Fastest Week Ever

This was the fastest week of all time, and I will try my best to remember stuff that happened. 

ZONE CONFERENCE:

The highlight of the week was definitely Zone Conference.  Thursday morning we left the apartment at 6:00 to pick up the Greeneville Elders and drive down to Asheville, NC.  It was cool to see some missionaries I hadn't seen in a while.  The actually conference was the best one of my mission so far!  It was super spiritually packed with a lot of great people.  After zone conferences, all of the district leaders from both zones have a meeting with the AP's and President Pickett.  It is usually good but this one was especially powerful. It was a great motivator to be able to discuss things we are doing well, but more importantly what we can be doing better. 

Meeting up with Elder Sessions at ZC

After everything was wrapped up, we headed back to Greeneville to drop the other Elders off.  Before we left, they wanted to introduce me to one of the people they are teaching, so we went and talked with him for a bit, then decided to go and get some McDonald's for dinner because we were starving.  I ordered first (I was more hungry), and after I was done the manager just said "alright it'll be right out" without having me pay. And she did the same thing for all 4 of us!  Needless to say we were very grateful. 

CAR SHOW:

On Friday night the town closed off downtown Main Street for a car show so we went to check it out.  We walked around for a little while trying to talk to as many people as we could. We didn't see a whole lot of success but we did get a lot of "what are those Mormon boys doing at the car show" looks, haha. It's always good to be planting seeds while showing people we are human too. 

A familiar truck at the car show

HURRICANE FLORENCE:

So there has been a ton of chatter about the hurricane hitting the Carolinas!  There are a lot evacuated people staying in the areas very near here, including my last area.  It is super sad. Luckily, all it should be for us is some big rain storms. It's kinda weird to see the clouds coming in from the east coast when usually it's the opposite, so it should be a good storm. 

CRAZY GUY AT CHURCH:

About 45 minutes into sacrament meeting yesterday, this guy just walked right in and sat dead center in the first row. Pretty cool right, that never happens... haha. Well after sacrament was over we were in the back talking to another guy when Sister Anderson and her daughter, Franky, basically dropped him off to us and ditched us saying "we think he could use a Book of Mormon or something" haha.  We took him into the relief society room and he told us ALL about his beliefs, and there were some fun ones.  He said he just goes around to these different churches because he talks to Mohammed and he tells him to.  He is a big believer in the Boogeyman, we talked about that for a while, haha. I just eventually started walking outside towards our car (in the pouring rain) and all the while he is just going off, we were just trying to humor him, haha. And once we got close to the car he finally said he was gonna take off. 

It was so funny, Elder Farley, who is the most kind, patient, quiet, proper human on the planet was just getting tired this guy’s rambling and when the guy was like, "Did you know, Jesus killed?" 

Farley, "That’s so dumb, no he did Not"

Guy, "It says in the bible!"

Farley, "No it doesn’t"

Haha, I had a good laugh. We went back inside and Sister Anderson was like "Heyyy… sorry I didn’t know what to do" but we were just like, “ yeah you did the right thing”.  Then we were walking down the hall and President Stockinger (Branch pres.) was like, "Jeez that was scary, I was coming over then I heard some of the things he was saying then I thought “nah they got it". It was a pretty funny experience. 

That’s one more week down in the TKM.  I hit month #10 on Saturday, I think, so that was cool. We have transfer calls this upcoming Saturday so we will find out what if any changes will be made! 

Elder Roden