2 January 2018

We recently had announced out here that we are getting a new mission president. President James is going home in July (I think) and we will have Matthew Holland, President of UVU and son of Jeffery R. Holland coming in. It will be interesting, and they've already met and President James is hyping us up for him saying how awesome he'll be. I hope so. Anyways, sorry for no warning on not sending out an email on Tuesday, I found out on Friday that Monday would be a regular work day because President James said that everyone would be home with their families. Well, he was right about that. The only problem is that no one would answer their door until two. Anyways, back to the start of the week. On Wednesday, we had a really cool experience with a former investigator that we had never taught before. We came by with a member who shared his conversion story and we taught a really powerful lesson with. By the end of it, the investigator was in tears and acknowledged that she had felt the Spirit and that it was telling her that she should go to our church. Unfortunately, when Sunday came, she wasn't there. There's always next week, but sometimes you want to take away people's agency and make them go with you because you know it's the best for them. Still, it's their choice and like it says in our purpose, we are to "Invite others to come unto Christ," not force them. We'll still work with her and make sure that she recognizes that the Spirit is there whenever we are and whenever she reads in the Book of Mormon as well. Hopefully she'll continue to progress. (By the way, I do apologize again Mom, no pictures because I don't have my camera with me and I can't recount the week too well because I left my bag in the apartment, which also had my camera. I never am quite ready for P-Days.) One more experience that stands out from this week is some work we did with a less active member. (Mostly because it happened yesterday.) But we had met this less active and he was pretty well to do, so we asked if he could help us. We're both new missionaries right out of training who haven't been able to do a whole lot of teaching in English (this is a split English/Spanish area) and we're trying to work on teaching. Could they help us? It turned out that he was very willing and so was his nonmember wife. We went over and taught the Restoration, and they gave a lot of very helpful feedback about how we could improve and how we could adapt to the area, because there a lot of Southern Baptists and Methodists. (The member was a Methodist, his wife is a Southern Baptist.) So that really helped. At the end of the lesson, we invited his wife to read the Book of Mormon, and she accepted for real, not just as a practice. So that was pretty cool. We're going back next Monday evening and working with them some more. That's all I have for the week, so have a good one everyone! And thanks to the ward for the letters, I just got those on Thursday!