Tropical Storm Clean Up

 

   I just want to get right into things. Do you remember Nate and Jared, the dudes our age that we are teaching? Well there's been a lot that has come from that. Jared decided to go visit home for 10 days in Michigan so before he left we definitely prepared him by talking about opposition potentially from family and friends about what he is doing. He mentioned that right before he left for summer sales, his parents told him, "Just don't come back a Mormon." Anyway, while he was gone, we got a call from another one of the members doing Summer Sales saying that her friend Scarlett wants to be taught. Scarlett spoke with Jared and since he said he loved the lessons, she was mad curious. Well, we go over to teach Scarlett with Nate present, but they want us to go down to the girl's apartment. We head down, open the door, and it's 4 college aged attractive girls sitting there. One of them said "We all wanna hear what y'all have to teach." Elder Johnson and I just looked at eachother in disbelief. But yeah, we taught them the Restoration and they loved it. 2 of them are Catholic born so it's definitely new information, but there is a ton of potential. Scarlett herself is basically asking us to be baptized since she just loves the people in our church. And hey, it's not everyday you get to teach a group of people your age on your mission. And now, when Jared gets back, we plan to put both Jared and Scarlett on baptismal date at the same time. Maybe even have Nate himself baptize them, idk. 👀 

   A huge tropical storm hit Florida recently and for some areas they got wrecked. Well, when the storm initially hit, we had really fast winds and bad downpour in our area, so our mission president had us stay inside for the whole day which was rough. Yeah yeah, I stayed 9 months inside for quarantine, but this is a little different since we were already used to being able to go outside. Back then, we had no choice but to stare at the wall. But anyway, on Saturday our Stake President and Mission President reached out to us saying that we need to organize all the missionaries in the Zone to help out with tropical storm clean up for Sunday morning. There wasn't enough time to organize for Saturday, so they went with Sunday with general seventy approval. Brewton got it the absolute worst and needed the most help. Sooo, we sent us a few other companionships up there and it was pretty bad. I guess I didn't mention, but there was a few tornadoes that came about with this tropical storm and because of that, some of these houses we saw were completely deleted. We did service from 9:00 AM-3:00PM which means we missed church. 😔 It dumped rain on us, and since the south is used to that, no one stopped working even though we were drenched. We did get word that we will probably go up again next week because there were homes that were way worse than the ones we were working on that needed help. You're going to be seeing a lot of pictures of me in a white/yellow shirt so stay tuned. 

   Lastly I'll just mention these two guys we found this week. They were boxing in their garage, these two philipino guys. I was on exchanges with my old companion, Elder Rasmussen, and we just walked up to them. They were so kind and welcoming to us! One of the dudes said that he was a good friend of Manny Pacquiao and has actually sparred with him in the ring a few times. They immediately started asking questions about our faith since they remember seeing people like us in the Philippines. We were able to testify who we truly believe Jesus Christ is and that brought them a lot of comfort knowing we were on the same page. They invited us back and it seems super hopeful. 

That's kinda all I got. We did go to Fort Pickins on pday which is an old war base. That was alright I guess. Anyway, til next week. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇 

 

Aliens

 

   I, once again, apologize for not writing last week. Sometimes I just get lazy and that's how it is. But these last 3 weeks have been one for the books so let me tell you a few stories:

   The first person I baptized in the mission named Kristina came up and visited me in my area. She lives in Foley which is not that far from where I'm at. Her and her husband took us to lunch and I was so proud to hear all of her progress she's made in the gospel. She's almost done with the whole Book of Mormon, she was sealed in the temple in March, and now she's a ward missionary. She goes out with the missionaries all the time. The Foley Ward is a lot of old people so she has been, as she put it, "getting them off their butts" and putting them to work. Oh, and since she is an Uber driver and loves to talk about the church, she's given us 4 different referalls of people interested in the gospel because she drives through Pensacola all the time. I was smiling the whole time, felt like a proud dad. 

   We talked to 2 different Atheists at different times will street contacting outside. Both of them went off asking our views on Aliens, who created God, how does science relate to the gospel, what if an Alien told me God wasn't real and he had perfect evidence. It was wild. On both occasions they actually enjoyed our answers and allowed us to come back to talk about the Plan Of Salvation. Who knows what'll happen. 

We had a craaaaazy experience happen with a member in our ward. His name is Nate and he's around my age. He's here in Pensacola for Summer Sales selling Solar so he's originally from Utah. He wanted to get closer with God and the church so asked us to drop him off a Book of Mormon. Nate mentioned that he has a coworker/friend that was interested in learning more about the church so we scheduled a time to come over and talk with them. The friend's name is Jared and when we got to this Solar HQ, it was super nice. Very fancy. Summer Sales is filled with returned missionary so this guy has been hearing a ton about who we are. We taught him the full Restoration and he had a lot of questions. We gave him a Book of Mormon and told him to read and pray about it. When we left, him and Nate continued to talk about the gospel for 2 more hours. Jared was having a bad attitude towards the Book of Mormon because he wasn't fully grasping the idea of more scripture quite yet. He was going off on a rant about it. Well, Nate gave him challenge, "Open up to a random page and read the first verse you see. Let's see if it speaks to you." Jared did and he opened up to Ether 2:8 which says, "And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared, that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them." Jared was shook, it said his name in the verse he opened up to and he started going crazy. The spirit slapped him. He, now more than ever, wanted to read this book and find out if it's true. Then, Nate himself wanted to try this challenge, so he opened up to a verse and it was spot on to his current life predicament. They both were in tears. The way we found about this is Nate called us when he was visited home in Utah. When he finished the story, his father hopped on the phone, in tears, and thanked us for what we were doing. He said he's never seen his son like this ever and was so happy. We'll be meeting with them Tuesday and they have a ton of questions written down for us to answer. So stoked for that. 

I'll just leave it at that for now. We're heading to the beach today so I'm excited for that. 

Have a blessed week, 

Elder Batman 🦇