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 🦇