Blacker, Dekan

Dekan's email address:  dekan. blacker @missionary.org He also spoke in church Sunday, so I attached his talk if interested.   Yeah, this week I found out just how disobedient Utah missionaries are. I've been told ever since I got here that Utah is known for having the most disobedient missionaries which is weird because you have people telling you not to have surgery outside of P day. I still can't get over that.        So we had President Pierson who's the area authority over our area and part of the quorum of the 70 come and speak to us. At one point he asked everybody to raise their hand if they had done Personal and Companionship study everyday this week. I saw only 6 hands go up. We had about 150 missionaries there, not good. I'm included in that too, I couldn't raise my hand. It was awful seeing my mission president's face because the last couple weeks he was feeling really great about the mission and kept telling us so. Then that happened ...

     Not much happened this week that seems to be worth mentioning. We were actually really busy and we continue to be getting busier. Our schedule next week is filled to the brim. We now have 4 people that we are currently teaching. All of them are kids, 3 nine year olds and an 11 year old. Seems like teaching kids is a big part of this mission. Elder Stewart is in charge of doing the baptismal interviews for people that other missionaries have taught and both of those interviews were for 9 year olds as well.       The car is nice. I really can't complain, but I'm going to anyways. There's this thing called "driver i" that our mission is piloting. It's a camera that tracks both us and the car. So it'll yell at us for a bunch of stuff while driving. Like when we're having a conversation, it tells us to stay alert. It's super picky about maintaining a safe distance, breaking too hard, accelerating, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Other missionarie...

      This week was by far the strangest I've had out on my mission. Yeah, so I broke my wrist on Monday. So, me and Elder Stewart were biking to what would have been my first nonmember lesson ever. Unfortunately,  we never got there because while we were biking, there was one point where we were on the sidewalk and I was trying to go from the sidewalk and use the driveway to get onto the road. Well what actually happened is as we neared the driveway, I checked over my shoulder to make sure there weren't any cars coming and as I did this I ended up veering off of the sidewalk. Unfortunately, there wasn't any grass off the side of the sidewalk just a hole. So I veered off the sidewalk into this hole and then immediately hit the driveway, because it was level with the sidewalk - not the hole, and went over the top of the handlebars. As I was in the air I was thinking, hmm here we go again. (I did basically the exact same thing mountain biking a couple weeks ago.) ...

     This week seriously went by so fast. Like it's actually really hard to believe that it has been an entire week. I've found a couple of things to do to spend my time better this week. First, the Layton mission is piloting a new 12 week training program. So everyday we have about 30 minutes of training activities to do. Second, we got a new area to add to the area we were already serving in. So now it's just me and my companion over 14 wards across 2 stakes. We kinda need a car now though as it takes 2 hours for us to bike up the mountain to the edge of our area. Third, I've been writing. My mom gave me a great idea to write a book about and so this week I started writing that book. I love writing so much . It's so relaxing to me, I just get to sit down, immerse myself in this world, and then write down what I imagine happening in the scenario. Actually, writing this book has reminded me why I wanted to be a sports writer. I haven't even written very much, bu...

      This week was better. To put it simply, I had growth which greatly helped my outlook on how things were going. Going into the week I had 2 simple goals, or things to focus on. First, I wanted to make sure I did the full 60 minutes of studying rather than 45 or 50 like I was doing. Second, I wanted to make sure to start my day with a prayer. I honestly didn't accomplish doing either of those things everyday. In fact, of the 6 days I had the goals, I did them only 3, but that's 3 more than last week and this week I have the same 2 focus areas with the intention and expectation of everyday achievement.       This week really was pretty typical for the most part, member lessons, wandering around, service. There was one night where we didn't have anything planned and so we just wandered around for 3 and a half hours trying to talk to people. There was hardly anybody out and those who were had somewhere to be, so as you can imagine that was rather dishearte...