Some People

Alright, well the most exciting news of the week was we had somebody back into our car this week. I'll start from the beginning so you get the whole story.

Well, the car in our area has needed some work done on it for a while. We've been in contact with the guy who works for the church in this area and we scheduled an appointment to meet him at the Auburn Stake Center on Thursday so he could do the repairs. We have limited miles to drive every month and driving to Auburn is a 60 mile round trip that eats up our miles super fast. We drove to Auburn Thursday morning and almost plowed into some lady pulling out in front of us at an intersection. She was making a right hand turn into our lane and didn't stop coming from the other direction. Thankfully there wasn't a car to the left of us and I was able to swerve into that lane to avoid drilling her and her stupid dog sitting on her lap. We made it to the Stake Center where we then ended up waiting, and waiting, and waiting. I called the repair guy and he said that he thought our appointment was at 1:00 not 11:00. He then said that he wasn't able to meet with us anyways because he was tied up somewhere else. Great. We wasted a ton of our miles driving there and didn't even get what we needed done.

On the way back, Elder Garner and I stopped at a restaurant in Grass Valley that is owned by some members and they let us eat for free there. We pulled into the parking lot and took the only available parking spot right behind some guy with a giant trailer on the back of his truck. He was parked across the parking spots so that he was taking up about 4 of them. We parked, went inside (walking right in front of the guy sitting in his truck), and started to order. About 30 seconds later, the dude in the truck came in the building and asked us if we drove the red corolla. We said yes and he told us that he backed into us and ripped the bumper off. He immediately started to blame it all on us, using the intimidation approach, by saying that it is only common courtesy to not park behind somebody with a trailer and that we should have never been there. Hmmm... let's think about that for a sec. Common courtesy... It's also common courtesy to not park your giant trailer illegally taking up 4 parking spots in a small parking lot, and it's also common courtesy to, I don't know, maybe look behind you when you're trying to back up and make sure nothing is in your path? Not to mention the fact that it's also common courtesy to not use your giant trailer to cross county lines and dump trash illegally in another county to "save money." (He told us he was doing his company "a favor") We also had a restaurant full of witnesses that could clearly identify who was at fault. Basically he put a giant hole in the left-hand side of the bumper and tore it off the car. We were able to snap it back on, but it's going to be a costly repair to get that hole fixed. 2 hours of paper work later, Elder Garner and I were finally able to get back out and continue our day. The mission office is handling everything now, thankfully. Good times, good times...

That's about it for now. Our investigator, Jason, didn't show for church on Sunday and we still haven't been able to meet with him. I don't know that the deal is. He forgot about our last appointment. If we could just sit down with him one more time it would really help us know how to handle the situation. Right now we're just in the dark and all we can do is keep trying to contact him and pray that his heart will be softened.

Happy Birthday on Sunday, Mom! I'm speaking in church and I'll give you a shout-out in my talk! : D

I'm still not getting the emails Devin is sending to me. I did get the one you forwarded, so until further notice keep 'em coming. He wrote to me this week, thankfully and I've already replied, so we do have some communication happening. We'll figure things out eventually.

I'm running low on Imitrex, fyi.

Well, hope you all have a great week. Pray for us to find more investigators. Our teaching pool is pretty dry right now. Love you all!! Man, I love this work!

Elder J. Hammer