This has been a stupendous week! Stupendous stupendous. My new companion is excellent: Elder B! We are taking Cedar River by storm!
We began with a lesson with T. the one who was brought to church by her member daughter and had a great experience so she called us up to meet with us. We've taught two lessons with our recent convert, and the most recent one with Elder B. was at a members' home, where we committed her to baptism on Feb 8th on condition that she find out these things are true. And she came to church this week! And while here she found out the relief society president was an old friend from high school! So we have female fellowship now for our next lesson tomorrow!
And also we were able to practice teaching the L. family, that part member family I keep talking about where the father is Jewish and the mother wants to get back into the groove of regular church and scripture study and FHE. So that's an interesting situation, but we were able to teach them the Plan of Salvation and Gospel of Jesus Christ in one lesson Saturday, and their two oldest daughters were paying close attention and asking questions about repentance and how we repent and it was really just a great lesson and the father was asking questions just to clarify things...he obviously has hang ups on Jesus Christ, and his wife was almost argumentative at some points with him about the meaning on the sacrifices in the old testament, because WE know they were obviously symbolic of Jesus Christ but he doesn't believe there's a connection. Anyway we invited them all to pray with sincerity to ask God if Jesus is the Christ necessary for the Plan of Salvation. And we're returning next Saturday to continue teaching!
We also had some success Sunday with visiting former investigators: the first fellow was a gentle guy smoking on his porch. I followed the spirit and ended up telling him that his recently deceased father is being taught by spirit missionaries like us in the spirit world and that he is being taught here so that he can eventually be baptized in proxy for his father. Yeah, I thought it was crazy too. But we got into a discussion about how he had been baptized by four different churches and is confused about which one is valid, so we invited him to let us come back and teach him about Joseph Smith's situation. He said (and he said it earnestly) that we should come back early spring because then his friends will be gone and it would be a good time to make good on our offer to help him in the yard. We're going to come back earlier though I think. Anyway he said our coming by has encouraged him to get back into reading the Bible every day, so that's something.
And we met a former, a Physician's Assistant who has had a LOT of guidance from the spirit in her life, guiding her to different jobs where she is much happier and so she really recognizes his influence. She claims that she isn't ready to change her religion. Isn't ready to change it. Which is interesting. So we got talking and the spirit was very strong and she said she felt we'd been sent by God to uplift her, so we asked if there was another time we could visit and talk and she said 8:00 to 8:30 on weekdays, which is our HARDEST TIME TO FILL. So we're like Absolutely. So that was cool.
Yeah. And we've had dozens of experiences while tracting the streets, talking to people on the streets or on their doorsteps. It's been very good!
