Family and Friends,
Transfer calls came last night! I will be staying in the Turlock YSA, but I have a new companion! Elder Stewart! Him and I were in the MTC together and actually were in the same room. I am so excited for this next transfer...it is going to be so fun! And he is one of the few Elders in our mission that is taller than me. As for Elder Robison, he will be going to co-train with my previous companion Elder Payne! He will do a great job!
Oh I forgot to mention that I hope Luke's birthday month is going good! I hope there has been plenty of recreation and fun. I am also very happy for him being able to advance to the office of a teacher!
This week was definitely slow, but we were able to find some success with the investigators that we do have. An update from last week's letter. We taught Juan Lopez twice this week! He is progressing very rapidly. We had a wonderful lesson with him on the Plan of Salvation and he committed to be baptized on Sept. 24. I am super excited for that. He is one of the most humble investigators I have ever had on my mission. He is sincerely trying to come closer to his Savior. He has also been reading the Book of Mormon; he told us that he knows that Joseph Smith was a prophet. As we teach him he always just thanks us for teaching him more and that he is excited to continue learning new things. When we taught him about the fall of Adam he was mind blown. After that super spiritual lesson we asked him to pray. It was a very cool experience for me because he told us that he was speechless. He was so excited to get baptized that he didn't know what to say! It was a super good lesson.
We also had a very good lesson with our investigator Josh. We have been working with him for a month now and he originally set a baptism date for Oct 22. Well, yesterday we were teaching him and we had planned to try to move his baptism forward. So we taught tithing and fast offerings and we were getting into Mosiah 18 (a wonderful passage on baptism and what it entails). After we read the scripture he told us that he wanted to move his date to Oct 7. The spirit is so awesome. We hadn't even extended the invitation to move it and he already wanted to move it forward. So we had a very good lesson with him too. He is in 2 Nephi (my favorite book in the Book of Mormon). So we are trying to help him through that!
We have also been working with some other investigators not as consistently as the former stated. Their names are: Marcus, Alexis, Valerie, Shayla, and Jonathan. We are trying to find some commitment out of them. Marcus is a really solid guy, but is not available most of the time. We have taught him once. He had a lot of questions about religion in general so we didn't get too far into the Restoration. Pray that we can get these people to commit to meet with us more. And that their concerns may be resolved. Thank you!
I want to share a story from this week that I felt was a way that Heavenly Father makes us better in the process of being a missionary. I was on an exchange with another Elder this week. We use the hours from 10AM-12PM to find. So we were out knocking doors...doing our thing. Well that morning could have defined the word "dead." We knocked on 28 doors and no one answered. It was then 11:30AM and we had not talked to but one person on the street. It was rough. I felt like I was not being put into a position where I could train this Elder on how to do a door approach. After a spiritual prompting we started our way over to the college to street contact. We had a total of 20 minutes left until we had to run some errands for other missionaries... Well we got to talk to four people. Three of them were not very interested. The last person we talked to was a girl that was getting ready to go to class. The Elder that I was with shared the picture of Jesus in America. We were able to have a very good conversation about the Book of Mormon and share a copy with her. I thought about this experience and how if we wouldn't have endured those 28 doors and then came to the college we wouldn't have been able to give her that Book of Mormon. If we wouldn't have followed the spirit that morning we wouldn't have been able to do the Father's will. I think this applies to life as well sometimes. Something may seem pointless, but God's timing is perfect. I love my mission and all of the things I am learning. This is a once in a lifetime thing!
I have a spiritual thought from my studies this week. I would invite each of you to read Mosiah 23:1-19. I was thinking about what this chapter could symbolize... I came up with replacing some words. Replace King Noah with Sin. Replace power of God with the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As I read through this I thought about how we need to flee from sin. And once we have fled from sin we need to stay away. We cannot be afraid to be different. Alma knew that they would become corrupted if they chose another king and followed the "precepts of men." (2 Nephi 28:14) So he being a righteous prophet of God warned them and led them to build the city of Helam where they "prospered"! Be courageous, be worthy, and be different! As we run from sin as Alma and his people ran from the armies of King Noah, we can find our land of Helam!
I love this work so much!
Love,
Elder Willden
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