Elder Jon Daniel: The house of levity 6-1-15

This week a lot of funny things happened.

Last week we were riding our bikes to a lesson and we took a short cut through an apartment complex. For some reason I thought we were stopping in the complex so I took my helmet off. Elder Matson kept going through down to the stop light and up the hill and I followed behind him. As I got to the stop light an SUV full of beautiful young women blasting music and singing at the top of their lungs out the window pulled up at the red light. I proceeded to turn right up the hill, but as I did so my front tire clipped the edge of the curb and I nearly toppled over my handle bars like a rag doll. Luckily I was able to catch myself in the nick of time. Unfortunately it was pretty noticeable that I had almost ate it hard, and as I started to ride up the hill I gave all the girls a good laugh, and one of them in the front passenger seat yelled at me as she was laughing and told me to put my helmet back on.. So that was fun, hah.

We helped Yong Cha, a Chinese lady in our ward, with some yard work at one of her rental properties. When we got there she told us that we were getting rid of some Birds of Paradise trees, (they’re basically like palm trees with big leaves and has orange blooms that look like the head of a bird), and they can grow pretty tall. In our case they were pretty tall. So we were wondering how she was going to take these things out, and she pulls out this electrical chain saw, haha. And we went right to work when we got there. She went ham on those trees! Imagine a short little old Chinese lady with a chain saw going to town on some tropical vegetation, haha. She cut up the two trees in about 20 minutes and we had them all loaded in the back of her van within the hour. It reminded me of all the random work and things we have done over the years with you mom, hah.

I don't know if I’ve told you before, but Elder Matson sleep talks and sleep walks every night, literally. It’s pretty funny. He doesn't just speak gibberish though, the only thing that he sleep talks about is missionary work. The other night he sat up in his bed and taught the whole first lesson, haha. That's when you know when you've been on your mission for a long time.

Whenever we go over Chris and Gloria's, Chris always says "welcome to the house of levity guys!” they always try to get us to break the rules, but we stay strong! They’re always watching a Padres game or something else like Storage Wars and they always try to get us to watch it. But we use our stealth missionary tactics to get out of it every time. We probably won’t be over there too much at the house of levity this week because Chris is having surgery on his eyes to get some cataracts out.

Yesterday we contacted a dad and his son in their yard trimming their palm trees and we noticed they had an accent. They were Persian but they both had English accents, we found out that they were from London. And we also found out that they practice Sikhism. Some fun facts about their religion is that they grow their hair long and wrap it in a turban and they can legally carry around a sword, (usually a dagger), as a part of their religion. It’s pretty sweet. They were pretty nice fellows, didn't want to learn more though. That was the first time I had ever met anyone that had practiced that religion.

Diana is going to be baptized this Saturday!!!!!!!! Keep her in your prayers that she won’t get cold feet. I don't think that will happen with her, but we’ve had that happen a few different times lately, so you never know.

So I had my exit interview on Friday, President Kendrick usually does them a week or two early for all the departing missionaries. He gave me a TON of advice on different things that he usually gives all the missionaries going home. At the end of the interview I asked him "out of any piece of advice that he could ever give me what would be most important one". What he told me was a little different from what I expected, I thought he was going to give me this drawn out lecture on some gospel topic, but this is what he said. "Very few things in this life are either fatal or final, nothing is worth getting upset about." Just as simple and profound as that. Think about it though, 99.999999% of every disagreement that we have with someone will be about absolutely nothing. Nothing is worth all the mental energy that we put into getting angry about something that is temporal. The only thing that really merits are tension is making sure that we are clean, everything else comes and goes.

I love you all,

-Elder Daniel