Elder Hopkins in San Jose: Its week 5... and I am already out of good subject lines.

Pictures from the baptism of Richard Hillis from September 6th, 2014.

Palo Alto Missionaries

Elder Hopkins, Richard Hillis (and son) Elder Harper


Baptism of Richard Hillis

This week has been really great! I attached the pictures from last weeks baptism and some pictures I took on September 11th. The whole zone got together and put our testimonies on Red, white, and blue balloons. That was pretty cool. Also there is a picture of Elder Pese jumping on the trampoline outside of the cottage, sorry that it is blurry. Also, Elder Harper, my trainer, is an artist. He drew a picture of me if I were black.

So last Friday I had a pretty humbling experience. We were at Sunrise Senior Living, an assisting living home where we do a lot of service. It was time to leave for our appointment when the director, Aprielle, informed us that it was national Milkshake day and if we could stick around for 5 minutes she would make milkshakes for us before we left. Elder Harper said we should really get going, I told him that 5 minutes would not really make any difference. I came to eat those words.

Sure enough 5 minutes later we were done and out the door with our small dixie cups of milkshake. We got in the car and a wreck took place in the intersection in front of us. The wait put us 40 minutes behind. If we would have left on time we would have avoided the delay.

We showed up to our appointment late. Our investigator, Vina, a tongan girl who we wanted to set a baptismal date with had been in an argument with her sisters when they got home 10 minutes before we had arrived. She was very emotional when we got there and we could not get through much of the lesson. If we had arrived on time I am sure that the lesson would have gone much better. But it took a long time and we did not get to set a baptismal date.

We were now an hour and 15 minutes behind schedule. We showed up to our dinner appointment late. The family had already eaten and we had arrived at the time when they were putting their baby to sleep. We sat awkwardly in their kitchen and ate the cold food and left without sharing a message.

Because we were so far behind schedule (now about an hour and a half) we missed an appointment we set with an investigator entirely. He doesn't have a phone so the only way we can set more appointments with him is by setting them at the end of our lessons. So now we do not know when we will meet him.

Then we went to our last appointment and of course we were 5 minutes late and they had already left.

It was very humbling. I felt like Esau who traded in his birthright for a mess of pottage. I had traded in a night of missionary work for a small dixie cup of melty ice cream. I am not too down about this experience though, I learned a lot from it and it was very humbling and the rest of the week was really awesome. I learned to put nothing in front of the work I am doing here.

My mom asked me a few questions in a letter, I think I will answer them here for everyone.

My normal day routine is study in the morning then we try to fill our mornings with service if we can because the morning is not very good for meeting with people. Also because I am a new meeting every morning we have an extra hour of study for training. That is how it is for the first 3 months. Then we just go out all day and meet with different people and meet people on the street. There are so many different cultures and diversity here it is really amazing. We do all types of service ranging from picking weeds to mowing lawns to washing windows to washing peoples furniture in their backyard.

This mission has 7 different official languages, Tongan, Samoan, Vietnamese, English, Spanish, Chinese, and American Sign Language. The districts are usually all of the same language, but the zone is all different types of language from the stake.

The food has been good, we are fed really well here. I have tried a lot of types of new food. We eat breakfast at home, usually cereal. We eat lunch at home sometimes we eat out, but not usually, and dinners are usually provided by ward members.

That is really about it. It has been really fun and we are working really hard to get the ward more involved in the work.