Week 84

Another great week has come and gone!

For a while now we’ve been getting media referrals like crazy, people have been ordering free copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon!! It’s been awesome, but we’ve also been getting people from sisters in our district. They find people on the street going to and from places and most of them are guys... but they can never successfully hand them over to us. We’ve reached out to the guys they bring to church, we message them over Facebook and stuff and nothing... the guys they find have yet to be interested in learning but more interested in the Sisters. Here’s an example. The sisters have been bugging us about this guy E, who claims to be interested. So they invited him to the church for a tour on Wednesday. After our Pday activities we came to the church and waited for E.

The Sisters invited him and told him nothing about us being there. He agreed to come and get a tour of the church. The Sisters had a one-day notice that one would be getting transferred early. So the Sisters couldn’t make it to the church and we were there to wait for E and give him a tour when he got there. We waited and waited... and we sent him a text saying we were here and that something came up with the Sisters and they couldn’t be here. For a while he didn’t reply and we decided not to waste anymore time. After the Sisters finished their transfer they came back to the church and we met them there before we left. We told him he hadn’t come and we are leaving. (We met the new Sister, Sister Ståhle from Temple Square who just took the place of Sister Neria). E never showed and we left to go visit G.

When we came up to his building we saw G out side smoking. He said we could go in and he’d be right in. We had a quick visit with G due to time. We tried to follow up with his reading the Book of Mormon, but he was too distracted in his mind and talked about the most random things. He doesn’t seem to be in the right frame of mind to be able to be taught, at least in the environment he’s in. So we invited him to come visit the church sometime and we could meet with him there. He agreed and we made an appointment.

On Thursday we spent most the time weekly planning and making a lot of phone calls. We just have so many people in our area book we are trying to find the elect and filter out those who aren’t interested and on top of it all we are receiving at least 3 referrals a day that we are trying to contact as well.

Friday morning after studies we called this guy named J, he is one of the referrals we received. He answered and we set an appointment for today and 11am. So we left the apartment and went over to his. Unable to reach him at his apartment we called him again and explained that we stopped by but he wasn’t home. He apologetically replied that he didn’t mean to confuse us, but he meant to schedule his visit for the next Friday. We then went back home for lunch and made more phone calls. It was a weird day... we had some appointments set but none of them worked out. We even had a window planned in our schedule to Face Time President for a quick meeting and that didn’t happen. It must have been just one of those off days.

Saturday was pretty great too; we had a solid lesson with a kid that the sisters sent us. His name is P, he’s 17, and he is so solid. He’s definitely been prepared, he’s been on a search for God and he found the sisters. We planned to meet with him around 3 and talk about the plan of salvation. We didn’t get through all of it because he had some many great questions. But we briefly went through each point from the pre earth life to the kingdoms. It was a great meeting, at the end he asked how to pray and we walked him through the steps and he offered his first prayer aloud. It was so awesome!

Sunday we had stake conference and it was all right, it was all in Spanish, they had headphones while they translated it to English but it was just different.

The last couple of days have been interesting but great!! Monday during district meeting in comes President Smith! He sat down next to Elder Patterson and listened in for a bit and made some great comments and asked some inspired questions. While someone else was speaking President leaned behind Elder Patterson and said something like, did you get my text? I asked if I could join your district meeting and if there was anything I could help with. I told him we never received his text and I’m not sure how he could help, but that he could participate.

After our meeting President stuck around to have interviews or speak with some other missionaries. Around 1:45 we would need to be back at the church to meet with President. I guess Elder Patterson had an appointment with President, but what ended up happening was around 2pm President was ready, he came to the front of the church where we were waiting and he helped us out with finding the records of a few people and then wanted to meet with us. After he tracked down the records of the family he sat down in the front of the church with us and we talked for an hour and a half. A thought came to my mind while he spoke to us, the thought was... “I was the one who filled out my application to serve a mission, I willingly wrote back to the Presidency accepting my call to serve as a full time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and I agreed to live the laws of the mission and the rules of the handbook.” With that thought I realized that I have little time left as a full time missionary and there are things I could do starting now to be more obedient. It was a great meeting; it was different than most interviews with President because this time it was both Elder Patterson and I together with President.

When we finished with President it was 3:30pm, President left, and we went over to a nearby classroom to begin a split with our roommates. Honestly this split for some reason felt like a weeklong! It only went from Monday 3:30pm to Tuesday 5pm. We spent all day out on Monday we were out from 1:30 after grabbing some lunch till 9pm. We were out doing some look-ups in the evening when we got a text from a woman in the Cayman Islands. She asked if we could go to the hospital and give her father a blessing. We went straight to the hospital and gave him a blessing. We grabbed some dinner while we were out and went for church to eat. At 7pm we had FHE this drunken guy named Mr. B came in and joined us, we could smell it on him before we even approached him. He sat through it all and was pretty mellow for the most part, anytime someone said something sort of funny everyone giggled and then he got loud and exaggerated his laugh. It was good though!

Tuesday we continued our split and finally were able to meet with G. We went over and followed up with his reading the Book of Mormon. He said it’s really difficult to understand the words. Then he kind of changed the subject a little and started expressing his feelings about life and he asked the exact questions, “where did I come from?” And “why am I here?” We listened for some time and when it was right we introduced the plan of salvation and testified of how those questions could be answered through prayer and study of the plan God had for us. By that time it was after 3pm and we needed to meet with a Sister from the Ward and give her neighbor a blessing. From the time we left G’s it was raining pretty good. We then went home for dinner and ended our split at home. After 6 we went back out, Elder Patterson and I, and visited a less active member and he asked if we could go to the hospital with him and give his mother a blessing. So we left straight way and walked in the rain to the hospital. I was soaked pretty good so I went to the bathroom and squatted under the hand dryer and dried my head. After waiting for nurses to finish cleaning up her room we went in and gave her a blessing. We then went to the church and picked up a big bag for Elder Patterson’s old mattress and home we went.

It felt like a really great week! I hope I remembered all the good stuff, but in many ways we were where we needed to be to help certain people. In 2 days we were able to give 3 people a blessing.

Patience. Love. Faith
Much love,
Elder Newbold