Elder Braden Miles, Washington DC South Mission: March 30, 2015

I will start out with how church went yesterday since it is fresh on my mind. We had three investigators at church - Jason, Larry, and Charlotte.

Jason is a referral from a young woman in our ward that we taught for the first time this week. He is 6' 8", African American, and played football and basketball in high school (he graduated last year). He went to our church when he was 3-5ish with his mom who is now inactive I guess. He told us he prays all the time, but still feels like he is missing something. He wants to have the church in his life really bad. After sacrament meeting he told us that he felt really good and wanted to have that feeling in his life all the time. Sadly, we will be passing him off to the Elders in my previous ward this week because the singles ward would be much better for him.

Larry is an African American guy in his 60's with a super deep voice. Seriously this guy has the coolest voice. He came to church during my second week in the area about three months ago and then went on vacation and disappeared. This week he just showed up at church unexpectedly! Everyone in the ward loved him last time he was here and the people flocked to him after sacrament to welcome him back. He made a lot of comments in gospel principles class and his word is law. When he speaks everyone listens. All of his beliefs are already in line with what we teach and he has read some of the Book of Mormon and loved it. He is the man. Once again, he doesn't live in our area, so we need to pass him off... Why does this always happen!?

Charlotte is the fiance of an inactive member. I have mentioned her in past emails. They only stayed for sacrament meeting and then had to go somewhere.

Service for their fellow man

We have a crazy schedule for this week. We have 6 solid lessons with investigators in the next 4 days and we have members set to come to each lesson. We are very excited for the work in our area right now. It seems to have slowly improved each week this transfer.

We did service for a guy on Wednesday that we talked to several weeks ago while we were tracting. We offered to help with service and he actually accepted (which surprisingly never happens)! We are helping him dig out a huge portion of his back yard so he can put a patio and a fire pit back there. His backyard is really sloped, so we are digging out a lot of dirt. He can't get any machinery back there because of his fence, so instead we just heave all the dirt over the fence... (haha). That was only the second time I have done service in this area and it was a nice change. People always think we are crazy because we basically beg them to let us do manual labor for free.

"Tired, Elders?"

I went on exchanges on Friday after our mission leadership council. I got to spend the day back in the Braddock ward! I got to see a couple of people I knew. We had correlation at my old ward mission leader’s house. This is where the picture of me sleeping comes into play. The topic came up about how the assistants don't get very much sleep and how I look a million times better now that I get regular sleep. The Elder I was on exchange with pulled out that picture of me and Elder Raban sleeping in a meeting. We had a good laugh about it. I remembered back to a time when I fell asleep in a whole mission conference and I am not sure if I ever shared it. So I fell asleep with my head resting on my fist with my elbow on the arm rest. My elbow slipped off, my head started falling, and I jolted awake. I quickly looked up to see if anyone noticed (which is a regular procedure for falling asleep in meetings). Turns out the whole mission saw it and everyone was staring at me! It was really funny and we laughed about that for awhile. Let’s just say I really enjoy the amount of sleep that I get now days.