The Storm before the Storm

Dear Family,

Thank you all so much for the e-mails this week!!! I really love reading the letters and don't ever worry about them being too long because I can print out the e-mails now and I won't have to use up my internet time to read the letters. So usually there's a calm before the storm but now there's a storm before the storm. This week has been pretty much crunch time because President is going to start organizing transfers on Monday and today's P-day and tomorrow's Sunday. Basically President asked if I didn't mind taking part of P-day out (moving that time to Monday) so we could finish his board that has all the missionaries on it. I'll send a document with my card on it so you can see what we're working on. We left the offices yesterday at 8:15PM working on finishing the backs of the cards where we have to write in all of the previous areas. We would have left even later but the bishop invited us over for dinner instead of lunch so we went to his house. We called President Lindahl and he let us stay over there past when we're supposed to be in the house because President really has a lot of confidence in the bishop of our ward. This wasn't even half of the crazyness. I had to print out a card for every one of our 161 missionaries and about half-way into the project we ran out of toner. It was pretty bad too because Elder Fuentes said that the last time they tried to buy this particular type of toner that no one had it. I was pretty much panicking at this point but fortunately we found some toner in a cabinet in another Elder's offices but we couldn't find Black toner which was exactly what the computer said we were missing. The plot keeps thickening: the computer said we were missing black but the printer had some weird error code that I didn't notice at first. When we finally figured out the code it turns out we needed Magenta toner. So now at this point the computer's a liar or the printer's a liar. In any case we actually had some magenta toner (which was the biggest break we got yesterday) so I put it in and there wasn't any more problems. So we got all the cards out while another Elder was cutting them into cards from the cardstock paper (we actually went to about 8 different stores, each the size of small countries (including Wal-Mart by the way) and no one had cardstock paper until we found a paper store and I was seriously about to give the guy a hug for finding it). After printing out the cards we started writing all the areas on the back like the old cards had. Halfway into that I had a revelation and I remembered "Oh dear, we haven't even done the cards for the Hermanas yet." I basically ran back to the computer and started formatting the cards for the Hermanas. The computer was popping out with some pretty weird errors and I was pretty much ready to explode at this point. FINALLY we finished those cards which haven't all been cut yet actually. I ended yesterday with a pretty big headache but I just felt great for all we had accomplished. Even though we still have to do next week's newsletter still (President Lindahl's coming in at 4 to finish that with us) I feel a ton better. Ok, one more problem we ran into but much earlier yesterday. When Elder Maxfield made the cards for the Missionaries on the computer he did some pretty weird formatting stuff and basically made it impossible to print from the document we had (I had to reset the computer at least a bazillion times as well as the printer so it didn't continue printing out 160 sheets of the cards we DIDN'T want (there's actually a bit of a mystery because the cards of all the Elders showed up on the black and white printer and no one knows why)). I had to make the document again so the cards printed correctly (and not with a blank sheet on just half of every page for no aparent reason). Ok, so needless to say yesterday was pretty crazy. I have some pretty crazy days to look forward to too because before the end of the month I have to write the month's Mission History and I also have to call Elders and get a hold of about 20-30 Baptism Documents that are in all parts of the mission. I also have to prepare binders for all of the Elders and Hermanas that are coming in at the transfers and then I have to update the cards for all the Elders and Hermanas that are being transferred. It would seem like at this point I would be on the floor crying but I like to use the Baseball analogy. When have the most exciting Baseball games (or any games for that matter) been? When the home team's up to bat in the bottom-of-the-9th inning, down by like 3 points, bases loaded, two strikes and the batter's sweating bullets. This would be considered a pretty stressful point, don't you think? How great does that feel when that batter just knocks the ball right out of the park? On one hand it seems like I have a ton of things to do, but when I finish these major projects I feel like I've just knocked the ball right out of the park and it reminds me of Cross-Country. At no point of a three mile race am I enjoying myself. I'd be tired, thirsty, hot and ready to just fall down because my body doesn't want to take another step. But then I just have to pick up speed and sprint the last hundred meters with everything I've got. At no point was I enjoying the race until I passed the finish line and broke my personal record. No matter how painful the race was, at the end of the race I'm reminded how much it was all worth it. Here in the offices we're not braking personal records but we are breaking "impossible" challenges. It's really amazing and I'm really looking forward to future projects here in the offices. I love you all and thank you so much for the letters!!! Bye!!!

Love,

Elder Williams

Lawrence said he formatted this chart. It says, "The Vision of the Mendoza Mission". The first section has a few numbers pertaining to baptisms, amount of discussions and investigators who have attended sacrament meetings. Here is what's listed at the bottom:

Goals of the Mission

1. Open your mouth (I think this is more of an expression meaning "contact" or "talk to someone") 10 times each day before lunch, each missionary

2. 15 discussions with a member with or without an investigator

3. Have 2 new investigators in the chapel each week

4. Have 2 new baptism commitments each week

5. 15 baptisms per companionship per week