2007 February 25--Toby's Turn

Hey,

It's wonderful to hear from all of you. You guys always seem to have a ton of things going on, which is great. I don't know where to start with this week. Thank you for your prayers. We definitely need them.

Anyway, yeah, it's been a pretty rough week. The good news is, I haven't blown up at my companion yet. I've been taking notes from Ensign articles and what not, about how missionaries get along with a difficult companion. One I liked was about a companion who made his sleeping-in-companion breakfast, (in the article, sleeping-in was not the only problem, there were lots of parallels to my situation.) Anyway, I did the same thing, but it didn't turn out as nice as in the article. He got up to eat, but he had some things to say about how he hates the milk here, and wasn't a fan of the laughing cow cheese I used in the eggs. He also didn't like it when I asked if we could use some of the Parmesan cheese he had gotten from one of his packages. Sigh. He amazed me further still by going back to sleep after the breakfast. I've had to wake him up a couple of times this week, so we could make our first appointment. We missed 3 appointments on Saturday morning because of what I will term a "drama queen performance" from my companion ( however, I feel that "drama queen" is cutting the description a bit short). I had to call one of the senior missionaries to clear up whatever his problem was so that we could go out and work.

I've kept my cool pretty well though, which I think is something just short of a miracle. I think I could contribute this to my last companionship being so mellow - and we just really had a good time. True we had some obnoxious things happen to us that transfer, but we were able to laugh at ourselves and ease the tension of some intense situations through humor and optimism. I really feel like I've gotten along great will every single one of my companions, even some that I had very little in common with. So now I've been thrown a curve ball, and I've think it nailed me in the head. I'm still trying to work out what I need to do. I'm positive that my companion's got some great personality traits somewhere, he's just seems to have suppressed or replaced them with something else. He may have just gotten in the bad habit of looking on the dark side of things. I think this bothered all of the rest of his companions, but all they did was tell him that he was really an unpleasant person to work with ( in probably more colorful language than that, but I think you get the point). Anyway, I'm convinced that he wasn't helped by that. I think he needs someone to help him out of the pit, not throw a shovel at his head.

I've had a lot of help dealing with this through prayer, and I've started to meditate about it as well, both of which, I think, have helped. I made him lunch the other day, it was kind of like a hamburger-helper macaroni sort of thing, and he didn't say anything bad about it, which is almost like the equivalent of Elder S saying "thank you", so I think there has been some improvement. I guess I've just got to keep going little by little ( tsikelikely as they say). I need your prayers, because I'm not perfect, not even anywhere close, and I've got things I have to work on even without all of the problems that exist in this companionship. I'm hoping that next week you will get a happy letter about missionary work, and maybe some of our investigators, or at least something about Madagascar. Until then, I still haven't unleashed the tension on my companion, and I've been figuring out some positive outlets for the frustration. Guitar is good ( a drum set might work better for tension-release, but you work with what you've got I guess). Meditation is good too. I've taught Elder S some guitar lessons which I think he likes, so we'll see how that goes.

In the mean time, I love you all, I pray for you everyday, and I look forward to hearing from you every week. I plan to start writing some letters to people this week. I wonder how many people I may have inadvertently offended because I'm so terrible at keeping correspondence in writing. Oh well, there's always something to improve. Well, until next week, Veloma!

Elder Draper