Time's Winged Chariot, or Whatever

I haven’t written a blog post all week. The thing is, I don’t have much to say. I went to a forum on Tuesday night where one of the speakers said, “I know Congressman Moore was very uncomfortable with the size of the stimulus package,” and I was the only person who laughed. What the hell is THAT about?! The Pirates were above .500 with over a week of the season behind them, but now they’re one game under. We had the missionaries over for dinner last night. This is the type of exciting stuff that’s been going on in my life, and this is why I haven’t written a blog post.

Okay, here’s something, I guess: I feel like a fraud when I share “uplifting” stories from my mission, because the only thing that makes them uplifting is cutting them off before the end. Does that make me a liar? Am I misleading people? For instance, I’ll share this story with you in two parts; the first part will end with the uplifting portion, and the second part will be “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say.

PART ONE:

I was on splits with the district leader in his area. Towards the end of the day, he pulled into a shopping center parking lot. “Okay, let’s get out an invite 20 people,” he said. “If it looks like the manager is coming out to yell at us, just head back to the car and we’ll go.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with this,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because we know it’s wrong.”

“We don’t know it’s wrong.”

“Then why would we be on the look-out for the manager and leave before he told us to?”

“Well, how do you guys invite 20 people a day?”

“Tracting.”

“But that would take hours.”

“I know, but it’s what we have to do.”

He was angry about it, but we went tracting. We only had about an hour left until our splits ended, so we went into the neighborhood behind the shopping center and began knocking doors. Within the first few doors we found a gourmet chef who was not interested in the gospel, but who loved to cook for missionaries. He said he and his wife would always have the missionaries over in their old town, and any time we wanted dinner, call them up and he’d cook for us. The district leader wasn’t so grumpy after that. Then, on the next street, we had this girl answer the door. She was in her mid-to-late teens and had been sent to live with relatives because she had been misbehaving in her hometown. We taught her a first discussion on the front step and she seemed interested in learning more. Our splits ended, but the district leader and his companion subsequently taught her the rest of the discussions and she was baptized.

END OF PART ONE.

PART TWO:

Meanwhile, my companion and I were teaching the baby-daddy of a girl in our quarter of the ward. Because the girl was a minor, he was on probation for knocking her up. He couldn’t be baptized while he was on probation, so he’d been taking the discussions for over a year, planning on getting baptized as soon as he was cleared. My companion and I both felt bad about this guy; it was obvious to us that he was only joining the church so his baby-momma would take him back. His probation was set to expire and he asked me to baptize him. I told our mission president I didn’t feel comfortable doing it, but our mission president said it wasn’t our call and we just had to do it. His baptismal date would be the same as that of the girl from the district leader’s side of town.

She was one of those investigators who confused the good feelings of the Spirit for good feelings about the missionaries. She had a crush on the district leader’s companion. He, however, was involved in a relationship with the under-aged baby-momma, and would be sent home in a few weeks. The investigator told the elder she liked him, he told her he didn’t like her, she became distraught and wanted to back out of her baptism.

Baptismal Sunday came around. The guy I had to baptize was upset that he was being confirmed second, because he was hungry and wanted to leave early to get something to eat. He met the girl investigator. A ward member told us the next week that she’d seen them naked together at a party, and that my baptism told the other one that the church wasn’t true. Neither of them ever came to church again.

If it weren’t for a baptism the night before I came home, that would have been my only baptism on my mission.

END OF PART TWO.

So when the missionaries were over for dinner last night, we were talking about tracting and I shared Part One, but I couldn’t get all goose-bumpy about it like they did because I knew Part Two. I obviously wasn’t going to tell these two sister missionaries Part Two, but should I then have not even told Part One?