It really just hit me how different this place is. Most places are really run down. There are some places that are actually pretty nice, but they're only as good as a typical Kaysville neighborhood. There is this one park where there is a lot of gang violence and shootings, which is kind of scary, especially considering the shootings happen in broad daylight, but its far enough away that I'm not scared.
It was kind of scary the other night though. My comp and I parked our bikes on the end of this street and walked up the street knocking doors. We met this one atheist guy who showed us a video about how religion is all made up and what not. I asked him a few questions and ultimately stumped him and then bore my testimony. I asked if we could come back, and he said no. :) but the scary part was when we were heading back down the road to our bikes. It was really dark and there weren't many streetlights and we had to walk past these two guys. One of them clearly had a gun in his pocket, and the other had a huge wad of cash.
I've learned that when dealing with some of the people there is this thing we do called "The Point". When we see one of our black "homies", we just raise up our hand like we're going to wave, but instead we just raise up one finger and point kind of at them and then up in the air. They do it back and they know we're homies. Honestly, I'm not worried about getting hurt here at all.
It's a little sad here too, because there are a lot of people who believe in God, but they don't want to change or anything. Most of the contacting I do goes like this:
me: "Christ gave his apostles the authority to baptize, right?"
dude: "Oh yeah, amen brother"
me: "All of the apostles died and that authority was gone from the earth"
dude: "Oh yeah"
me: "That authority to baptize has been brought back in our Church, and only in our Church"
dude: "Amen! oh yes brother"
me: "Will you be baptized by that restored authority?"
dude: "I've already been baptized"
me: "But will you be baptized again, this time by the proper authority of God?"
dude: "I've already been saved"...
No, its not all that bad, but that's 70% of my contacting, kinda funny, but kinda sad.
There's also this church here called the Calvary baptist church which is crazy. The members are super devout, and the church is one of the top businesses here in Beaumont. They're super anti-Mormon, so if we meet anyone from that church there's almost no hope, kinda sad. There is this guy from there named Pastor Jordan who takes me and my comp to Golden Corral every Thursday for lunch. He has this goal in life to unite all the churches into one. He'll say stuff like "If Joseph Smith said he was a prophet, then he was a prophet. Amen brother!" He's really nice.
Another different thing is the home teaching here. Our ward is a pretty good ward, but their home teaching is at less than 10%. The thing is, that home teaching means so much more here than in Kaysville. We met this member family yesterday who just lost their baby. They aren't super active, and the ward had no idea what they were going through. It was really sad because their house was way dirty. Their walls were covered in all sorts of gross stuff and their carpet was filled with crumbs and gross things. Their mom is really sick right now, because she had a late stage miscarriage, and the dad works a lot. What's even sadder is the fact that the ward had no idea, it's just really sad.
Anyways, this might seem like my week was really sad, but it wasn't. I'm just realizing things are a lot different from Kaysville, but the important things are the same.
I'm really loving it down here.
Elder Jone
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