Letter #47

Greetings!

 

Well this week was fantastic! Elder Dees and I really had a great week! We decided this week we really wanted to focus visiting all of the other people that we had previously talked to that said we could come back another time! It worked out pretty well for us! Not as good as we hoped, we did not get in touch with everyone but we still made some good progress. I don’t know if you guys remember me talking about Shane. He will pop up from time to time then I won’t write about him for a while. He was the other Chinese guy that I met like my first week in this area. Then we would call and call but he would never answer. And we would try to go visit him but he was never there. So eventually we started to give up. But it seems like each time I have started to give up, he is put back in my path again. One time the Portuguese elders ran into him and he said he was still very interested in meeting with us; he has just been so busy. So we tried to go visit him that night and got the first lesson with him! But then the same thing happened we got out of touch... a few weeks had gone by and we were starting to give up again. But then we were eating dinner at a member’s house close to where he lives. So we decided to go try to visit him again. Sure enough he was home and we were able to teach him again. It turns out that he had been reading the book of Mormon and was still very interested. And the best part was, he agreed to be baptized.  We set a date with him for the 20th of august. Even though, he still does not fully understand everything, he knew that baptism was a good choice. He has a long way to go still but we are very excited for him. It is very evident that heavenly father thinks he is prepared. We now have a set day and time that we will stop by every week so that we don’t loose communication with him.

Other than investigators this week, we were also able to be involved in some reactivation. We met 3 people tracting that had been baptized and lost contact with the church. It was very powerful to see how heavenly father leads us to his lost sheep. One of them that really stuck out was a man that had two autistic children and a wife that was not a member. He told us that he still had the strongest testimony of the church; it was just hard for him to get to church and have his kids distracting the congregation. His wife works on Sundays so she is not able to help out with the kids. He said that he tried and tried for two years to bring his kids to church, but he said it just didn’t make sense. He then said he had his purpose in this life and he wanted to fulfill it. He talked to us about how raising those kids had helped him so much and how he tries to talk to his wife about the church. I thought that was a really cool thing for him to say. It really became evident how god knows each of us individually! One of the other members I want to share about was having a hard time with his testimony. I am not sure of the full thing that happened to him but regardless, he was struggling. As we were talking to him, the spirit came in so strong and took over the lesson. We shared with him d&c section 6. This is the section when Oliver Cowdry wants to translate the plates. There are some really powerful verses when the lord says he had already answered Oliver and tells him when he is having a hard time to think back to that one night when the lord did answer him. We then asked him why he was baptized (He was a recent convert). He said that it was because of the feeling he had when he read the book of Mormon. We told him to think about that moment. The spirit was very strong. It was like you could see everything clicking together in his mind. We are not sure what he will do, but we hope he will start coming to church again, so he can baptize his daughter that is 9 years old.

The weather this week was crazy! I am not used to this crazy humidity! If you leave food out on the counter here, instead of becoming stale, it will become soggy from the moment you get out of the shower you are wet for the rest of the day! Then it will randomly just start to rain out of nowhere sometimes! Sorry that was random, but I just felt that you guys needed to know.

Well I hope that you guys all had a great week! I am going on a hike today, so I am pretty excited! It will be nice to go see what this place is really about! I hope I don’t get any ticks.

Elder Barton