My Dear Friend, Harold. Part One

Me & Sister Hawker exasperated with time!

There are three very simple answers to the question: Why have I not posted in weeks and weeks and weeks??

The first answer: A heavy dose of Writers Block. Similarly to the movie "Stranger than Fiction" I could not think of what I should write next, the difference is that my story doesn't involve death or taxes...at least...not yet...and hopefully not for a while when it comes to the first, and unfortunately inevitable when it comes to the latter.

The second is rather unfortunate: I. Am. A. Procrastinator. 
There I said it! I need to go to Procrastinators version of AA. "Hi I'm Sister Jensen and I'm a procrastinator."  No seriously, ask my mother. I have dealt with
     hardcore
          to the extreme
                stupid frustrating procrastination all of my life!

Thirdly and finally: TIME. Time has not been my friend lately, in fact we are kind of on the outs as of the past two weeks. He keeps slowing up, speeding down, doing cartwheels, laying around, all sorts of ridiculous things, that is making me very irritated with him.

During all this Time of procrastinative writers block, I've done a lot of reflecting.  These ponderings are mostly about the experiences I've had between January 2013 until now. I've thought about the families I've
been able to teach.  These people have changed my life for...forever! I've thought about the good times, the bad times, the door slams, the overwhelming love, the ugly words, the truth, the conversion and the spiritual experiences. But mostly I've thought about Harold.

Harold is who I want to write about; but first I have to preface the rest of this blog post with the source of this idea.  During this time, I came across a blog post about another missionary and his "Harold." Elder Choe inspired me with his story and experience teaching Athena while on his mission somewhere in "Utahland!" So to Elder Choe I say thank you! And to everyone else reading I say, here is the story of my dear friend, Harold.

*This is a true story*
*Names have been changed*

It was a beautiful warm California Monday night when we first heard Harold's name. All the plans we had, totally failed and we. were. frustrated.  We had only one plan left, to go and visit Maxine. We prayed that Maxine would be home and allow us to teach her.  (We plan out our days as missionary's so that we are as effective with our time as we can be.  And it is SO hard when it doesn't work like we think it should...but it ALWAYS works out the way God wants it to.  As evident here because it lead us to Harold.) 

We had been teaching Maxine for quite a while and although Maxine loved us and our visits, we were starting to see that she wasn't interested in acting on the message we were sharing with her.

Alma 56:46-48

This particular summer night, Maxine was very upset, but we had no clue!  This was because when we got there she was her usual upbeat, happy, energetic self.  We shared a story with her from the Book of Mormon about young stalwart warriors and the great faith they had in God, the which they attributed to their mothers. "Maxine" we said, "You are one of these mothers. You have raised your son Larry with so much faith in God." She became very emotional and we learned that her family was really struggling. That they needed help.  They didn't know what to do anymore.

They had recently received into their household a nephew named Don --jk! The nephew was Harold!(dumb joke. I know.)