go do some service. We went to this old lady's house that looked like at one point in time would have been very nice but it was all run down and gross looking now. Elder Bibeau called the lady and she told us to walk her dog fir...

Love those Texas Ice Storms! Get the man an ice scraper! Happy New Year-2018 (5:30 p.m.) Warning:  the man that spoke with me in this story used some awful words. I've bleeped them out but this still probably isn't something you'd want to read with your kids. Sorry in advance if anyone gets offended.    Checkmate, atheists: On Friday  I was on exchange with Elder Cook and since we had absolutely no appointments we tracted all day long. We met a lot of cool people and most people were pretty friendly with us like usual. Then we knocked on this one door, it swung open for about .3 seconds a man let out a furious, "UGH!" and slammed the door in our face so hard pictures in his window shook.  "ATHEIST HOUSEHOLD!" He screamed at us from behind the door.  We stood there surprised, not because he slammed the door on us or yelled at us but because he was an atheist in Texas. An atheist in Texas is a lot like an American man in North Korea: he...