Time ticks on, and Elder Harris sweats in the Las Vegas Sun with a smile on his face. 107 is the coldest day here this week.
So, you may be wondering why our apartment smells citrus-y, as per the subject line. I will explain. You may remember that we have had some air conditioner leakage awhile back, flooding our carpet. This has probably happened to some degree or another two or three times. Because of that I wasn't too concerned when I got out of the shower one day and Elder Parker said, "We have a wet spot on our carpet!" I said that it was just the AC acting up again and we didn't have to worry about it too much. It would dry up pretty quick. "That's too bad," we thought as the carpet spot slowly grew to span the hallway. "What a pity," we mused as the water traveled over and into the closet, soaking my laundry bag. "Perhaps we should be concerned," we said as the water started running down the walls and out of the light switch socket. You could hear it dripping inside the walls. Soon every step caused a small splash and the doorframe on the bathroom swelled up so much that you can't even shut the door anymore. We called the apartment office and said, "We might have a small leak in our airconditioner..." It turns out it wasn't that. A toilet 2 stories above us had exploded, and all the water just came pouring down. It was rather unfortunate. As we did our studies we heard a loud, "wump!" outside. This was followed by another two or three wumps. We looked out the window and saw carpet padding cascading from the upper floors. The next day someone finally came and looked at our carpet. They pulled out our pads, and after going another several days with damp carpet and no pads, they came in today and got us new pads and shampooed everything. Maybe it is all just a blessing in disguise, because our carpet probably hasn't been cleaned for 20 years. Thus this citrus smell.
This week we also got to go to church again. I think that was my fourth time in about 5 months, so I am feeling pretty active, haha. We missed the bus, so we biked about 30 minutes in our suits, but I love getting the fresh air. It made me sad, though, we had a meeting, so we were at the church early. We ended up doing a ton of cleaning because someone had just trashed the yard of the church. They had pulled all the trash out of the dumpster. We cleaned up beer cans, human poop, and worse. It just made me sad that someone would do that.
But! There are lots of other people in the world that are really good. We taught some members the other day and they gave us a whole tray of muffin and cinnamon rolls, which was super nice. We also went to a bike shop called Bike World to fix up a flat Elder Parker had. We fixed it at the store, and asked if we could borrow a wrench. They gave us a cool one that could fit like 8 different nut sizes and just told us to keep it.
Apparently I have continued my sleep-teaching, probably scaring my poor comp to death. He said he got up to go to the bathroom and as he walked past my bed, in his words, my large frame that hangs off my tiny bed just sat up like a robot, I mumbled something about "good lesson," shook an imaginary persons hand, and rolled over and fell back to sleep. I didn't remember any of that, so that was humorous.
This week we brought someone we are teaching a tie and taught him to tie it so he can wear it to church. He seemed really excited.
One thing I really enjoyed this week is when I was praying one night about how I could help a certain missionary and be a good leader. Suddenly I found my thoughts taken to imagining his desires to serve God, his willingness to be reassigned and return to his mission, and thoughts of his family that must love him and worry about him. I just felt impressed to love him better. I suddenly came to the very clear realization that the Holy Ghost had guided all those thoughts to me the entire time. It was almost like, "Aha! You almost got away with me thinking that those thoughts were my own, but I caught you! They were from you the whole time!" It was just a sudden but clear realization that I had been receiving some pretty clear revelation. And it wasn't anything earth-shaking or ground-breaking. Really pretty simple. But I was very grateful that God helped me recognize it.
The work goes forward. I enjoy it and only ever find myself frustrated that there isn't ever enough time in the day to do all the missionary work I want to get done. Sometimes I catch myself feeling like that, just that I want more time to work harder, but then I realize that that is probably a good thing, and I'm not doing so badly.
Have a good week.
Elder Harris
Pictured are all the tupperwares we have to bring back to members that give us so much good food, double-decker bus time, and me hanging out with my crush (haha). Today we also drove past a crazy house that is like a combination of hoarding and a mini-golf course without any actual golfing. They had a giant dinosaur statue, a ferrari, manequins, a Chili's restaurant pepper, a roller-coaster on the roof, a small mount rushmore, and a million other strange things. I took pictures of this original batmobile and a small space-shuttle. Kind of crazy!
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