Adjusting to Midland

This week has been really long. And my feet hurt more than they ever have in my life, haha. Midland is awesome! But our area is huge and, like Seminole, it's supposed to be a car area, but we're stuck on bikes. Only Elder Morley likes walking more than biking, so we do a lot of walking. It's weird being in a big city now, since I got used to the small town life of Seminole. We don't even live in our area and have to walk about ten minutes to get to it.

It seems like this area will be a little harder than my last area because I feel like the poorer people of Seminole were a lot more humble and ready to accept the gospel. We're also working with a lot of less active members because there's so many! Probably almost half of the ward is less active it seems like! We've only had one lesson not with less active or active members this week and we only have one investigator right now and she might get deployed soon.

We did meet this one guy morning finding one day and taught him a lesson. He soaked it all up and loved it and accepted a baptism date already! But we had to turn him over to the sisters in the YSA ward so we probably won't see him again, or at least we won't be the ones teaching him.

Sunday it was really nice being in a ward again, but I feel like I know nobody, haha. There are three sets of missionaries in our ward (including Morley and I) plus two other wards in the city and a Spanish Branch. I'll have to get used to having so many other missionaries around. One missionary in our ward, though, is Elder Garey, who was in my MTC district!! It's great seeing him again and he's already training. After church Sunday we had the other elders in our ward drop us off in one part of our area. We spent the next five hours walking around visiting people and just contacting people (well, five hours including the hour and a half walk back to our apartment). I have some gnarly blisters from that, haha. While we were out there we talked to some people who only spoke Spanish and so I tried to talk to them, but I pretty much suck at it, haha. They probably didn't understand a word I said.

It's been kind of a hard week adjusting to Midland but I think I'll like it here and I hope we can find some people to teach or at least I can figure out how to help less active members better. I love and miss you all.

- Elder Carlson