Elder Roden's Tennessee Knoxville Mission: Malakai!

Busy busy busy week this past week, but it was awesome
MALAKAI:
Wednesday night was Malakai's baptism! We are super happy for him. We had a great service with good attendance. It was also really cool because one of the young men was able to baptize Malakai, which went really well. The young men’s president approached us about getting the young men more involved, so we decided that would be an awesome thing to have happen. Then on Sunday, after we locked our car keys and apartment keys in our apartment and had to call to get a last minute ride from a member, I was able to do the confirmation during sacrament meeting.
And now after Malakai's baptism, it has sparked interest in some of his family, so we will be keeping in touch there.

Malakai with the elders

TRACTING:
Elder Donahoo and I have been pounding the streets really hard trying to build up our teaching pool. We have been tracting a lot lately and it is always interesting, haha. We were at this one apartment complex that was pretty run down and we knocked on this door a couple times and nobody answered. And right next to the door were some steps going down to some abandoned room and the steps were covered in moss (I’ll include a picture). For whatever reason we decided it would be a cool picture, so I walked down to pose. But as soon as Donahoo took the picture, the guy whose door we had just knocked opened up and started talking to him, haha. So while he’s by himself talking to this guy, I start awkwardly walking up the stairs to join in. Right when I got to the top step, the guy walks out of his doorway right into me, and I didn’t really know what to say except, "hey". Haha, he was so confused. But anyways, he went on to tell us how he was atheist and was not interested and what not. But as we were leaving he was like, "have a good day y’all", and we responded with "God Bless!" Missionaries have a lot of awkward experiences, a lot of "hey" moments and a lot of “God Bless”'s to atheists.

The Atheist stairs

We were also in this neighborhood knocking doors on Saturday evening, and it was pretty cloudy but we felt fine about it. But as we were standing on this one porch, it literally started raining harder than I have ever seen in my life, and our car was like 200 yards away. So we just started bookin’. We probably looked so dumb. But when we got to the car literally every square inch of our clothes were soaked to the bone.

Drowned rats...

Also one really cool thing happened, we were knocking an apartment complex and we met this lady and she said she was busy but to come back tomorrow. So we came back and we taught her and her 2 daughters the restoration and it went really well! They accepted a baptismal date for the 23rd of this month. There are people being prepared!

Their area includes a small section of Virginia

MOVE:
We got a call one day saying that there was a ward family trying to move out and nobody to help them and they wanted some help moving "couches". So we showed up and they had a U-haul there that was empty. And they said "alright we'll bring some stuff out for y’all". So in the humid 90 degree weather, with literally everything in the house soaked in cat pee and cat hair, Elder Donahoo and I packed that thing to the brim. It was so hot and the only people there were the mom and her kids, and another lady from the ward. Yikes. But after a while we finally got it done.
SHADES OF GRACE:
Well I got roped into singing at Shades of Grace during their service. Haha, I was just playing around one day and Pastor Will heard a song and said I was playing it. So I, with Sister Dutson on the piano, played it during service. And the microphone I was using just kept getting lower, and lower, and lower throughout the song, haha. But it worked out okay. If you look up, Shades of Grace: A United Methodist Congregation on Facebook, they live stream their service every week and we were at about minute 38 (June 3^rd) Haha!

Singing at the Methodist's service

POISON IVY:
So we were doing some service for Matt a couple weeks ago, and I got into some poison ivy up my arms and legs. It sucks I wouldn’t recommend it. But I’ve got some lotion stuff a member gave me so hopefully that works.