Exchanges and Fish Fillets

 

 It's been a crazy two weeks. God is working some miracles in the Northport area and I will never complain about that. Here's what I got for you:

-Our friend, we'll call her Lin, has accepted the invitation to be baptized on the 14th of November. She loves reading out of the Book of Mormon and praying to God. It really seems like she knows this the truth. She wants that light she used to have about her to come back. Little does she know that we can give her that and more. Only issue here is that she lives with her boyfriend. Luckily for us, she's in the process of breaking up with him because he kind of seems like a dirt bag. An alcoholic hot head. What a great combo. She knows she deserves better and knows God wants her to live the Law of Chastity. I'm fairly confident this baptism will go through, just gotta work out a few situations and we'll be solid.

-H, the blind guy with the poor memory, has also accepted the invitation to be baptized on the 21st of November. This is quite the scenario. Our Elder's Quorum President gave us the advice to teach the same lesson three times in a row so that his memory will catch on to the information. We'll, we've been doing just that. On the 3rd lesson, I was on exchanges with another Elder and it was going alright. There was one point in the lesson where it seemed like the direction we were going didn't seem right, and at that moment the other Elder brought up 3 Nephi 17 where Jesus is about to depart but the people beg Him to stay. Jesus shows compassion and asks all to bring their sick and afflicted forward so He can heal them. The other Elder asked Hubert, "Do you have faith that Christ can heal you?" He said yes. The Elder then proceeded in saying that if he gives up cigarettes and is baptized by proper priesthood authority, he will receive his sight. H agreed and then handed us his box of cigarettes. Crazy. That's what we got going for us right now. A little bit of worry in my mind honestly. I mean, what if he isn't healed? We'll see what happens, we just gotta get him to the font first.

Oh and about the Fish Fillets. H was hungry and his daughter was running late to get him food -ya know, since he's blind. So, we just offered to go grab something for him. He's in love with Fish Fillets from McDonald's so we got him a couple of those and now it seems like the dude loves us even more. Service really does soften hearts. Learned that lesson from Hurricane cleanup. 

-We got in contact with a guy that has been completely off the radar since the beginning of August. I just had a random prompting to call him and this guy NEVER answers the phone. Well, lo and behold, he did answer. He said we could come over which was like a 30 minute drive in the most boonies of boonies place in our area. It was a fantastic lesson, he said that we were an answer to his prayers. He's been taught for a fairly long time and so we thought it wasn't too far fetched to challenge him to read the entire Book of Mormon. He mentioned that he has studied the New and Old testament extensively and feels like he's ready for the next level up. The Book of Mormon is that next level up and he knows it. He said he'll text us through the week with any questions he has about what he is reading. I'm just so excited for this man, he's gonna get blown away.

-A pentacostal woman put in a referal request for someone to pray with her. We were terrified to tell the truth. You never know what you are gonna get with pentacostals. Anyway, we said the pray which was mostly about her son who is on trial to go to jail and wants the judge to have fair judgment, and after that we just asked if we could share a message of faith and hope. She agreed. Guys, it went so well. Usually when you bring up Joseph Smith with pentacostals they just hang up and block your number, but not this time. She was very interested, but shared some doubts. She knows that she needs to pray to know if what we said was real and we fully agreed with her. Also talked about the Book of Mormon and she actually had one from some other Elders who were tracting her neighborhood a while back. She agreed to read it! I was so stoked. Just another book that'll change her life. 

Well that's really all I got. A very successful couple of weeks in my opinion. Obviously some little details I didn't share, this was just the key parts, but dang were they good key parts. We'll see how it all works out next email. 

Love y'all, 

Elder Jackson Batman 

Super Duper Busy

 

The last two weeks have been a lot. I told my companion that they were going to wip by and that's exactly what they did. It's already another pday and I don't how I got here. We had Zone Conference, interviews, hurricane cleanup and General Conference. That'll sure make the time pass by fast. 

Zone Conference was alright, not too much to report on there. Our Mission President is a huge fan of repetition so a lot of times these meetings are just him repeating the same topic over and over again making sure it gets engrained in our memory and eventually into our actions. He loves to go off about not wasting time and not being casual about the work. That's basically what ZC was. But hey, I saw some dope missionaries in the zone, that's always great.

In interviews with President, usually they are just 3 minutes long but I like to ask him questions to get answers from a more spirtually mature perspective. I asked him about revelation, like how do you actually do it. Do you wait after you ask a question in prayer? How long exactly? Where at? 

Obviously he told me that I'm completely overcomplicating the process and need to chill out. Just pray to be shown the answers throughout the day and don't be shocked when something different happens. I asked him about receiveing witnesses though, and he hit me with "A witness is no more than praying for guidance and he shows you a little tender mercy later in the day." So yeah, I just need to chill.

As far as hurricane cleanup goes, that was tough work, but it was well worth it. I'll let you in on one experience I had. To set the background; this was the last house we cleaned up, it was about 7:30 at night, our muscles were sore and aching, and you could probably bet that our attitudes weren't super positive. We all just wanted a nap to tell the truth. Well, we get to this house and it wasn't terribly ruined. It had a lot of leaves and tree limbs all over the front and back yard and some of her fence got destroyed so she did want us to get rid of the broken parts. So, we go about doing just that. It took a while. Probably about an hour and a half to two hours. Hurricane cleanup is no joke, it is hard labor and sometimes while you're doing it, you don't feel like you can measure up to the work load you've been given. You don't feel like you have the strength to complete the task. I definitely didn't. But, how grateful I am to having a loving Heavenly Father who supplies strength when we just ask. Those were many of my prayers in the days before this event, "Father, give me strength to do this work and allow this work burden to be lightened so I can bear it." I was actually able to do this work. I knew I was working with a blessing. Oh, but this lady. Oooo, she was so sweet. Her name was Annie and when we were finished and we knocked on her door to tell her, she was so happy. We always like to ask the people we serve if we can say a prayer with them before we depart, and this time around she agreed. The prayer was powerful, the spirit was there. In the closing of it, she expressed her gratitude and how wonderful it was to see such young boys and girls going about doing good. She even asked about our church, where it was at, stuff like that. We handed her a pass along card and went on our way. I guess we'll see if something comes from our efforts. I'm confident that she was touched and wants to feel that feeling again. 

I don't have much to update on Conference because I haven't watched it yet since hurricane cleanup overlapped. I'll watch it over the course of this next week. 

That's all guys, til next week.

- Elder Batman