Change... change is good

January 15, 2013

The work in St John's is progressing faster than I ever could've imagined. We picked up 4 investigators this last week and also set a dinner appointment and a lesson with a part member family with one of those families that I feel like I was sent here specifically for (the F's, the one whose brother Melissa catered the wedding for. Actually, if you still have Brent F's number he just moved to Portland, it would be cool to have him at our lessons). The first was picked up with 5 minutes of tracting before a lesson that we had with L. I knew what kind of buildings that I should be looking for from an answer to prayer that I received just before Elder Belo left. We said a prayer asking to be guided and knocked on 3 doors. On the 3rd door T. answered and told us to come back the next day at 3. We taught him the Plan of Salvation and committed him to be baptized. He came to church with us. Another was the part member family of our ward mission leader. He has an inactive daughter and a 9 year old non member granddaughter. We taught them the restoration and will be committing her to baptism this week. The next one is a little trickier Her name is J. She had the lessons with the missionaries about 3 years ago and is still friends with them on facebook. She had a lot of skepticism, but we determined after an hour of answering her questions from personal experience and the Book of Mormon we determined that if she felt the Holy Ghost and she knew it was the Holy Ghost, that she would believe. The only problem is that she's living with her ex boyfriend and his brother who are both Muslim and from Western Africa. I'm not sure how we should proceed on that front. She wants us to come back, but the others are always in the room while we are teaching. The last is a member referral that Elder Belo never wanted to go see because we had seen him at church once before and he didn't really seem to understand or like any of it. He stayed pretty closed off. We went over, and taught him two lessons in two days and gave him a soft invite to baptism. It was a little embarrassing. After the first lesson, he open WAY up to us, but we had already handed out the 4 BoMs that we had on us that day, and we never would have started to teach him if we hadn't trekked on in the absolutely freezing weather at 8:00 PM. Blessing come when you work and take notes of it all. I have a testimony of that. I love the fact that I've been able to do several things that my first companion never wanted to do and they all turned out fruitful.

We taught more lessons than Elder Belo and I ever taught in one week and we had two days taken out of our work week this week because of transfers and P-day. It was WAY exhausting. I took 2 naps yesterday during p-day. It was ridiculous.

So Elder Roemmich is SUPER easy to get along with. We never stop talking and laughing. He taught our district how to play Zombies. Essentially it's tag, but you play it in a building with windows with all the lights off. The one zombie has to tag all the humans before the humans make it to all 3 safe points. when the zombie tags a human, they become a zombie. It's WAY fun!

We taught E. about the word of wisdom and he said that just like the Sabbath day he's willing to try it out until he comes to a conclusion on it through scripture study and prayer. It came up because he heard that we couldn't drink coke from someone in church. Sometimes, I wish that everybody would just teach from the scriptures and not put their own opinions into the doctrine. It was an excellent teaching opportunity, but that's the second time that I've had to correct someone on that in this ward alone.

There's an experience I have to share with you. The Lord me direction very specifically that I find miraculous. On Saturday night I was told to eat sparingly at the dinner appointment the next night. So I told Elder Roemmich what I had been told. He said okay, then that's what we'll do. When we showed up at the dinner appointment, the family had the flu hard core and we excused ourselves and just had dinner at our apartment. The Lord is here with us and he is protecting us. I've never known that with such a surety before this and also the bike accident experience that I had that I told you guys about on Christmas. He's real. He cares. That's why he puts change in out life. Without change we could not progress. So it is with the mission. Without change in missionaries, companions, areas, etc, this work would cease to be as effective. When you become too familiar with an area, people get used to you, and as Christ said "a prophet (or a missionary in this case) hath no honour in his own country." I love you guys. I hope all of you are well, and I hope that the Lord is changing things in your life so that you can come closer to him. He gives us the scriptures, church, and prayer as tools to understand Him. My mission president told us something rather profound about prayer. He said the “...object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves the blessings that God has already willing to grant but are made conditional on asking for them.” I know that to be true. His blessings are sooooo much better than the blessings that we want for ourselves. It keeps you happy to pray. It also keeps you humble.