I had been in Palo Alto for two months and had just gotten a new companion, and this particular morning he asked me to pick the streets we would tract. I got on my knees to pray for guidance and then picked two streets that I felt good about. Off we went.
A teenage girl answered the third door on the first street and my companion gave his door approach: "We are sharing a message about Jesus Christ today and if you have 15-20 minutes we were wondering if we could come in and share that message with you.” The girl said “Uh, yeah, I guess” and then she let us in.
My companion and I hadn't discussed what we would do if we got in a door, so I just tried to follow his lead. He started by telling her about a few of our beliefs about Christ and then he introduced the Book of Mormon giving a brief overview up to Alma. He turned it over to me and I talked about Christ’s visit to the people on this continent and then turned to Moroni’s Promise. After I read the scripture and bore my testimony, my companion told the story of Joseph Smith's fisrt vision -- and I wondered if that was what he had expected me to do when it was my turn.
In any case, we gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon and left. We had given her most of the first discussion, so my companion said we could count it on our weekly report. I had my reservations because of what we didn't talk about, but I kept them to myself. Regardless of what we put on the report that week, I never counted this as a discussion and that meant that I was still waiting to teach my first dicussion in the mission field.
The area we were in was extremely slow, and those few times my previous companion and I had gotten in a door we just gave a short presentation on the Book of Mormon. I think that's why I continued talking about the Book of Mormon when it was my turn in this girl's home. In retrospect, I should have counted this experience as a discussion because it would be a month and a half before I got the chance to teach another one.
At some point in the previous two months, my trainer and I had tracted into Leslie who lived on a street called Corina, which was at the far end of our area. She was busy the day we first knocked on her door but asked us to come back another day. When we did so a few weeks later, Leslie was busy again, so we gave her some pamphlets and promised to return. The following week we rode all they way done to Corina to give her a copy of the Book of Mormon. This time she had a few minutes and we gave her the short presentation about the book -- I didn't understand why we didn't take a few minutes more to give her first discussion.
But it gets better, because we didn't have a marked copy of the Book of Mormon -- during the first year of my mission we were supposed to be giving copies of the book that had several passages marked -- so we didn't actually give Leslie a copy of the Book of Mormon that day. For the next couple of months I would go down to Corina with my next two companions only to find that she was either not home or too busy. Finally, my last Thursday in Palo Alto, my third companion in the mission field and I got the chance I had been waiting four months for.
At first, it seemed like another missed chance when we arrived at Leslie's house only to find that she was not at home. Feeling a little dejected at getting dogged, we crossed the street to sit down in some shade. It came to pass, when we were about to get up and ride off, that Leslie suddenly drove up. This time I took the first two principles of the discussion, which were about God and Jesus Christ, then I taught her the steps of prayer.
When my companion started teaching her about the Book of Mormon, we found out that Leslie had an anthroplogy degree. Naturally, she had some concernes with the story of Lehi and whether Native Americans are his descendants.
Because of this my companion figured it would be at least three months before she would be baptized, if at all, and neither of us would be there for that. My companion went home the following week, having completed his two years, and I was transfered down to Seaside. None of that mattered, however, for I had finally taught a full discussion to a real investigator, thus closing the frustrating chapter that was Palo Alto.
One final note, one the way back to our apartment, my companion got a flat tire. It took us 90 minutes to walk home.
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