Mission Secretary

Wow. This last week has been a big whirlwind. Life changed very rapidly with a single transfer. I'm...now secretary of the Brazil Maceió Mission. 

 

LOLWUT

 

Yeah. I'm now the office guy for the mission. My companion is the financial secretary, who's a really cool guy named E. Douglas. He's a smart Brazilian who's definitely UCAS material. I like him a lot. I also like my second trainer on the mission, E. Langlois. Remember the really tall guy that I've taken a few photos of? Yeah. He's now my other companion. He walks me through all the new responsibilities I've got, and sometimes he has to save face when I do something dumb - and yessir, I DO do dumb things still. Becoming a secretary, unfortunately, didn't invoke a magical transmutation into the faultless Secretary Gubler.

 

Dependence on God: check. 

 

First cool thing about the office is that I'm now focusing my talents on the thing they've been focused on the majority of my life: the computer. I love using the computer, and I've literally almost forgotten nothing. It's like a dimension of my life that I had kind of forgotten existed, but refused to die. Woo! I'm confident that I've got something God wants me to contribute to the office organization and efficiency - I just gotta find it! For now...I just gotta learn all the routine stuff before I pull fancy tricks like I always want to.

 

Excited for immediate future: check.

 

Now that I'm the secretary, I'm also learning lots of the little things about the mission that I never knew before. I'm learning the internals of transfers, what a mission president actually does (or at the very least, how Prez. Gonzaga likes to do things), the various applications that the Church has developed to facilitate mission work and other things like...baptismal forms!

 

Curiousity being satisfied: check.

 

Dude. Baptismal forms are by far the most mind-numbing part of this whole process. It's a lot of repetitious typing for something that represents one of the most special things in somebody's life. It's like...canning somebody's following of Jesus Christ into a record. The date of the first crucial steps in following Him...recorded as numbers and put into a computer to get crunched and referred to when needed. It's...weird. The always-mysterious organization of the Church is kind of unraveling to me now, but it's good - I like learning this sort of stuff. I'm always welcome to eye-opening experiences.

 

In the meantime, it's also pretty cool because there's a recent convert here (really recent - 2 weeks ago she got baptized!) in the office. She's got a really neat momentum going, and always felt good when the missionaries passed by in the Edifício Work Center. She's giving us quite a few references, so we'll probably baptize in spite of spending until 6 PM every day trapped in the office!

 

Fulfillment of calling to baptize and thus happiness: check.

 

There's always a ton of things I could say. I'll focus on more details next time - for now, I've still got a small mountain of tasks to handle here! Don't y'all forget to write, because now I get mail in the same day it arrives here at the office - I'll be counting carefully. Muahahaha. Until next time, people!

 

Blog post: check.